1. Report: Apple orders 15 million iPhone 5s
Apple has placed an order for 15 million next-gen iPhones with Taiwan-based manufacturer Pegatron, DigiTimes reported today. The order is based on a September ship date for the new iPhone, which DigiTimes' sources say is not a major revision from the iPhone 4.
These numbers cast our memories back to when Apple was pushing the first iPhone toward a million sales within months of its launch. These days, Apple is shipping multiple millions per quarter: the first quarter of 2011 saw 16.24 million iPhone sales, topped by the second quarter's 18.65 million.
The increased sales are not entirely thanks to the new CDMA version of the iPhone, either. Pegatron overhauled its entire factory setup to satisfy a 10-million-iPhone CDMA iPhone 4 order, but less than four million of those have shipped. Since September's model is entirely new, we doubt this will be a repeat problem for the company.
The iPhone 5's body reportedly resembles the iPhone 4, but may receive several internal revisions, including a dual-core A5 processor, 8-megapixel camera, and an edge-to-edge 3.7- or 3.8-inch screen with a resolution a third higher than the iPad 2's 1024x768 screen. Verizon also slipped up recently and said the new iPhone may be dual-mode CDMA and GSM, though whether it will be able to take advantage of 4G LTE has not yet been publicly discussed.
2. Zuckerberg Finds Friends on Google+
Who's the most popular person on Google's spanking new social networking site? Britney? Lady Gaga? Larry or Sergey? Nope, it's Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He has racked up a whopping 29,543 followers on Google+ as of Tuesday, beating out Google cofounders Larry Page -- who came in second with 19,878 -- and Sergey Brin, who took fourth place with 15,646. Many wondered if it was actually Zuckerberg. His identity was confirmed by tech blogger Robert Scoble via Twitter, who noted Zuckerberg texted him saying, "Why are people so surprised that I'd have a Google account?"
3. Are Ubuntu's Glory Days Over?
If there's any lesson to be learned in high school, it's that popularity is a fickle mistress. One day, you can be riding high on the strength of your awesome gaming skills, say, and the next, a fleeting fashion faux pas can bring you crashing down again. But maybe that was just Linux Girl. In any case, popularity is nothing if not changeable, as Ubuntu has aptly demonstrated in recent weeks. The Unity desktop, specifically, has raised more than a few eyebrows in the Linux community, causing some to speculate even that Canonical has lost its way.
4. ARM chips to rival PS3, Xbox 360 in 18 months?
ARM has been beating the performance drum again, this time telling the Inquirer that a new Mali GPU design due out in 18 months will make its chips the equal of current-gen gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. There can be little doubt that an ARM-based mobile chip will surpass these two consoles in pixel-pushing capacity (measured variously) at some point in the future, but we've heard this kind of talk about Mali before.
Some Googling turns up 2009 and 2010 as years when Mali was supposed to bring Xbox 360-level graphics to mobiles, and we're certain that if we went past the first page of search results we could find more.
But whatever ARM has said in the past, it's not really a stretch to imagine this happening in roughly an 18-month timeframe. For reference, at the 2010 ISSCC, Microsoft showed off the SoC that powers the latest version of the Xbox 360, a combo chip that puts the CPU and GPU of the console on the same 45nm die and clocks in at only 372 million transistors. That's a bit over 100 million transistors more than NVIDIA's 40nm Tegra 2 mobile chip from that same year. So yes, given a process shrink to 28nm or thereabouts, it seems quite possible that ARM will at the very least be able to pack as much hardware as the Xbox 360 does into an application processor.
So much for ARM's Mali claims. The much more interesting question is, what will NVIDIA have out at this point?
The company's upcoming Kal-El part is due out in the second half of this year, and it could well bring something approaching console-level performance to tablets and other portables. And 18 months from now, we may begin to see something out of Project Denver, which could well make for a killer desktop gaming chip (assuming that any games will run on it).
5. Mac OS X Power Consumption vs. Ubuntu 11.04, Windows 7
Last week we delivered results looking at the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 versus Windows 7, which was interesting in its own right, but in this article is a brief look at where Apple's Mac OS X operating system fits in between the power consumption of Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft...
6. Weekend Project: Create Virtual Hosts with Apache
Apache is very flexible, and it's easy to configure Apache to handle several domains even when your Web server only has one IP address to share between them. You can use this to host multiple sites, or just to provide a sandbox for development rather than making changes on your live site. This weekend, we'll learn how to create virtual hosts with Apache.
7. Peppermint OS: Cloud Oriented Desktop Distro
Released in July, Peppermint Two is based on Lubuntu 11.04, an Ubuntu-derived distribution using the LXDE desktop environment (see our overview). Its main distinguishing feature is that it mixes traditional applications with cloud applications that are closely integrated into the desktop.
