MacRumors

Apple has released the Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard update. The 180MB download is now available via Software Update, and a restart is required after installation:

The 10.5.2 Update is recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac.

For detailed information on this update, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307109.
For detailed information on security updates, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798.

A number of improvements are detailed, but some highlights are listed here:

- Airport: Improves connection reliability and stability
- Back to my Mac: Adds support for more third-party routers, as detailed in this article.
- Dock: Updates Stacks with a List view option, a Folder view option, and an updated background for Grid view.
- Desktop: Addresses legibility issues with the menu bar with an option to turn off transparency in Desktop & Screen Saver preferences.
- Desktop: Adjusts menus to be slightly-less translucent overall.
- iSync: Adds support for Samsung D600E and D900i phones.
- RAW Image: Adds RAW image support for several cameras, as detailed in this article.
- Safari: Addresses issues with Safari reliably resolving certain domains.
- Time Machine: Adds a menu bar option for accessing Time Machine features (the menu extra can be enabled in Time Machine preferences).
- Time Machine: Improves backup reliability when computer name contains slash or non-ASCII characters.
- Time Machine: Addresses issues in which some external drives are not recognized by Time Machine.

The final build number of Mac OS X 10.5.2 is 9C31, the same as the last developer's build. Once you install Mac OS X 10.5.2, readers should recheck their software update, as the Leopard Graphics Update appears once 10.5.2 is installed.

Standalone Combo Updater (353MB) is also available.

Please add undocumented issues in the Mac OS X 10.5.2 Fixes, Bugs and Problems guide. For discussion, questions and issues, please post to our Mac OS X forum.

Mac OS X Server 10.5.2
Mac OS X 10.5.2 Server has also been released. With the following changes:

Software Update Server
Addresses an issue which could prevent Software Update Server from working properly on a system that had been upgraded from Mac OS X Server 10.4.x.

Mail Server
Addresses an issue in which Virtual Mail users were required to have short names configured in order to become active.

Password Server
Addresses an issue that could block object changes from being propagated to Open Directory replica servers.

Discuss the Server release our Mac OS X Server forum.

Starbucks announced that they are partnering with AT&T to supply Wifi access to Starbuck's 7000 stores nationwide. Starbucks had previously partnered with T-Mobile to provide pay-Wifi access in their stores. AT&T's new service offers free access to specific customers:

Beginning this spring, Starbucks Card holders can enjoy up to two hours of free Wi-Fi service per day at Starbucks locations offering Wi-Fi access, while more than 12 million qualifying AT&T broadband and AT&T U-verseSM Internet customers will have unlimited free access to the Wi-Fi service. In addition, more than 5 million of AT&T's remote access services business customers will be able to access Wi-Fi service at Starbucks locations. AT&T will soon extend the benefits of Wi-Fi at Starbucks to its wireless customers.

Outside of these situations, AT&T's Wifi service costs $3.99 for a two-hour session, or $19.99 for monthly access. Existing T-Mobile HotSpot customers should be unaffected. T-Mobile customers will continue to get free Wifi access at Starbucks due to an agreement between AT&T and T-Mobile.

Of interest, AT&T states that it "will soon extend the benefits of Wi-Fi at Starbucks to its wireless customers", suggesting that iPhone users will also get Wifi access in the future. AT&T currently provides exclusive wireless service for the Apple iPhone.

Trademork notes that Apple has filed to extend their Apple trademark into new areas, covering:

Toys, games and playthings, namely, hand-held units for playing electronic games; hand-held units for playing video games; stand alone video game machines; electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only; LCD game machines; electronic educational game machines; toys, namely battery-powered computer games

The filing took place on February 5th, 2008.

Apple's iPods have always contained a few built-in games, but in 2006, Apple extended this to allow 3rd party developers release downloadable games through iTunes. The trademark application, however, will certainly reignite rumors that Apple is seriously pursing its own game development or even its own game console.

Apple has been known to be recruiting game developers back in 2006, and has authored a number of the existing iPod games. In the mid 90's, Apple did launch a short lived game console called Pippin.

Update: Game Developer Job listing from Apple, via 9to5.

Video Game Design and Production. Successful candidate possesses a proven track-record of producing and designing great video games.

This may not mean much, as Apple has already written and released a number of iPod games.

9to5Mac believes that the iPhone and iPod touch will be seeing $100 price drops in the next two months, simultaneously discontinuing the low capacity models.

Their belief is that the 8GB Touch and 8GB iPhone will be discontinued, leaving a 16GB iPhone at $399, 16GB Touch at $299, and 32GB Touch at $399.

