MacRumors

AppleInsider claims that Apple will forgo the use of Intel's Montevina chipset in their next generation laptops. Instead, Apple will either design their own chipsets or could adopt 3rd part chipsets from AMD or Via.

It should be said however, this does not mean that Apple will be moving away from Intel's processors. The chipsets are simply the support chips required to interconnect the processor and the rest of the computer. Intel's Montevina platform (now known as Centrino 2) consists of a Penryn processor, the Montevina chipset and wireless networking interface. Future laptops will continue to use Intel's most recent Penryn processors which provide improved bus-speeds (1066MHz).

To the customer, Apple's decision to use 3rd party or custom chipsets is not of great significance, as all the chipsets should be functionally identical. However, AppleInsider speculates that Apple must believe there is some competitive advantage in pursuing alternative chipsets, such as improved power consumption.

Seth Weintraub, the author of 9to5Mac, publishes more information at ComputerWorld about what he has heard about the upcoming MacBook updates.

According to Weintraub's sources, the new MacBooks will be thinner than the current MacBook and MacBook Pro designs while slightly more rounded. The case is said to be made of one piece of aluminum and bears some similarities to the MacBook Air. The trackpad on the new notebook is to be made of glass and support multi-touch and the use of gestures, but the notebook will not incorporate a multi-touch screen.

Finally, Weintraub expects the new MacBook to be released at the end of September.

Based on the description, it appears these new MacBooks will be an evolution on existing laptop designs and not a radical departure into tablet designs. Of course, no one expected Apple to abandon the traditional notebook design, but the use of the term "MacBook Touch" may have confused some. Of course, these rumors don't preclude the possibility of some sort of tablet based device as well.

With persistent rumors of some sort of tablet-based Mac, it is interesting to see what other device manufacturers are working on in their labs. Toshiba revealed last week a prototype device which relies on an on-screen keyboard. The device resembles the Ultramobile PCs that never saw mainstream adoption. This prototype, however, uses Intel's new Atom processor, a 64GB Solid state drive and GPS. Toshiba admits that this version of the device is not commercially viable since it is "too small" but they are continuing to explore the technology.

Atom is Intel's new low-power processor line that was formerly known as Silverthorne. Intel hopes these processors will power a new line of mobile internet devices (MIDs). The Atom processor shares the instruction set as the Core 2 Duo so Mac OS X could theoretically run on these new processors unaltered. Intel is expected to be releasing a 1.6GHz dual-core version of its Atom processor on September 21st.

Apple has been rumored to be adopting Intel's Atom processor for "multiple products" in 2008.

The topic of Steve Jobs' health has become a hot topic amongst blogs and newspapers over the past few weeks. In 2004, Steve Jobs underwent surgery for a rare and curable form of pancreatic cancer. Jobs was reportedly cured of the disease.

The issue of his health, however, was recently raised again after his appearance at WWDC 2008. While MacRumors had previously avoided speculating about this topic due to its personal nature, a New York Times article by Joe Nocera now provides first hand information from Steve Jobs, himself.

In an unusual sequence of events, the author of the article reports that Steve Jobs called him directly, and divulged details about his recent health problems but only if it was kept "off the record". In the end, Nocera does reveal that there was nothing that contradicted his previous article on Steve Jobs' health and that "while his health problems amounted to a good deal more than 'a common bug,' they weren't life-threatening and he doesn't have a recurrence of cancer."

This is likely to be the most official response about Steve Jobs' health that will be publicly disclosed.

Apple has finally posted an update regarding the extended MobileMe email outage that has affected approximately 1% of users. Their updated support document reports that they have restored web-access to affected MobileMe accounts. This will allow affected users to see emails that they have received since July 18th, the day the outage started.

As a first step toward restoring service, we restored web access to a portion of your MobileMe Mail account at 10:00 p.m. PDT, July 25. You can now log into me.com, and use the Mail web application to access all the messages you have received since the July 18 service outage. You can also compose, send, and receive new messages as normal. Please note that this interim solution does not provide access to any email messages received or saved before the outage began on July 18.

As Apple details, users still do not have access to emails prior to that date and are unable to access their email from their desktop email clients. This functionality will presumably be restored over time. This temporary web-access is meant to allow users to access their recent mail that has been unavailable.

Apple warns that users should not make changes to their MobileMe password, email aliases, or storage allocation while this temporary solution is in place. Doing so could result in technical errors.

Apple also admits that while the majority of email messages will be fully restored, approximately 10% of messages received between 5:00 a.m. PDT on July 16th and 10:20 a.m. PDT on July 18th have been lost. Additional details can be found in their tech note.

Update: Apple has started posting daily updates about the MobileMe email outage at the request of Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know whats happening with MobileMe, and Im working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, its been a rocky road and we know the pain some people have been suffering. Be assured people here are working 24-7 to improve matters, and were going to favor getting you new info hot off the presses even if we have to post corrections or further updates later.

The writer explains that he or she will be updating again this weekend to report on progress.

Speculation about a possible Apple tablet has started infiltrating the mainstream media with an article on ABCNews summarizing public reaction to this possibility. The buzz about Apple's next product kicked into high gear after Apple's Peter Oppenheimer uncharacteristically described a new product during the Q3 2008 financial results conference call.

