Continental Airlines will begin offering WiFi on some flights beginning next year. 21 757-300 jets will be outfitted with WiFi to begin with.
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Regardless of recent updates to the Mac Pro line, rumors are circulating that Apple could be upgrading its pro line of desktops early next year with faster processors that sport more cores and consume less power. The information was allegedly leaked from Intel, and the new processors (codenamed Gulftown) will reportedly make use of six cores on a 32nm die with 12MB of L3 cache per chip. Currently, Apple’s high-end machine offers only four cores per processor with 8MB of L3 cache.
According to AppleInsider, the i7980X will start at a clock speed of 3.33GHz, which happens to be the clock speed of the fastest quad-core processor you can currently order in a Mac Pro. The i7-980X will supposedly replace the i7-975 in the Extreme tier of Apple’s three-tier system. According to the roadmap, the processor will see a launch in the first quarter of 2010.
So far, Apple’s first fiscal quarter of 2010 is showing signs of becoming another record quarter with big year-over-year increases in Mac sales for October and November. The latest US sales data from market research firm NPD shows Mac sales are up 21 percent for the first two months of the quarter, but that’s not the end of the story.
Breaking out the sales data for notebooks and desktops shows a reversal of recent trends where growth came from sales of MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Sales of Apple’s portable machines were only up five percent for October and November. However, sales of desktop Macs are up a whopping 74 percent. While revised Nehalem-based Mac Pros are likely moving just fine, chances are that big bump is likely related to the apparently huge demand for Apple’s 27″ iMac.
Budget computer vendor CherryPal has announced the availability of a new $99 netbook. The device, which has a 7-inch display and a 400Mhz ARM processor, is designed to run Windows CE and Linux.
The system is aimed at developing markets and is branded as the CherryPal Africa, a reference to charitable work that the company has been doing in collaboration with the Paajaf Foundation in Ghana. CherryPal touts the little laptop’s energy efficiency and describes it as “small, slow, [and] sufficient.” In addition to the 400Mhz processor, the device also has 256MB of RAM and 2GB of flash memory.
The next revision of your favorite gadget may have a bit more memory. Toshiba has launched new 64GB embedded NAND flash modules, which it says are the first in the industry. Samples are available now with mass production beginning this winter.
AdWeekMedia has announced a number of awards for the best in advertising and branding for the first decade of the millennium. It’s probably no surprise to most of our readers that Apple was on the receiving end of five of those awards, and had its hand in another product that also received recognition.
AdWeekMedia’s awards were divided into four categories: media, agency, creative, and brand. Unsurprisingly, Apple was well represented in the creative and brand categories. Apple was named Brand of the Decade, and the company’s iconic CEO Steve Jobs was named Marketer of the Decade. “Steve Jobs the marketer is inseparable from Steve Jobs the personality,” according to AdWeekMedia. “His inimitable blend of competitive skill and design savvy hasn’t just saved a fading brand, it’s recast two businesses that used to have nothing to do with computers: music and mobile phones.”
For those of us who remember being teenagers (especially at the dawn of the Internet age), the fact that young people are making use of their cell phones to send sexually suggestive content is not only unsurprising, it’s downright expected. Still, the phenomenon (tragically referred to as “sexting”) is constantly being examined in the context of cyberbullying, privacy, and child pornography laws. To that end, the Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report on teens and sexting in hopes of gaining further insight into why and how young people send T&A to each other.
Apple has moved back the shipping date for a number of customers who ordered 27″ iMacs recently, apologizing that the company has been unable to keep up with demand. However, the delays may be caused by a number of issues, such as screen flickering and broken glass, that have reportedly affected the mammoth iMac model.
Google is supposedly in the process of testing its own phone and may be set to release it as early as 2010. The plan, according to the rumor mill, is to release the device without a carrier partner—a strategy that is near unheard of here in the US and could force some carriers to put up or shut up when it comes to welcoming just any device onto their networks.
