Headline Feeds
There were a lot of different topics on the minds of Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) bloggers this week -- tidbits like Apple dropping its 20-inch Cinema display, some new tear-down photos of the 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro, and the squabble between Apple and the Electronic Frontier Foundation over jailbreaking the iPhone.
Still, some of the more interesting bits of news include Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) filing a lawsuit against Nvidia, Apple ignoring a call to unify mobile device chargers, and the company's difficulties with iWork '09 and iWork '08 compatibility.
Chipping Away
Apparently after a year or so of attempting to work out its differences with the GPU maker, Intel threw its hands up in the air and filed a lawsuit against Nvidia. Traditionally, Intel has a been a CPU processor builder, while Nvidia has produced graphics chipsets, many of which work closely with Intel's processors. Nvidia has licenses from Intel that give it rights to build GPUs that work with Intel's innovations, but according to Intel, their agreements only extend to older generations of Intel processors, not its newest Nehalem-based CPUs that contain integrated memory controllers.
Intel also charges that Nvidia has falsely claimed it is licensed to produce said chipsets.
Part of the core problem, of course, is that Intel has been trampling on Nvidia's GPU territory by building its own integrated GPU systems -- which were used by Apple in many of the early generations of MacBooks. More recently, with the aluminum unibody MacBook and MacBook Pros, Apple essentially ditched Intel's integrated CPU processors in favor of Intel CPU processors combined with Nvidia's GeForce 9400M and 9600M GT graphics processors.
You can guess how Intel feels about that.
In the Ars Technica post on the subject, reader ravyne comments, "This is about Intel shoring up is platform solution during a time when OEMs are realizing that the GPU is now important even in the value market. Their current integrated GPUs simply don't compete with Nvidia's or the AMD (NYSE: AMD) chipsets available on their platform. I see this as little more than Intel strong-arming Nvidia until they're able to produce a competitive, Larabee-based, integrated GPU and have a 'complete' platform again."
Some commenters simply bring up the issues Nvidia faces as it attempts to maintain its place in the world.
"I think Intel is heading into murky water here. On one hand, we all know that the GPU is becoming more and more important. Hence the work Intel is doing integrating them. But on the other hand, if Intel does do this then they look like a monopoly controlling a major portion of the market. How does Intel go forward in the direction things seem to be moving without knocking Nvidia down a few pegs. Also, what does Nvidia do? They don't have the technology to build their own CPUs. Do they try to team up with AMD? AMD already has ATI (Nasdaq: ATYT). Seems like Nvidia is the odd man out because Intel brought their own date to the dance," TechGeek notes.
Overall, it's hard to say how important this lawsuit will be to how graphics are rendered in future Macs and PCs.
"I don't think Intel is terribly worried about Nvidia in terms of Nvidia's impact on Intel, but Intel tends to be pretty protective of its legal rights and positions," Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for Insight 64, told MacNewsWorld.
Basically, Brookwood said, Intel says Nvidia has a license that lets it create products that interface with Intel's frontside bus on its processors, but Intel's newer processors no longer have frontside buses. "So Nvidia is saying, 'Well, you know, we have a license that says we can tie into Intel CPUs whether there is a frontside bus or not'," Brookwood explained.
Intel now wants a court in Delaware to decide.
One Charger to Charge Them All
At the Mobile World Congress event this week, the GSM Association announced a cool new program designed to help mobile phone manufacturers consolidate their chargers into a single, energy-efficient, universal micro-USB charging system. For consumers, this would be a handy boon -- if a user bought a new phone, they wouldn't also have to buy new proprietary chargers for it. Similarly, family members could all use the same chargers. When traveling, it would be easy to plug in and charge up with a buddy's charger.
Reportedly, such a move will result in chargers that use 50 percent less energy in standby mode and save the world from 56,000 tons of duplicate chargers. It's not clear exactly what these numbers mean, but they are definitely "greener" than what's going on right now.
InformationWeek.com's Over the Air blogger Ed Hansberry says he has several chargers in various locations in his home, bag and car. "If you had to replace some or all of those when you got a new phone with a different connector, it could easily cost $100 or more, and the old chargers are sent to a closet somewhere or to a landfill to occupy space," he noted.
Still, not everyone believes this move will create butterflies and rainbows any time soon. "I've used a lot of phones which had mini USB connectors but couldn't be charged via USB unless a driver was installed on the system. Others I've seen which had the same connector on the phone but were from different cellular companies and one could be charged via USB while the other could not, needed the special charger with the USB plug from that cellular provider," comments digitaldd on HotHardware.com.
Indeed, the big issue is manufacturer buy-in, and even though 17 handset makers and mobile operators have jumped on board, we won't really start seeing results until 2012.
"This is actually a pretty big move. A lot of vendors have protected markets with proprietary chargers, but this is similar to headphone jacks, where everyone had their own headphone jack standards, but now most device manufacturers are now moving to 3.5 mm headphone jacks," Chris Hazelton, a research director of Mobile and Wireless for The 451 Group, told MacNewsWorld.
Some device manufacturers, however, will likely decide to continue doing their own thing, in part to help protect their accessory partnerships with other manufacturers, Hazelton said.
So far, Apple seems to ignoring the effort ... and is widely expected to continue with its own proprietary docking/charging systems.
Apple Pulls a Microsoft
Meanwhile, Apple has acknowledged a surprising problem with compatibility between its iWork '08 and iWork '09 application suites -- iWork '08 can't open files created by iWork '09. The workaround is to save files in iWork '09 as iWork '08 files. So how is this pulling a Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT)?
For many years, the company in Redmond was notorious for having incompatibility problems between versions of its Microsoft Office products -- though, admittedly, Microsoft has made great strides in recent years.
Still, for Apple, this seems like a pretty big oversight.
"I know bugs are to be expected with software updates, but one would think that compatibility is one of the major things they check for," commented NPrtmn4evr on the AppleInsider.com post on the subject.
Another reader seems to be taking it all in stride. "Why is this being framed as some kind of scary problem, when this is almost standard procedure in the software world for years and years???" Virgil-TB2 noted.
However, most seem to be floored.
"This is stunningly stupid on Apple's part. And further fragments an already-small market segment," anantksundaram added.
So what gives? Is document incompatibility an accident? Or a technological hurdle?
"I believe that it's usually more a matter of taking the time/effort to make things work than any significant technical challenge. There are some exceptions, particularly when a new version institutes significant changes or leverages fundamentally new technologies in an application," Charles King, principal analyst for Pund-IT, told MacNewsWorld.
"The inclusion of new file formats in Office 2007 is a case in point, both in how an application changes over time and how a vendor can help minimize customer confusion. Microsoft went public early on regarding the changes and made converters -- for Office 2003 and XP -- readily available for download," he explained.
"I think that it behooves vendors to support legacy platforms and applications for as long as possible -- or as long as makes sense from a business perspective -- but at some point everything changes immutably or dies outright," King added.
But iWork '08? Wasn't '08 just last year?
