There have been several updates in the last few days and a fairly mixed bag of news, including Thailand iPhone rumours, but don't get your hopes up.

This week, I am looking at the new Apple MacBook Pro.

The new MacBook Pro (1) Out of the Box

One of the important updates last week was to Apple's Safari. All three versions were updated to version 3.2. Three versions? Tiger, Leopard and Windows.

The update fixed a number of things most notably the insecurity concerning phishing that had been hanging around for a while. There were also some other fixes concerning handling of XML files and some other bugs.

A few people with 3rd party add ons and plugins did report some problems, but I am happy to say it was plain sailing for me.

Apple has updated the firmware for the new MacBook Pro and its trackpad, as anticipated and has now released a Trackpad Firmware Update. The 704KB download, via the OS X Software Update feature, is an application that will update the firmware for the user. We understand the computer should be connected to the power source for this update.. I did send this to the Post for next week's article, but I cannot tell if it arrived on time.

There was also an update for QuickTime this week: to 7.5.5. It was something to do with the H264 codec and iChat.

Talking of QuickTime, a trailer for the new StarTrek movie is now online and, if you like anything like this, you ought to have a look.

Other update news concerns OS X and the iPhone. 10.5.6 is on the way, although when it arrives is not yet known. According to AppleInsider, some of the improvements concern Mobile Me syncing, particularly concerning computers with lower speeds and slower network links, and with firewalls. The report tells us that some 90 components of OS X are being examined, among them "multi-touch commands in the Finder, USB device disconnects . . . Keychain Access and File Sync." There is no information as yet on size, but we may well expect another large download.

Applinsider added to this at the weekend with an "imminnent" warning. Or at least, pretty soon.

Some of you will know that I have been writing about the System preferences in OSX for almost a year now on and off. I thought it was going to be a four or five week series, and it just grew. There was a lot of other stuff between, like updates and new hardware. To consolidate, I am bringing the whole lot together and adding some more information where I think it is needed, then putting the information online in PDF format. I even needed a change from my original plan here because I found that when I was making the first part of the PDF, just a few of the preferences created a hefty file, and the whole lot together would be about 10MB I would guess. I have put it all online now as a sort of soft release.

Last Thursday there was a report in the Bangkok Post Business news concerning True and the iPhone. True say they are going to have this in a few months and the unsigned report also suggested *unsurprisingly) that AIS and DTAC were also in the running. But the price quoted, 25,000 baht, is way too high. You can get an unlocked on from HK for that now. I am beginning to think that Apple has missed the boat on this device here and optimism on projected sales is misplaced.

I took some of the information from the report and added some of my own information and put it on the Bangkok Diary pages. Before so, I ran it past someone at Apple Singapore, but got an unsurprising, "Apple has no comment", for my troubles.

I also sent the information to Macsimum News and Dennis Sellers put an adapted version online.

The iPhone is apparently being released in Egypt, although minus GPS which is not permitted to those there. Let's be generous: maybe they are trying to protect antiquities. On Monday we heard that Venezuela now has the iPhone. I had better give the MacDaily News link as the original source is in Spanish. It is also apparently about to be released in Taiwan according to M. Sharp of Insanely Great Mac. He ended the piece with the following comment which makes me feel that he clearly has little understanding of the way some societies east of Europe are formed:

He says:
"It pleases me that Taiwan will get the iPhone before China. Granted, Apple's hot-selling handset is already available in Hong Kong and Singapore, so it's not like our friends in the ROC are stealing a big march on Chinese in other enclaves."

On the other hand one place that has the device but where sales are apparently not going well, is India according to Chris Foresman in Ars Technica.

I expect India's somewhat open system of bringing in devices and making them available to consumers, something like the Mahboonkrong in Bangkok, only on a grander scale, has already saturated the market. Another reason, and this is soemthing that will affect the Thai market, is the price. With he US price fairly reasonable, Apple puts it on sale in 3rd world countries for several times the cost in the US: not only can people not afford it, but they will simply avoid it and go for something else, apart from those few people who want bling.

This is the same mistake that the software companies made when personal computers first became available here: no software; or too expensive compared with the US street market; and refusal to sell to legitimate buyers because they happened to live in a suspect country. The software companies themselves created Phantip and are only belatedly getting to grips with the real market here, although many prices (and I think particularly of Microsoft Office here) are just too high.

And some more bad marks from Apple who appear to take a leaf out of the Vista handbook, according to Cyrus Farvar of MacUser, with High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection, that requires all video devices connected to the new MacBook Pro to be authorized. As far as I can see this only applies to iTunes downloads, so is not as draconian as the Redmond one, but it does leave some upsetting questions.

I was trying to figure out why some sites linked to my web pages over and over, so clicked on a couple. One or two made sense, but when I looked at one called ebooks, I found that one of my pictures (unattributed), was not just being used online via a direct link but that the page was apparently a free download of a Wiley publishers book, iMac for Dummies, by Mark L. Chambers. I sent him email just in case -- I was really after attribution of the picture if it was him -- but his reply made it clear that in no way was he responsible and he was letting his publisher (Wiley) know about this copyright infringement.