The move would be reminiscent of the $200 iPhone price drop and discontinuation of the 4GB iPhone that took place in September, 2007. The surprise iPhone price drop -- only 3 months after the introduction of the iPhone -- caused an outcry amongst early adopters. The outcry was so great, that Steve Jobs posted an open letter to explain the decision and gave existing iPhone owners a $100 Apple store credit.

Based on this experience, it seems Apple would be reluctant to make a similar move when they could have easily timed the price drop to coincide with iPhone/Touch updates last week. This being said, the iPhone is still expected to receive further updates this year with the introduction of a 3G model in 2008. It's possible that any future price drops could correlate with the introduction of the 3G iPhone. AT&T has already committed to expand their 3G network to more U.S. cities in 2008.

While 9to5mac had an excellent early rumor record, their record has not been perfect, with their recent claims of 5 million iPhones sold by Macworld failing to come true.

Computerworld notes that the latest Webkit nightly builds offer considerable performance boosts over the current public Safari build (3.0.4) -- with Javascript benchmarks over 2.5x faster in some instances.

While these performace boosts in Webkit date to at least November 2007, Weintraub speculates that the optimizations will find its way into the just-beta'd Safari 3.1.

Indeed, we've managed to track down Sunspider Javascript benchmark results from the same build that Weintraub used (r30090) vs Safari 3.1 (Beta) on a Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz. The results:

Shorter times are faster.

Webkit Build r30090: 3495.8ms
Safari 3.1 Beta: 3408.0ms
Safari 3.0.4: 9302.3ms (extrapolated)

Amongst other improvements, the latest Safari beta does seem to incorporate the speed optimizations found in the latest Webkit builds. Webkit is an open source project that serves as the basis for Apple's Safari browser. Webkit's nightly builds offer end-users access to the latest (potentially unstable) Webkit updates. A number of other browsers also use Webkit and will also benefit from these improvements.

Reports emerged today that Yahoo's board will be formally rejecting Microsoft's $44.6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo on Monday, according to "a person familiar with the situation",

Formal details will be revealed Monday but one of the claims is that the bid "massively undervalues" Yahoo. Analysts, however, say that the Yahoo board is obligated to reject Microsoft's first offer as a duty to their shareholders to get the best possible price for the company.

"You would expect Yahoo's board to reject Microsoft at first," Marlin said. "If they didn't, they would be accused of malfeasance."

Others speculate that Microsoft is prepared to up their bid from $31/share to as high as $35/share as part of the negotiation. This being said, its been no secret that Yahoo's co-founder and CEO, Jerry Yang, is reluctant for his company to join Microsoft.

If this rejection is final, however, Microsoft has the option of taking the matter directly to the shareholders, and bypass the board of directors entirely.

TUAW tentatively claims that Mira Mobile is hiring for an unannounced Apple event in the last week of February.

The company reportedly coordinates television services for sporting and other live events, including Apple's events. TUAW cautions that this is otherwise unconfirmed information, but speculates the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) may be the subject of a late-february announcement. We received a similar (the same?) tip earlier this month, but were unable to confirm it.

Of interest, it does appear that Apple contracts out to MiraMobile for their AV needs. A video documents the AV truck that was used at the 2007 Macworld San Francisco Keynote speech, which was stamped with MiraMobile's url:

Appleinsider has also heard whispers about an "unusual number of visual resources" being prepped for late February. Apple is due for a number of potential releases in the coming weeks: Apple TV software revision, MacBook Pro updates, and Mac OS X 10.5.2. The iPhone SDK, however, is the most likely to warrant its own event.

Update: 9to5 is chiming in, citing February 26th as the exact date.

Macenstein reports that Apple has decided not to exhibit at the 2008 National Association of Broadcasters conference which takes place from April 11-17 in Las Vegas, NV.

"Apple is participating in fewer trade shows this year," said Anuj Nayar, senior manager of PR at Apple. "Often there are better ways to reach our customers. The increasing popularity of our retail stores and Apple.com Web site allows us to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world in innovative new ways."

The news follows an earlier announcement by Avid that they would also not be exhibiting at this year's NAB conference. We'd heard rumors that Apple would be pulling out of NAB and that the reason was primarily motived by the high cost of exhibiting.

In 2007, Apple even held a special event at NAB, announcing a number of updates to their professional video applications.

MacNN reports on a number of new patents from Apple, one of which involves an interesting use of "widgets" alongside streaming video that would allow for more interactivity.

