News Bits: Apple MacBook Merom Upgrade, Quanta Lags, AMD Dell Notebooks with ATI Graphics

Apple MacBook to get early Merom upgrade?

Next month, Apple plans to ship not only its Core 2-equipped MacBook Pro, but also the consumer-oriented MacBook according to Asian reports.

Taiwanese contract manufacturer Asustek will push out MacBooks with the new CPU - Quanta is said to manufacture the MacBook Pro. Together, Asustek and Quanta will churn out 200,000 - 300,000 Mac laptops according to Chinese-language Commercial Times.

Original reports said that higher-end machines were slated to get a Core 2 Duo upgrade at the end of this month, or early September, but now it appears as if the mainstream models will get the same treatment.

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Quanta posts weak on-year revenue growth in July compared to other top-four notebook makers

Quanta posted an on-year revenue growth of 0.4% in July, well behind the over-40% increases reached by the other big four - Compal Electronics, Wistron, and Inventec. Sources attribute Quanta's poor growth to Dell switching its business-notebook orders to Compal this year.

Quanta did not comment on orders. They shipped 1.45 million notebooks in July; their total shipments for the first seven months of this year were 10.15 million units. Compal, in comparison, shipped 6.75 million.

Dell's top supplier before this year was Quanta, who produced mostly business notebooks. This year however, Dell turned to Compal for its business orders, while Quanta started making consumer notebooks for Dell. Quanta's president, Michael Wang, expects the company's notebook shipments to grow 25-30% sequentially in Q3 2006. Quanta is confident that its shipment growth will outpace other notebook manufacturers in 2007.

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AMD-based Dell notebooks to have ATI graphics

Dell's AMD-based notebooks, expected to be available in October or early November, will be fitted with ATI Mobility Radeon graphics chips. It's not the first time AMD-based notebooks have gotten ATI graphics, but Dell's notebooks will be the first ones launched after AMD's recent announcement of acquiring ATI.

Dell's decision to use ATI GPUs in its AMD-based notebooks is a sign that the impact of AMD's acquisition of ATI on the PC industry will start to make a difference in the near future.

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Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 delayed

Although Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 last month, DailyTech reports that Firefox 2.0 Beta 2 has been delayed. It was supposed to be unveiled to customers this week, but was held back due to persistent bugs.

Even though Beta 2 has been delayed, it will not affect the September 26th launch of the final release of Firefox 2.0. New features of the browser include spell checking, enhanced search capabilities, session saver and anti-phishing technologies.

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What your Inbox says about you

The saying "You are what you eat" also applies to your Inbox. Pay attention to how you answer or file each email - notice what you choose to keep or delete. Consider how you react when you find your inbox stuffed with unread messages.

The appearance of your inbox is a reflection of your habits, your mental health, and *gasp*, even the way your Mom and Dad raised you. Sound interesting? Read more!

Two Sony VAIO SZ notebooks tested

X-bit labs takes a closer look at two Sony VAIO SZ notebooks, those being the VAIO VGN-SZ1HRP/B and VAIO VGN-SZ1XRP/C.Although they appear visually similar, the price difference of $500US says otherwise.

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I disagree with that inbox article!! It says if you have only 10 emails in your inbox, you're missing out on life. Well, I don't think so! I usually have between 5 and 10 emails in my inbox. When I have more than 5, it becomes harder to keep track of them. You have to look at them every time you're in your inbox to figure out why they're still there, and if there's some action that needs to be taken. Why hasn't it happened yet? OMG I've so many things to do, and I can't even get this over with now because I have to wait until something else happens. Aaaa! But when there are only 5, I can see them all at once, which means that I'm not spending any time reading the sender/subject of any one in particular, which means, no worries. I can relax and do fun things in life

Malia

 

i have 1500 emails in my inbox that have not been read hehe

 

It's not really surprising that the AMD notebooks will come with ATi cards. But by then, won't they just be called AMD GPUs since AMD is dropping the ATi name? Still, Dell's best notebooks (and probably best sellers) will be their Intel/nVidia notebooks. nVidia just makes better high-end cards than ATi.

 

so pretty much the big difference between macbooks and macbook pro's will remain the same lack of dedicated video card in the more mainstream ones and of course smaller screen and few other features the macbooks lack.

 

Yeah imagine the confusion..

"Hey I'm running an AMD chip on my Intel!"

 

I thought that story ended up not being true (about AMD dropping the ATi name)?

-Zadillo

 

For some reason the FireFox news just made me laugh. I used to really love FireFox, but after using it lots and having it on sites with a lot of gif-animations, or one large one, it just has so many problems handling the information it really gets tedious to use. I actually like Opera better than FireFox, which is strange. I hope they get those bugs fixed up soon though. There's some issues that have never been fixed.

 

exactly - ditto here - and most are crap/spam mail. obviously # emails has nothing to do with who you are...

 

What sort of sites are you talking about that give Firefox this kind of problem? I've personally never seen Firefox have problems handling sites with large numbers of GIF or Flash animations.

 

Firefox sometimes has problems on DeviantArt.com (DA) or FurAffinity.net (FA) for me. Whenever you get too many animated gif icons on the screen Firefox slows to a crawl. Also, one big 500x500 animated gif will have the same effect. Opera and IE have no issue showing it nor multiple gif's on the same page. As an administrator on FA, I've read a couple of complaints against Firefox for the gif-lag, and the only way we can get rid of that is to make changes to our system which isn't going to happen since most users use IE or Opera on the site. Firefox needs to catch up.