*scottstuff*

There’s a rumor going around that Apple and Nokia are going to partner and produce a mobile iTunes application for the Nokia N91. Nokia is denying it, but the phone’s still months away from its launch, so there’s plenty of time for things to change.

As I see it, there are sort of three levels of iTunes integration for portable devices:

1. The device syncs with iTunes and can play encrypted iTunes Music Store .m4p files. Right now, this is pretty much just the iPod, although the long-rumored Motorola iTunes phone will join it once it’s released.
2. The device syncs with iTunes and can play MP3s and maybe unencrypted AAC files. Before the iPod took off, most MP3 players fit into this category, but I don’t know if Apple has continued supporting their competition.
3. The device and iTunes don’t know anything about each other, and the user is stuck looking for third-party tools.

I suspect that the N91 will fit into the second category–just plug it into your computer using a USB cable and iTunes will copy things over. It’s possible that we’ll need a bit of glue code, but that shouldn’t be too hard to write. Worst case, it should only take a few hours to write something that can read through iTune’s XML database and copy playlists to the N91.

The Mac Observer has a report from an investment analyst predicting near-future Apple hardware upgrades:

1. The PowerMac G5 will be upgraded with dual-core 970MP chips, giving Apple effectively a quad-processor system at the top of their line.
2. The PowerBook will be upgraded to around 2 GHz, using the 7448 that I discussed last week.
3. The PowerBook will get a HD screen.
4. The Mac mini will get a G5.
5. The iPod mini will get a color screen.
6. There will be a video iPod.

Some of this seems pretty obvious–the color iPod mini has been rumored for almost a year, and it’s a pretty obvious direction for Apple. I don’t think anyone doubts that it’ll happen, it’s just a question of when. Similarly, the dual-core PowerMac G5 is Apple’s only available upgrade path for the G5 systems–if they’re going to upgrade them at all before they get dropped for Intel systems, then Apple’s going to use the 970MP.

The PowerBook upgrades are a bit more of a mystery to me. I can see a simple upgrade that swaps the current 7447 CPU for a 7448–they’re basically pin-compatible. The 7448 has a slightly faster FSB, which will help since the G4 suffers from a painfully slow bus, but it’s basically just a continuation of the current G4 line. The problem is that several rumors say that the PB G4 is moving to DDR2 memory, and that confuses me. It suggests that Apple’s building a new north bridge, which seems kind of expensive for a product that will only be on the market for 9-12 months.

The DDR2 change would make perfect sense if Apple was really swapping the current 7447 for a MPC8641 and using the MPC8641’s on-chip DDR2 controller, but as far as I can tell, the MPC8641 isn’t supposed to ship in quantity until early next year.

Engadget hinted last week that the DDR2 move was really a power-saving move, not a performance move. Since moving to DDR2 wouldn’t help performance a whole lot when even PC2100 RAM is faster then the 7448’s FSB, power savings make as much sense as anything. I don’t know enough about laptop power budgets to know if dropping 5W on the CPU and a few more Watts on the memory is enough to really extend the laptop’s battery life by a significant margin, but it suggests that Apple may be aiming for 6-7 hours, rather then the current 4-5 hours that most PowerBooks currently get.

Back to the rumored Mac mini G5–I can’t see this happening at all:

1. Cost. The G5 is supposed to cost more. The Mac mini is Apple’s most price-sensitive Mac. Even a $50 price bump would probably be unacceptable.
2. Cooling. The dinky little Mac mini case has many of the same cooling problems that G5-based laptops would face. Battery life isn’t an issue, but getting rid of 30W of waste heat is.
3. Lineup. If Apple speeds up the mini, then it’ll have to either drop the eMac or upgrade it too. It could also cannibalize iMac and iBook sales. Those wouldn’t be a big deal if Apple could upgrade either model and get more performance, but they’re basically stuck with both of them. I guess they could build a dual-core iMac G5, but they have cooling problems with the iMac, and adding a hotter CPU probably wouldn’t help with that.

I don’t know about the video iPod–I can see a 5th generation iPod that’s capable of playing videos on the 2” display while still being optimized for audio playback, but I have a harder time seeing Apple producing an iPod with a huge display. I don’t feel really strongly either way, I guess.

Finally, on the x86 upgrade question–I’ve been wondering which Apple model will be the first to be switched, and when it’ll happen. Apple said that consumer systems would be first, and that’ll happen sometime in 2006. My personal guess would be the iMac in March or so–it’s Apple’s most distinctive system, and it would appeal to users even as a stylish Windows box. It’s not really going to be fast or cheap enough to kill PowerMac G5 sales, so that’s a safe move for Apple. The Mac mini and iBook are the two other consumer options, but I can’t see either one being part of the first wave of upgrades–they’d kill sales of the PowerMac and PowerBook. So I expect that we’ll see systems upgraded in roughly this order: iMac, PowerMac, PowerBook, Mac mini, iBook.

