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A week before Macworld, Apple released hardware updates for their Mac Pro and Xserve products, while I wont be covering the Xserve updates I have to say that they look strong. In the other hand the Mac Pro is the best machine I’ve ever seen and the fastest Mac ever -Apple said.

I’m very impressed with the technology behind this machine and definitely understand why Apple went with Intel for processing power. Not even AMD is getting close to the specs these new Intel Xeon chips have, up to 3.2 GHz Quad Core processors capable of managing 32GB of Memory, these specs are hard to match.

After reading the specs in detail and reading what the industry and bloggers are saying around the web, it looks like the Mac Pro still lacks some features people were expecting to see. The first one, a Blu-ray player option, Apple is a supporter of the Blu-ray format yet no one has seen anything Apple related with support for any HD format.

Apple 23 inch and 30 inch displays are advertise as HD capable and that’s it, no word on whether drives will be an addition on future dates and this drives people crazy (me on the one hand.) I personally think that they are long due to these offering and I can’t simply understand what the delay is.

Did anyone notice that Bluetooth is not an option anymore? WiFi is! This is very weird, the previous model had an optional WiFi-Bluetooth ad on for $99 USD, the new models have integrated Bluetooth and an optional WiFi Extreme card for $49 USD.

One thing I don’t understand, if you can stick up to 4TB why would anyone need a raid card that cost $800 USD to manage a raid on your Mac Pro. Is this true for all flavors of raid (0, 1, 5, and 10) I guess I’m missing something here, my experience with raid arrays is not enough to understand this.

With this new release, Apple included Memory running at 800MHz, which is nice to know that Apple is finally implementing this speed on their memory line. Almost all current processors have a system bus of 800MHz, maybe by Macworld 2008 we have iMacs, MacBook and MacBook Pro running same type of memory.

The addition of the NVIDIA 8800 GT makes this Mac the best choice for many people, let’s not forget that there is another optional graphics card, the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of GDDR3 memory, which is killer. If you are thinking on gaming, me too.

Finally, reading Apple’s website I notice something interesting, Apple advertise the Mac Pro as a 1600MHz dual independent frontside bus couple with the 64bit architecture capable of a processing power bandwidth of 25.6GB a second. At this rate, you can manage lots of application and files at the same time on one of these systems, making you the most productive guy/gal on earth.

What was running around as rumors became a reality, Microsoft has released photos and specs for their new Zune lineup that will be release sometime in November 2007. The new Zune lineup has an 80GB model called the Zune 80, and two flash models sporting 4 and 8GB of storage. The company gave no indication of discontinuing the 30GB, 1st generation model, instead the new updated UI (user interface) will be added via update software to the old Zune.

If you ask me Microsoft is up to something, the new UI and software upgrade add some interesting features that are worth discussing. This first one is the integration with Windows Media Player, now you can transfer your media content from your computer to your Zune effortlessly. What’s better the new Zune software is compatible with h.264 and MPEG4 codecs, you don’t need to convert your media files to WMV.

Some good news to Podcasters is that the new Zune software includes support for podcasts, you won’t be able to update your podcasts over WiFi, but you can share them with other Zune players. Talking about sharing, Microsoft changed the rules for sharing music a bit. Now instead of getting the three days, three plays restrictions you only get the three plays restriction, not sure if this means something to Zune owners.

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Enjoy your creamy latte with a free iTunes download, from October 2 to November 7, 2007 Starbucks will be giving away free iTunes songs. At a rate of 1.5 millions songs per day, Starbucks plan to giveaway over 50 millions songs on this campaign. The goal is to promote the new venture between the two companies in which Starbucks will have a service available that allow users of the iPhone or iPod touch to purchase music while they wait for their coffee.

The announcement of this new iTunes WiFi Store together with Starbucks was released on September 5, 2007 in an event where Apple Inc also released new iPod products. The promotion kick off with a free song from singer Bob Dylan, following famous people in the music industry such as Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, and KT Tunstall. I don’t know about you, but I’m a coffee lover and a music junkie, head to your nearest Starbucks to enjoy a free song courtesy of Starbuck and Apple.

I played with the iPod touch for a week, during that time I spent over 10 hours on the web. I tested different websites like Google, Google Reader, Gmail, Soonr.com, Popcat.com, etc. I surfed and tested Twitter, MySpace, among other sites. Between yesterday and today I’ve been doing the same thing with the iPhone and found out that Safari behaves differently on each device.

Lets clarify something, I understand that both devices are different, one is a phone and the other one is an iPod. One would think that they have the same applications installed, but even if they are the same they don’t behave alike. For the most part the Safari on the iPhone behaves like a mobile device, on the other hand it behaves like a regular browser on the iPod.

Whenever I surfed to Google the iPod would bring my iGoogle site the same way I see it on my computer. In the iPhone it goes directly to the mobile version of Google.com. I guess that since the iPhone could be working off the Edge network and the iPod touch not, this is a good thing since the iPhone would seem sluggish opening a full version of a website off of the Edge network.

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