The August 2006 filing introduces the possbility of incorporating Dashboard-like Widgets alongside video content in the Apple TV interface. The Widgets could be triggered by the video itself and could be contextual:

"For example, while the user is viewing a musical performance a ticket widget can be displayed over the content or elsewhere in the user interface, which can be access by the user to purchase concert tickets or receive other information related to the concert or performer," Apple said. "In the example shown (below), the widget could be triggered by a marker in the content which corresponds with a portion of the concert where the performer is not performing, or can be based on a period of inactivity (e.g., the DVD player is placed on "pause"). In some implementations, the widget can be displayed as part of a DVD menu system."

Beyond this commercial usage, the system could also be used to incorporate live video chat during an event or provide live sports stats during a game.

BBC's Mark Thompson responds to some criticisms about their Windows-only support for their iPlayer service, which allows users to stream and download videos to their computer. While Mac and other platforms have been able to stream shows, downloads have not been available.

Thompson explains that this is due to rights management issues and working with their limited resources. That being said, the BBC is planning on launching a download version of BBC iPlayer for Mac in 2008.

Another interesting possibility was previously raised in the same blog by BBC's Ashley Highfield, who felt Apple's refresh of the Apple TV along with rental model could introduce BBC programming direct to your TV.

..we can look to getting BBC iPlayer onto [the Apple TV] too, as we should be able to use the rental functionality to allow our programmes to be downloaded, free, but retained for a time window, and then erased, as our rightsholders currently insist.

On January 30th, Apple announced that the new Apple TV software has been delayed and will not be available for "another week or two".

Anandtech provides more standardized battery results for their 1.8GHz MacBook Air (HDD).

They setup 3 tasks of varying intensity with the MacBook Air's display set at just above 50% brightness, and not to go to sleep, though the hard drive was allowed to spin down if able. The tasks and battery life times are listed as follows:

1) Use Wifi to browse 20 pages in a loop, spending 20 seconds on each page, while playing MP3s in iTunes. 4hr 16min
2) Play a DVD image (off the internal hard drive) in a loop. 3hr 25min
3) Download 10GB of files, Web browsing loop from #1, play two 480p Xvid videos in a loop. 2hr 25min

As expected, the battery time varies greatly with use, and helps explain the discrepant battery life times seen by various users. Andantech summaries:

Apple's 5 hour claim is laughable but not as much as I expected. If I wanted to I suspect I could hit 5 hours by making the web browsing test less stressful, but my focus was on real world usage scenarios, not proving Apple correct. Regardless, 4 hours and 16 minutes doing what I consider to be the intended usage model of the Air is respectable. It's not great, but it's not terrible either.

Walt Mossberg weighs in on the Solid State Drive (SSD) vs Hard Disk Drive (HDD) debate. The issue has become relevant now that Apple offers a SSD option on the MacBook Air, and this feature will certainly trickle down to future Apple laptops.

An earlier comparison from Arstechnica was difficult to interpret due to differences in machines (1.6GHz vs 1.8GHz) and non-standardized testing.

Mossberg offers at least one piece of standardized data on the SSD vs HDD comparison in the MacBook Air. He compared two 1.6GHz processor MacBook Airs which only differed in the type of hard drive (SSD vs HDD) and ran a standardized test case: "turn off all power-saving software, set screen brightness to maximum, turn on the Wi-Fi and play an endless loop of music."

As always these tests come with some considerations. After some investigation, it appears that iTunes explicitly turns off Mac OS X's file caching, so the drives are being accessed with regularity in this test. This drive access, however, is small and sequential which does not take advantage of SSD's strengths (random non-sequential). With these notes in mind, the results of the test revealed almost no difference (5 minutes in favor of SSD).

Not all SSDs, HDDs and laptops are made equally, however. Mossberg also compared a Toshiba Portege R500 with a 1.8" HDD and a 1.8" SSD drive. In the same test, Mossberg found the Portege R500 ran 1 hour and 21 minutes (36%) longer with the SSD. Now, the reason for this large difference is unclear. Update/Correction: the Toshiba also uses the 1.8" drive, not the 2.5" drive previously reported here.

Similarly, MacLife found that the 32GB DVNation SSD drive installed in a MacBook Pro saw 55% increased write speeds and 88% increased read speeds compared to the stock HDD. They also saw similarly dramatic speed increases in "real world" tasks as well as a 14% battery life gain with the SSD drive.

As a result of these discrepant findings, the SSD vs HDD debate will likely be reintroduced with every new laptop introduced, as findings seem to vary by individual model and task. At this point, however, it seems the accepted advantages for the SSD drive in the MacBook Air is a more responsive user experience, and less vulnerability to data loss.