MacRumors

Forbes reports on Apple's "secret weapon" that has helped keep its earnings well above expectations: falling NAND-flash memory prices. And according to Forbes, there are no signs that this trend will abate anytime soon.

Tech tracker iSuppli released a report last week predicting that the dollar value of flash memory sales will decline this year and next, even as unit sales pick up.

A combination of falling demand and over supply are contributing to the plummeting prices. The benefit to Apple will be higher margins for their current products as well as the ability to incorporate higher capacity storage into future products.

The dropping prices may also allow Apple and other companies to put more flash-based hard drives into their notebooks. Apple recently introduced a 128GB Solid State Drive (SSD) option for their MacBook Pro. Apple's iPod and iPhone products could also see higher capacities over time.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Tony Fadell, the senior vice president of the iPod Division at Apple, is leaving the company for personal reasons.

Fadell has been credited as the "father" of the iPod and also was part of the team involved in the development of the iPhone. According to a 2004 Wired profile, Fadell was an independent contractor and hardware expert who came up with the idea for the iPod and eventually approached Apple:

"Tony's idea was to take an MP3 player, build a Napster music sale service to complement it, and build a company around it," Knauss said. "Tony had the business idea."

Knauss said Fadell left Philips and set himself up as an independent contractor to shop the idea around. Knauss said Fadell approached several companies and was turned away by all of them, except for Apple.

As an interesting historical footnote, Fadell approached and briefly worked at RealNetworks before he joined Apple, suggesting that the iPod's history might have been dramatically different. Apple released the iPod on October 23rd, 2001. The iPod is credited for much of Apple's financial success over the following years.

Update: Apple issued a press release confirming the departure:

Apple also announced that Tony Fadell, Apples senior vice president of the iPod Division, and his wife Danielle Lambert, vice president of Human Resources, are reducing their roles within the company as they devote more time to their young family. Fadell will remain at Apple as an advisor to the CEO. Lambert will depart the company at the end of this year after a successor is in place.

Mark Papermaster will be joining Apple as senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering to replace Fadell. Papermaster is the former IBM executive that Apple recruited which triggered a lawsuit from IBM.

Apple has issued a statement to Macworld clarifying that there are no plans for any new products before the holiday season.

"Our holiday line-up is set," Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld.

This announcement squashes circulating rumors that the iMac and Mac mini are scheduled for imminent updates.

An iMac update had initially been seen as a surprising possibility, as it was one of the more recently updated Apple products. Still, the iMac generally shares the same internal hardware as Apple's notebooks, making it natural to believe that they might see similar upgrades. The fate of the Mac mini remains unknown, as it has not been updated since August 2007.

The next major Apple event is Macworld San Francisco which will be held in early January 2009.

AlleyInsider reports on a new analyst report from Friedman Billings Ramsey which claims that Apple's iPhone production could fall "more than 40%" in the 4th Quarter of 2008. AlleyInsider points out this may simply represent a surplus of iPhone production from Q3 2008 and the decrease in Q4 is to adjust inventory to match demand.

Another contributing factor is believed to be the recent economic downturn:

That the firm's iPhone production plans are being revised lower suggests that the global macroecomomic weakness is impacting even high-end consumers, those that are more likely to buy Apple's expensive gadgets, and that no market segment will be spared in this global downturn. This is a negative signal for global demand, in our view.

The analyst bases his findings on "recent checks" on the chip industry which supplies parts for Apple's iPhone. The news comes shortly after Apple reported record iPhone earnings capturing 2.3% of the mobile phone market.

Bit-tech.net has benchmarked the new Nehalem (Core i7) processors from Intel ahead of their official launch. The hardware site compares the new processors to Intel Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo and AMD Phenom X4. From a Mac perspective, the Intel Core 2 Quad (3.2GHz QX9770) most closely resembles the high end Xeon processor currently available in the Mac Pro.

Bit-tech found that the memory benchmarks were dramatically better on the new processors even at the same clock speeds. This improvement reflects the new underlying architecture technologies found in the Core i7. Overall, these improvements did result in substantial real world improvements for many tasks. In encoding video, they found the new processors showed improvements ranging from 18%-22% at the same clock speeds as existing chips. Even more impressive improvements were seen in Cinebench 10 testing with clock-for-clock improvements of 29% at the high end. Gaming results, however, were a bit more mixed with only modest improvements in Crysis and Half Life 2, and performance decreases in Far Cry 2.

Based on these findings, they concluded:

If you're very interested in video encoding, transcoding, image editing or you need to compress files that much faster Core i7 is the de facto choice - even the least expensive Core i7 920 is worth the upgrade.

While this should be a good marker for performance improvements coming to the Mac Pro, it's still not clear when Intel will be introducing the appropriate server-class (Xeon) versions of Nehalem. Apple has traditionally used Intel's Xeon chips for their Mac Pros which are due to be updated.

Update: TheInquirer has organized a roundup of Core i7 reviews and benchmarks. Anandtech's conclusion was similar to Bit-Tech's:

The Core i7's general purpose performance is solid, you're looking at a 5 - 10% increase in general application performance at the same clock speeds as Penryn. Where Nehalem really succeeds however is in anything involving video encoding or 3D rendering, the performance gains there are easily in the 20 - 40% range. Part of the performance boost here is due to Hyper Threading, but the on-die memory controller and architectural tweaks are just as responsible for driving Intel's performance through the roof.