Rumors about an Apple tablet have been ongoing for years with credible claims that had originally pointed to a 2003 release. Since then, it has been revealed that Apple had been working on a tablet called Safari Pad but this was later morphed into the iPhone.

Shortly after the financial results call, MacDailyNews published an unconfirmed report about a "MacBook Touch" with a laundry list of possible features. While the exact details of the report remain up for debate, an earlier rumor from Jason O'Grady did point to a Mac OS X tablet launching this September or October. O'Grady believes this sort of iTablet is exactly what Oppenheimer was referring to.

This, to me, means that Apple is going to leverage the more than 100 patents (like MultiTouch) that theyve filed for iPhone in a larger screen device that borrows heavily from iPhone. Think of a larger, media playing, eBook reading iTablet with 3G, GPS, and Bluetooth. Now think of it in 6, 8 and 10-inch screen sizes. This is when things get interesting.

Indeed, Apple's extensive multitouch patent library has depicted multitouch control panels intended for use in Mac OS X and not just the iPhone OS.

Many believe that if Apple were to introduce a Tablet-based computer, they would have addressed the issues that have prevented mass adoption of existing Tablet PCs. Based on the "Safari Pad" codename of their previous tablet project, it seems obvious that Apple once considered web browsing to be the killer app of such a device.

The new iPhone 2.1 Beta Firmware that was released to some iPhone developers yesterday has been found to have hints at an upcoming Copy and Paste feature. According to MacNN:

One notes that in exploring the Localizable.strings entry under English.lproj in the current iPhone WebKit framework, there are entries for several commands the firmware does not currently support, including cutting, copying and pasting.

Apple's Greg Joswiak recently said that a copy/paste feature has simply not been high enough on the priority list so far, but suggested that there it could be coming in the future. Previously one engineer had revealed that Apple had been working on iPhone copy/paste but that the exact implementation had not been decided.

Now with the introduction of 3rd party iPhone applications such as WordPress for iPhone, basic copy and paste functionality has become even more important.

Update: There's a suggestions that these string findings may be meaningless as they appear Leopard's webkit as well.

Virginia Tech is building another Mac-based supercomputer, this time out of Mac Pros. According to ArsTechnica, Virginia Tech's Center for High-End Computing System is building a new cluster using 324 Mac Pro towers that will have a theoretical computing capacity of 29 teraflops.

The system will be used to study two main areas: power-aware software systems that can adjust performance automatically to maximize efficiency, and distributed shared memory systems that can run existing threaded code on high-performance clusters "as if they were scaled up versions of multi-core desktops."

Virginia Tech made headlines in 2003 when they assembled a cost-efficient supercomputer named System X out of Power Mac G5s. System X ranked as the third fastest supercomputer in the 22nd edition of the of the Top 500 list, performing at over 10 teraflops. The system was upgraded to 2.3 GHz Xserve G5s approximately a year later. Ars notes that if System X were to be upgraded to current generation Xserves, the result would be a "8800-core monster that could push as much as 100 Tflopsat least in theory coming close to Top 10 territory."

The school is using Mac Pros instead of Xserves because Xserves would require more robust cooling requirements; System X uses a hybrid liquid and forced air system whereas the Mac Pro cluster would only require a conventional air-cooled room. Also, the additional PCI Express 2.0 slots provided by the Mac Pro were deemed desirable for use in other research projects.

Correction: The System X cooling system is not located in a separate building.

GearLive reports that Apple has seeded a beta version of iPhone 2.1 Firmware (Beta 1, Build 5F90) to developers.

According to the site, Apple has included new Core Location features that might suggest that turn-by-turn GPS could become a reality. Core Location can reportedly track your direction and the speed at which you are traveling.

Along with the new firmware, Apple has also seeded a new version of the iPhone SDK but the new SDK can not be used to submit Apps to the current App Store. There have been earlier reports that Firmware 2.0.1 had been spotted in the wild, but a 2.1 upgrade would presumably introduce more than just bug fixes.

Update: Besides Core Location speed and heading additions, Apple has also included early Push Notifications APIs that allows applications to process notifications in the background. Apple promised this feature by September.

Note: The seed is only available to registered iPhone developers who were accepted prior to July 11th, 2008.

AllthingsD republishes a memo from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to all Microsoft employees detailing an update in their corporate strategy. Ballmer specifically mentions Apple and their recent success:

Apple: In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often comes with some compromises to the end-to-end experience. Today, were changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises. Well do the same with phonesproviding choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.

Ballmer details how Apple has found success in an "end-to-end" model by providing the customer with a full experience by designing both hardware and software. Walt Mossberg had previously articulated this basic difference in strategy between the two companies.

For many years, there have been two models of how to make computers and other digital devices. One is the component model, championed by Microsoft. The other is the end-to-end model, championed by Apple.

Microsoft, of course, saw huge success in the component model in the personal computer market by supplying Windows to thousands of competing hardware developers. Microsoft has tried to apply this same strategy to music players and mobile phones, but now acknowledges this had come with some user experience compromises. Some of this shift in strategy has already been seen in their Xbox 360 and Zune products where Microsoft is the sole vendor.

Ballmer, however, believes that Microsoft will be able to extend a "no compromises" end-to-end experience while retaining a commitment to choice. He specifically mentions phones as a target. In fact, Microsoft is already rumored to be working on a Zune phone to compete with the iPhone.