Heh. Apparently eBay knows something about the mythical PowerBook G5 that the rest of us don’t. Take a look at this ad that Google Ads attached to Engadget’s RSS feed:

Update: The Inquirer has a few more details on the PowerBook G4 update front. They’re pointing fingers at the Freescale MPC8641, the single-core version of Freescale (formerly Motorola’s chip division)’s dual-core G4. The chip includes a RapidIO FSB, on-chip network and PCI-E controllers, an on-chip dual-channel DDR2 controller. Other reports have suggested that Apple’s going to use Freescale’s 7448, which seems to be the same basic chip, only without the on-board memory controller, PCI-E, networking, or RapidIO, and with a 200 MHz FSB instead.

It goes without saying that I’d love to see the dual-channel MPC8641D in a PowerBook, but that’s probably asking way too much from Apple.

According to Mac OS X Hints, Tiger has NTFS support, so it can finally read hard drives formatted for modern versions of Windows. I’ve wished that I had this several times over the past three years; it’s nice to know that it’s now there when I need it.

I store all of my iCal calendars on my home web server in a Subversion repository. This worked flawlessly from when I last wrote about it until about two weeks ago when I changed the password that Apache uses for Subversion authentication. When that happened, iCal was unable to connect automatically to the server. Once I entered my new password, it worked until I restarted iCal, but then I had to enter my new password again. It was acting like it still had the old password saved and was using the old one instead of the new one. I ignored this for a few days, but then it really started irritating me.

The solution was pretty simple: open up the Keychain tool and delete everything that even vaguely looks like it could be used for authenticating against the web server in question. I ended up deleting almost a dozen entries, presumably dating back to when I first started using iCal years ago. It took me three or four tries to find them all, but once they were all gone I was able to connect to everything.

This brings up a bug in Keychain Access.app, though–it’s really lousy at deleting things. In many cases, deleting items seems to delete them from the keychain database but still leaves it visible in searches in the keychain tool. I had to stop and restart Keychain Access repeatedly to make sure that everything was gone.

I can’t believe it: Apple has a new mouse, and it has more then one button. Actually, if I read this right, it’s really a four-button mouse with a 2-d scrollwheel/trackball. Plus two of the buttons are force sensitive. It looks cool, but I don’t really ever use a mouse anymore–I bought a nice Logitech optical mouse when I first bought my PowerBook, but I found that I’d rather use the touchpad.

ThinkSecret says that Apple is getting ready to upgrade OS X Server with some sort of improved mail and calendar solution, probably Hula. That’s nice and all, but I REALLY want them to upgrade iCal to support some publicly-available calendar server. The ability to publish read-only calendars was nice in 2002 when it was first added, but it’s been three years, and I’m still waiting for the ability to share read/write calendars with other family members. I’m aware that I could probably do this with .Mac, but I’m not willing to pay $100/year just so I can edit events on my wife’s calendar a couple times per week.

Having said that, Hula looks pretty nice. Even without iCal syncing support, I’ll probably consider it when it’s time to upgrade my mail server software again; fortunately that’s probably at least a year away still. If iCal gets CalDAV support before then, then I might have to be a bit more aggressive with the timeframe. Either that or look for other CalDAV servers.

The AC adapter for my PowerBook died this morning. It was weird–it was working fine at home this morning, but it completely failed to work at the office. I changed power plugs and wiggled all of the connectors, all without success.

Fortunately, my office is only 20 minutes from one of the local Apple stores, so I was able to dash out and get a replacement. After 40 months, I guess I’m not really surprised when pieces die on my laptop anymore.

So, with Apple’s new “Universal” binary format, where Xcode creates programs that will run natively on both PPC and x86 chips, is there actually a single Mach-O file that contains code sections for both processor types, or are there two different executable files hiding inside of an application bundle?

Apple’s documentation kind of implies that the two architectures are stuffed into a single binary:

You can force a command line tool to run translated by entering the following in Terminal:

ditto -arch ppc tool /tmp/<toolname> 
/tmp/<toolname>

There only other statement that I see in the documentation that gives any details is this little gem:

Note: Xcode has per-architecure SDK support. For example, you can target Mac OS X v10.3 for PowerPC while also targeting Mac OS X v10.4.1 for Intel.

Between the two statements, it seems pretty likely that the PPC and x86 binaries are crammed into the same file, but probably don’t share static strings or any of the other parts of the executable file. They’re really just two distinct program files combined into a single physical file.

Are any other details on the universal binary process public yet?

I was just wondering–what will Apple call their professional computing line once they switch to Intel? The “Power” in PowerMac and PowerBook originally referred to the PowerPC chip inside. Will they keep the “Power” and define it to mean “powerful,” or will they spit out a new prefix?

The iBook/iMac/iPod/iSight/iWhatever product lineup doesn’t have this problem, of course.