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News Archive for Friday July 2, 2010     Goto Current News Page

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Drivers for Radeon 5xxx series in new Mini OS X 10.6.4 image
In a follow-up to an earlier post, Philip sent a FYI on another MR thread regarding drivers for ATI/AMD Radeon 5 series in the Mac mini OS X 10.6.4 image. So hopefully before too long we'll finally see Radeon 5xxx series GPUs for Macs also. (A Mac 5870 has been on my wish list for quite awhile, long before the Fermi was released.)
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Hacks to run Nvidia Fermi (GTX480/470) cards in Mac Pros
You may have already seen this but last week Hackintosh site Netkas posted a FYI on Fermi support in OS X that was included in the original download of the Nvidia GTX-285 driver update for OS X 10.6.4. The download has since been changed to remove that, but the netkas posting links to this IM thread w/downloads and related replies/posts. Yesterday a reader sent a link to a macrumors forum thread on a GTX480 running OSX in 1st Gen Mac Pro. Interesting experiments but from what I've read so far performance is disappointing (less than GTX-285) and for most not worth the effort/cost at this point. I'd considering getting a card to try but with the current state of things, I'll likely wait to see what the "Mac" version costs and if the benefits are worth it.
Unrealistic I know but I hope it won't be another repeat of history (new card, bad drivers, waiting for fixes/improvements that never fully happen and then the next new card appears and we start all over again...) But regardless it's about time we had a refresh of graphics cards (long overdue).
Hopefully the "Mac" offering won't be too much more than the PC versions, although they have been out awhile now and prices always drop over time (lots of competition), where Mac cards rarely do. The feeling is any new card may be announced when the new Mac Pros are but only time will tell. (And I'm still hoping for a Mac ATI 5xxx series card also.)
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Apple says update coming to fix incorrect iPhone Signal Strength bars
Here's a clip from the Apple press release today (Letter from Apple Regarding iPhone 4.)

"We have discovered the cause of this dramatic drop in bars, and it is both simple and surprising. Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars. Users observing a drop of several bars when they grip their iPhone in a certain way are most likely in an area with very weak signal strength, but they don't know it because we are erroneously displaying 4 or 5 bars. Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place.

To fix this, we are adopting AT&T's recently recommended formula for calculating how many bars to display for a given signal strength. The real signal strength remains the same, but the iPhone's bars will report it far more accurately, providing users a much better indication of the reception they will get in a given area. We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see.

We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G."

I don't own an iphone 4 but correcting the displayed signal strength won't fix the grip/antenna attenuation issue, although there are simple fixes for that (cases or even a simple rubber band).

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Apple/products related News/Articles/Commentary

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Software Updates, Freebies and Related Articles/Reviews
(later added first)

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Apple Support/How-To/Troubleshooting Doc updates

Topic based Guides, Tips & Troubleshooting for Mac & iPhone/iPad/watchOS/tvOS Users.
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