Apple thinks that the market for
high-definition video defined by Sony's Blu-ray is "just a bag of hurt"
where the licensing of the technology is too complex - and its chief
executive Steve Jobs said that the company is "waiting till things
settle down and Blu-ray takes off in the marketplace".
The
remarks came after Apple refreshed its notebook computers on Tuesday
night, introducing a "pro" version which includes two separate graphics
cards and a new version of its consumer-focused MacBook line which uses
an aluminium casing. But while the notebooks were unexceptional, the
launch showed that the company is unafraid of the economic downturn in
the US - the only concession to price was a lowering of the cheapest
MacBook to $999 - nor in the UK, where the price of the cheapest
MacBook actually rose from £699 to £719. "Apple is relying on its brand
here," remarked Ian Fogg, an analyst with Jupiter Research.
The
new machines abandon the mouse button completely in favour of a larger
multi-touch trackpad on which one can make gestures using up to four
fingers. But multi-touch screens "so far haven't made a lot of sense to
us," said Jobs.
The launch in Cupertino was notable for the fact
that Jobs shared the spotlight for the first time with Tim Cook,
Apple's chief operating officer who took over the running of the
company while Jobs was in hospital in 2004 for surgery for pancreatic
cancer, and then with Jonathan Ive, the company's head of design. Jobs
alluded afterwards to the continuing speculation about whether he has
had any recurrence of the cancer, putting up a slide claiming to show
his blood pressure: "This is all we're going to talk about Steve's
health today," he told journalists.
Jobs shrugged off the idea of
a "netbook" (or ultraportable), saying it was "a nascent market that's
just getting started". Also notable was the absence of FireWire, the
high-speed data transfer system invented by Apple, from its new
MacBooks in favour of USB 2 ports.
Overall though the new
machines showed that real processing power advances are coming from
graphics chips, not CPUs: the new CPUs are barely faster than those of
machines released six months ago, but the GPUs are dramatically more
powerful. Apple intends to use that power in future versions of its OSX
operating system (The piranhas of processing await, July 17 2008).
Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/