Apple has placed an order for 15 million next-gen iPhones with Taiwan-based manufacturer Pegatron, DigiTimes reported today. The order is based on a September ship date for the new iPhone, which DigiTimes' sources say is not a major revision from the iPhone 4.
These numbers cast our memories back to when Apple was pushing the first iPhone toward a million sales within months of its launch. These days, Apple is shipping multiple millions per quarter: the first quarter of 2011 saw 16.24 million iPhone sales, topped by the second quarter's 18.65 million.
The increased sales are not entirely thanks to the new CDMA version of the iPhone, either. Pegatron overhauled its entire factory setup to satisfy a 10-million-iPhone CDMA iPhone 4 order, but less than four million of those have shipped. Since September's model is entirely new, we doubt this will be a repeat problem for the company.
The iPhone 5's body reportedly resembles the iPhone 4, but may receive several internal revisions, including a dual-core A5 processor, 8-megapixel camera, and an edge-to-edge 3.7- or 3.8-inch screen with a resolution a third higher than the iPad 2's 1024x768 screen. Verizon also slipped up recently and said the new iPhone may be dual-mode CDMA and GSM, though whether it will be able to take advantage of 4G LTE has not yet been publicly discussed.
2. Zuckerberg Finds Friends on Google+
Who's the most popular person on Google's spanking new social networking site? Britney? Lady Gaga? Larry or Sergey? Nope, it's Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He has racked up a whopping 29,543 followers on Google+ as of Tuesday, beating out Google cofounders Larry Page -- who came in second with 19,878 -- and Sergey Brin, who took fourth place with 15,646. Many wondered if it was actually Zuckerberg. His identity was confirmed by tech blogger Robert Scoble via Twitter, who noted Zuckerberg texted him saying, "Why are people so surprised that I'd have a Google account?"
3. Are Ubuntu's Glory Days Over?
If there's any lesson to be learned in high school, it's that popularity is a fickle mistress. One day, you can be riding high on the strength of your awesome gaming skills, say, and the next, a fleeting fashion faux pas can bring you crashing down again. But maybe that was just Linux Girl. In any case, popularity is nothing if not changeable, as Ubuntu has aptly demonstrated in recent weeks. The Unity desktop, specifically, has raised more than a few eyebrows in the Linux community, causing some to speculate even that Canonical has lost its way.
4. ARM chips to rival PS3, Xbox 360 in 18 months?
ARM has been beating the performance drum again, this time telling the Inquirer that a new Mali GPU design due out in 18 months will make its chips the equal of current-gen gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. There can be little doubt that an ARM-based mobile chip will surpass these two consoles in pixel-pushing capacity (measured variously) at some point in the future, but we've heard this kind of talk about Mali before.
Some Googling turns up 2009 and 2010 as years when Mali was supposed to bring Xbox 360-level graphics to mobiles, and we're certain that if we went past the first page of search results we could find more.
But whatever ARM has said in the past, it's not really a stretch to imagine this happening in roughly an 18-month timeframe. For reference, at the 2010 ISSCC, Microsoft showed off the SoC that powers the latest version of the Xbox 360, a combo chip that puts the CPU and GPU of the console on the same 45nm die and clocks in at only 372 million transistors. That's a bit over 100 million transistors more than NVIDIA's 40nm Tegra 2 mobile chip from that same year. So yes, given a process shrink to 28nm or thereabouts, it seems quite possible that ARM will at the very least be able to pack as much hardware as the Xbox 360 does into an application processor.
So much for ARM's Mali claims. The much more interesting question is, what will NVIDIA have out at this point?
The company's upcoming Kal-El part is due out in the second half of this year, and it could well bring something approaching console-level performance to tablets and other portables. And 18 months from now, we may begin to see something out of Project Denver, which could well make for a killer desktop gaming chip (assuming that any games will run on it).
5. Mac OS X Power Consumption vs. Ubuntu 11.04, Windows 7
Last week we delivered results looking at the power consumption of Ubuntu 11.04 versus Windows 7, which was interesting in its own right, but in this article is a brief look at where Apple's Mac OS X operating system fits in between the power consumption of Ubuntu Linux and Microsoft...
6. Weekend Project: Create Virtual Hosts with Apache
Apache is very flexible, and it's easy to configure Apache to handle several domains even when your Web server only has one IP address to share between them. You can use this to host multiple sites, or just to provide a sandbox for development rather than making changes on your live site. This weekend, we'll learn how to create virtual hosts with Apache.
7. Peppermint OS: Cloud Oriented Desktop Distro
Released in July, Peppermint Two is based on Lubuntu 11.04, an Ubuntu-derived distribution using the LXDE desktop environment (see our overview). Its main distinguishing feature is that it mixes traditional applications with cloud applications that are closely integrated into the desktop.
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