Monday morning dose of Apple

Written by Wil Harris

January 16, 2006 | 10:53

Tags: #core-duo #imac #macbook #osx #pro #world-of-warcraft

Companies: #apple #blizzard #dell #intel

It's not surprising that since last week's announcement of Apple Macs running Intel chips, there's all kinds of buzz regarding the machines. Here's a quick round up of some of the better news and views.

You may not know that World of Warcraft is out on the Mac. Blizzard has traditionally been a Mac-friendly company, and the Mac version is actually shipped on the same discs as the PC version, and has been from day one. Of course, the problem is that the power of even a high-end Mac can't compete with a PC when it comes to gaming. With the new MacBook and iMac lines, this is about to change: mid-range X1600 graphics are standard, and 1.83GHz Core Duo processors handle the number crunching. Blizzard has announced that it has WoW up and running on Core Duo chips for Mac, and will shortly be shipping an update to the game to enable flush new Mac buyers to get into Azeroth.

Next up: Apple is now worth more than Dell, by some bizarre twist of fate. With the surge in Apple's stock price off the back of last week's announcements, it means that Apple has been valued at $72.12 billion, as opposed to Dell's current value of $71.97 billion. Jobs is apparently very happy about that, especially since Michael Dell has been rather disparaging about Apple in the past. It's bizarre to think that a company like Apple, which only holds around 5% of the market, can be worth more than a company like Dell which must be getting on for 40 or 50%. iPods, huh?

The new iMacs have the Core Duo chips in standard sockets, according to a recent disassembly. PowerPC chips have traditionally been soldered to the board, and the use of a socket means that it may be possible for buyers to upgrade their processors in the future: not a common thing on the Mac platform.

A report on O'Reilly (O RLY?) suggests that the new MacBooks might only have 4 hours of battery life, no better than the current models. Although the official Apple line has been that the models on display at MacWorld were pre-production, there is some worry that the laptops aren't going to get close to the 5 or 6 hours of battery life newer Centrino machines can get to.

Finally, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has got itself in a tizzy because it is not happy about the latest version of iTunes. iTunes now looks up the Music Store while you're playing music to find other albums and tracks by the current artist. The data about what you play and look at is collected by Apple, but nobody knows what for. Does this really matter - is my music collection really that interesting?

No more Apple news for the rest of the day, we promise. Got some thoughts? Drop them in the forum.
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