Maybe I’m dumb, maybe I need new spectacles or maybe my mind just switched off itself.
Today, the 19th June 2009, a big day for Apple, because they are releasing a so called “major update” for their new phone, the iPhoneGS. I’ve been reading all about it for days.
The new specs are actually good in general. The CPU spec:

• ARM1176JZF chip with TrustZone (enables trusted computing environment for media, apps, network, OS, etc. — very bad for hackers)
• Can vary in clock speed up to 700MHz or more, depending on implementation
  
• ARM Intelligent Energy Manager (claimed to reduce power consumption 25-50% in portables)
• 16K / 16K cache
• Features vector floating point coprocessor (”for embedded 3D-graphics”)
• ARM Jazelle enabled for embedded Java execution (hmm…)
• SIMD, high perf integer CPU (8-stage pipeline, 675 Dhrystone, 2.1 MIPS)
• 0.45 mW/MHz power draw (with cache)

Sorry, the reason why I’ve talked about its CPU only is because all the other hardware specs are available on its website, while the CPU bit is what Apple doesn’t talk about.

Well, there was indeed a leak from T-Mobile Netherland, where they did accidently published the full hardware spec of the iPhoneGS. Its CPU is rated at 625Mhz with 256 Mb mobile RAM and a GPU which support OpenGL 2.0 for mobile devices. The drawback with OpenGL 2.0 is that it is not compatible with version 1.0 which is on the old iPhones, meaning game developers will have to re-write the whole game from scratch to make it compatible with the iPhoneGS GPU.

Now the funny marketing ploy which I’ve noticed today on the apple store UK website is….

Generally when a product is new, you label it as new to catch people’s attention. But not only have they labeled the new  iPhoneGS as new, but they’ve also labeled the old iPhone as new. Is is a mistake or a marketing ploy?

Apple normally pays loads of attention to details and I doubt it was a deliberate mistake. I’m sure it was there on purpose jsut to temp people in accidently buying the old one.

Don’t worry as if you are among those who have accidently bought the old one, you can still get a refund as per some UK laws for online shopping which gives you a period of 14days to get a full refund. NOTE: DO READ APPLE’S POLICY AS THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS!!!!

As for the prices… That’s a complete different story.

The prices in UK are nearly doubled as to the one in the States. Why?

It is the same hardware, USD is cheaper than GBP, so why it is more expensive in UK that in the states?

Below is a snapshot of Apple Stores US with their prices:

Photoshop, a very nice software indeed. Many want to have have the Full package from Adobe, that is  CS4 Extended (at time of writing) and keep wanting more and more and more and the new version as soon as it comes out.

When you stop and think about it, how much space does it consume on your PC/MAC? Do you make full use of the whole package? And how many other services get install in background, do you know about them?

I know many who will actually install the Extended version of Photoshop just to fix a few photos. I don’t understand why the need of using such a fully fledged package for such simple editing. Picasa does the job, but because it is free, many people think it is not worthy. Another rival (the way I see it) for Photoshop is GIMP. GIMP was initially developed for Linux systems, but now the windows version is available. It does most of the job as Photoshop (not extended version) will do and the good thing, it is free. It also support loads of plug-ins and ad-dins.

So, the question is, why so many people feel the need of having/using photoshop, when the only task they’ve got to do is nothing much that a simple photo editing???