Netflix's beta for streaming content directly to Macs is now available for open beta at:

http://www.netflix.com/silverlightoptin

Netflix notes a few things to consider before signing up:

- There may be bugs. We are logging all errors, but if you run into problems you can help out by posting details here in the blog comments.
- Not all movies are available to watch with Silverlight. You may notice errors or lower than normal quality when watching certain titles.
- Our new player works on PCs and Intel-based Macs.
- Windows users should be aware that if you opt in, you will need to use Silverlight on all the machines you use to watch instantly.

Netflix previously announced that they had begun limited beta testing of the new Mac service and expects the final release to be available by the end of the year.

Netflix is best known for its mail-order DVD rental service but also includes unlimited video streaming with their fixed monthly plans starting at $9/month. Up until now, this streaming service has not been Mac compatible.

In a profile this past week of Opera Software, the New York Times had indicated that Opera's Mini Browser had been rejected from the App Store based on anti-competitive grounds. Apple has rejected other applications claiming the submitted application's feature set mirrors one of Apple's too closely; a practice which has drawn heavy criticism.

This particular case, however, may not be entirely accurate according to further research by John Gruber.

My understanding, based on information from informed sources who do not wish to be identified because they were not authorized by their employers, is that Opera has developed an iPhone version of Opera Mini - but they haven't even submitted it to Apple, let alone had it be rejected.

Gruber had previously believed that the browser had been rejected due to a built-in JavaScript interpreter, however he clarifies that this was incorrect. In fact, Opera Mini does not contain such interpretive code. As explained by Gruber:

In a nut, it works like this: You request a URL in Opera Mini. Opera Mini makes the request to a proxy server run by Opera. Opera's proxy server connects to the web server hosting the requested URL, and renders the page into an image. This image is then transmitted (in a proprietary format called OBML - Opera Binary Markup Language) to the Opera Mini client. Opera Mini displays the rendered image on screen. This may sound convoluted, but apparently the result is very effective - its faster to transmit, because only OBML (a compressed binary format) is transmitted to the mobile device over the phone network, and far faster to render on slow mobile processors.

However the current version of Opera's Mini browser for other platforms is coded using Java (and BREW) which is not supported on the iPhone and is against the terms of the SDK. In order for Opera Mini to be made officially available, the program would have to be ported to C/Objective-C.

Update: Upon further investigation, the differences between the New York Times and John Gruber's accountings may be based in semantics rather than substance.

An Opera employee blog seems to indicate that Apple is indeed using anti-competitive reasoning for keeping the Opera Mini browser off the iPhone. However, neither the employee's blog entry nor the New York Times article indicate that the browser was officially submitted to the App Store and rejected, the point to which Gruber took issue. It remains possible that Apple and Opera have been communicating via channels outside of the App Store submission process.

Fudzilla claims that they've been hearing whispers that iMac and Mac mini updates could be coming as soon as November 10th. They are not particularly confident about the date which would fall on a Monday.

While we don't place too much confidence in Fudzilla as a rumor source, the information is consistent with circulating expectations of pre-holiday iMac updates. Apple typically issues updates on Tuesdays, but has had an occasional Monday release including the last iMac update on Monday, April 28th.

Apple revised the MacBook Air during their October 14th media event. The new model features the NVIDIA chipset and integrated graphics card. This should provide the MacBook Air with substantially better graphics performance over the first generation model.

A couple of early XBench benchmarks have been posted here and here, showing off the new 128GB SSD drive. Comparison scores can be found at Xbench. Further discussion can also be followed in our MacBook Air forum.

CNet reports that IBM has filed a lawsuit against former employee Mark Papermaster for accepting a job at Apple. Papermaster was IBM's vice president of microprocessor technology development but recently accepted a position at Apple to begin in November.

IBM claims that Papermaster is violating his prior employment agreement by accepting a position at a competitor and may divulge IBM's trade secrets to Apple. Papermaster reportedly has authored several papers on PowerPC chip development and is considered a "top expert in Power architecture and technology."

CNet speculates that Apple's interest in Papermaster was due to of his experience in both chip and system designs.

Papermaster's expertise in system design--putting together the entire package of processor, chipset, and the rest of the guts that form a computer--could serve him well at a company that prides itself on soup-to-nuts design.

Of course, Apple could also be interested in having Papermaster help with their recent P.A. Semi acquisition. Apple has been said to be working on their own ARM processors for use in the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If Apple wants to continue its strategy of designing and building complete systems, hardware, software, and now chips for iPhone and iPod Touch, it's going to need someone who can predict the future of chip design and advise Jobs and Apple's executive team on how Apple can best take advantage of those trends. Papermaster, with a unique set of skills in the tech industry, might be just that guy.

The NY Times profiles Opera Software, the company that distributes the Opera browser for multiple platforms. According to the article, however, Apple is not allowing an iPhone version of the browser into the App Store:

Mr. von Tetzchner said that Operas engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple wont let the company release it because it competes with Apples own Safari browser.

Gruber speculates that it could have to do with the Javascript interpreter or, more clearly, that Apple has been restricting apps that compete directly with some of their built in iPhone apps such as Safari.

Apple has been criticized for its decision to restrict certain applications from the App Store, and this suggests users shouldn't expect any other web browser alternatives (such as Firefox) to appear in the App Store at any point in the near future.