Apple has really begin to expand in the region. We were happy to see the online store in Thaiand (and get a couple of t-shirts in the mail) which came at the saem time as an online store for the Philippines. Friday night we read of another online store: Malaysia; and I also saw that Indonesia has joined the club.

We dissed Microsoft a bit last week, so let's give Redmond the benefit of the doubt this week -- for now at least -- and look at their Cloud-based services that are due to arrive soon. It is rumoured to be Office up there and, we are told, that it will neither be Windows specific (although with the number of versions that is a relative term), nor linked to IE. According to a blogger, reported by Ina Fried on CNET, this could well run not just on PCs but Macs, Linux and also on the iPhone.

On the other hand, that "Vista Capable" lawsuit in the US -- the one in which Ballmer claims he has no knowledge of the decisions -- has lurched on a bit more. Lots of emails are being released to the court and in one, Jim Allchin writes, ""I believe we are going to be misleading customers with the Capable program". That's not very nice. Not for Microsoft. Not for the consumers.

The onslaught by Microsoft may well have led to this week's decision by Jerry Yang to step down from Yahoo! which was reported all over the place. The question one may ask is, "Did he jump, or was he pushed?"

And we also see that Zune prices are being reduced, "to adapt to the realities of the market according to information in Electronista. I expect soon they will be found in the Corflakes box as well.

I am setting the balance with True this time. Connections and download speeds -- and uploads come to that -- are as fast as I have ever experienced. Now why can't we have this all the time?

Electronista tells us this week that the standard for USB 3 that we mentioned last week has indeed been approved and it will have 10 times the speed of USB 2. They have a link there to a page that has the specifications at the USB developers' organization which could do with a bit if a speedup itself.

I had another one of those Paypal, "confirm your details" phishing emails on Monday. In Apple's Mail, I used the View menu and selected the Raw Source item. You can also check this by holding the cursor over the suspect URL. By looking through the text, I found the place where I had been expected to click included a URL for http://confirm-your-data.com which has the DNS number 71.205.165.120 and that seems to be part of the ISP, Comcast, somewhere up in Michigan. PayPal do not send emails asking for confirmations.

Their URL to report phishing or spoof sites is on the web page that goes with this podcast.

Barack Obama will have to give up his Blackberry - a device that he loves and uses constantly. An article by Jeff Zeleny on MSNBC that was originally in the NYTimes, tells us that there are certain obligations that a president has with regard to correspondence in the White House, although with the current lot I find that a surprise. Perhaps he can carry on with receiving email -- he has his aides send him a lot of information directly using the Blackberyy already -- but just avoid sending.

According to the article he will have a computer on his desk and we already know Michelle Obama bought him a MacBook recently. Maybe as a Mac user, he will be able to continue with that. Another change occurred last week when the weekly Democrat radio address also went out on YouTube.

Last week I saw a report that MP3 players could damage your health, if you were wearing a pacemaker and put the speakers on your chest. This week we have information from the University of Maryland School of Medicine that tells us a research team concludes the cardiovascular benefits of music are similar to those found in their previous study of laughter.

Let's see how many popular news organs put this out and start the report with "iPods are good for your heart."

Maybe there's a good reason for this. I was listening to a BBC podcast this week on the bus, when on came a catchy little hip hop number, "I saw God with an iPod" by Milk Kan on Blang Records.

Too Good to Miss?

Psystar the company that Apple is suing for sellng cloned Macs has lost is countersuing anti-trust claim in court, Tom Krazit reports. No real surprise there.

I have reported in the past on stuf from ZappTek, particularly iSpeak It. Now, with the ease of putting books online as iPhone apps, Zapp Tek have linked with InterLingua to provide audio and text summaries of classic books and plays that we can listen to or read on the iPhone or iPod touch.

I have had a problem with several apps pages on the iTunes store -- the bit that we in Thailand are allowed to use. When I look at an app, I don't just link to the iTunes in information page, I also check out the developer pages and the support links. I keep finding pages that, when I press that link to the developer it opens the Apache default page on my Admin account. I found this with another this weekend. The site link is coded (again) to take one to the localhost index page, which simply opens the Apache default page. What has appeared to happen is that the developer leaves the URL blank. Either that or in the submission process the data is removed and what we end up with is just http:// which does not help at all. I decided that I had had enough, so sent feedback to Apple.

I don't know what happened to the Nation RSS feeds last week. It sort of dawned on me that the breaking news feed had not been updating so I went looking. For a fairly useful technology they bury the links fairly deep and relegate them to the Others section. Only when I found the list and tried another to the one I already had, that had the same date: 5 November. For the record the link to the Post's has links to two feeds prominently on the main page.

There could be more, but at least they are working.

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