Touch-screen shortage, Office 2008, Mac Pro RAID card; iPhone

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
A shortage of touch-screens for Apple's new iPod touch player is having an adverse affect on the NAND flash market. Meanwhile, Microsoft is offering new upgrade incentives to customers who purchase Office 2004 ahead of January's Office 2008 launch. And Apple has begun shipping its $1000 RAID card for the Mac Pro.



iPod touchscreen shortage



"Expectations of rebounding NAND flash prices due to rising shipments of iPod touch may be dashed since touch screen panels are running short at present," reports DigiTimes.



Following the launch of the iPod touch in September, Apple originally planned to rapidly grow global shipments up to the year-end holidays, the overseas rumor publication said, citing market sources. However, due to the shortage of touch screen panels, volume shipments have been pushed back to this month, those sources added.



The shortages have reportedly affected shipments from NAND flash makers to Apple. "If the NAND flash makers were able to make shipments to Apple as planned, they would not have had to face pressure to sell their products to other vendors," DigiTimes said. "In the long-term it is unlikely prices in the NAND flash market will stabilize."



Microsoft's "Super Suite" office deal



Starting Thursday, Microsoft began offering customers the ability to save up to $500 by purchasing qualifying Office 2004 for Mac products. Those who do will receive a copy of Office 2008 for Mac Special Edition for just the cost of shipping and handling.







Promotion details and a list of qualifying Office 2004 products are available from Microsoft's new Super Suite Deal website.



Apple ships Mac Pro RAID card upgrade



Meanwhile, MacNN reports that Apple has begun offering its RAID controller cards as a separate upgrade for its Mac Pro high-end desktop systems.



Mac OS X already allows users to stripe two, three, or four hard drives in a RAID 0 array for increased performance with a large storage capacity. The operating system also supports RAID 1 mirroring for protecting critical data against drive failure, while the new Mac Pro RAID card supports hardware RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 0+1.



The new card features 256MB of RAID cache, a 72-hour cache protecting battery, and sequential read performance of up to 304MB/sec in RAID 0 or up to 199MB/sec in RAID 5 without the need for any external drive enclosures. Apple's new Mac Pro RAID card is available via the online store as a configuration option for new Mac Pro purchases, adding $1,000 to the price of potential Mac Pro purchases.







Apple states: "The Mac Pro RAID Card delivers enhanced storage performance and data protection through a powerful hardware RAID engine, 256MB of cache, and an integrated 72-hour battery for protecting cache data. The card occupies the top PCI Express slot (slot 4) of your Mac Pro and requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later."



Users looking to enable a Mac Pro for hardware RAID can install the Mac Pro RAID Card and two or more hard drives in bays 1 through 4. Each RAID level requires a minimum number of hard drives, however, with Enhanced JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) needing just one drive and RAID 0+1 requiring four separate drives.



The Mac Pro RAID card ships with an installation tool as well as detailed setup instructions.



TIME pays homage to iPhone



And as if it's any surprise, TIME magazine has named Apple's iPhone its "invention of the year."



"The thing is hard to type on. It's too slow. It's too big. It doesn't have instant messaging. It's too expensive. (Or, no, wait, it's too cheap!) It doesn't support my work e-mail. It's locked to AT&T. Steve Jobs secretly hates puppies," writes Lev Grossman. "And -- all together now -- we're sick of hearing about it! Yes, there's been a lot of hype written about the iPhone, and a lot of guff too. So much so that it seems weird to add more, after Danny Fanboy and Bobby McBlogger have had their day. But when that day is over, Apple's iPhone is still the best thing invented this year. "



Google to announce wireless play on Monday



Also, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that we won?t have to wait much longer to hear from Google about its big plans in wireless.



"The company looks set to make a splash in the mobile market on Monday, announcing an alliance with various handset makers and cellphone operators around the world that are willing to push its ?open? platform for cellphone applications, the paper said, citing sources. "It?s always possible the announcement?s timing could change, but Monday looks like the day at this point."
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 22
    filburtfilburt Posts: 398member
    I am confused... why should anyone buy anything but Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher Edition? It's cheaper and you get the same 2008 update.
  • Reply 2 of 22
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by filburt View Post


    I am confused... why should anyone buy anything but Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher Edition? It's cheaper and you get the same 2008 update.



    Because that person may be neither a student nor a teacher?! Am I missing some subtlety here?



  • Reply 3 of 22
    filburtfilburt Posts: 398member
    You do not have to a teacher nor student to legally purchase and use Student and Teacher Edition. Well, it used to be, but Microsoft has changed the licensing term to allow home use (non business).



    With Office 2008, Student and Teacher Edition will be renamed to Home and Student Edition.
  • Reply 4 of 22
    I wonder if Microsoft is going to make this deal any better. I recently brought Microsoft Office 2004 [Student & Teacher] with the free* upgrade to 2008 upon release.



    Now I see if I only waited a little longer I could have gotten Special Media Edition for even less. I am a little upset, but not much since $3 is not much of a savings and the only program I use from the Office suite is excel.



    Now it is time to wait for the more vocal people then me to complain to Microsoft about their price cut! :P

    Maybe I can get a $1.50 Microsoft credit (not that I know what I could use it for)



    * $10 Shipping & handling cost + tax
  • Reply 5 of 22
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacLovin View Post


    Now it is time to wait for the more vocal people then me to complain to Microsoft about their price cut! :P



    Actually it doesn't get much better than this, what is there to complain about?
  • Reply 6 of 22
    i've read the info and even went to the site to "order" the new product using the discount, but i still can't tell: what's the required proof of purchase? does this apply only to new purchases? If i bought 04 a year or so ago, am i still eligible for the new edition? do i need any proof of purchase other than having registered the original (qualifying?) product?



    does anyone know?
  • Reply 7 of 22
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by filburt View Post


    You do not have to a teacher nor student to legally purchase and use Student and Teacher Edition. Well, it used to be, but Microsoft has changed the licensing term to allow home use (non business).



    With Office 2008, Student and Teacher Edition will be renamed to Home and Student Edition.



    That's good to know. (Btw, do you have a link to where I can confirm this, in case someone asks me. Thanks).
  • Reply 8 of 22
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rtdunham View Post


    i've read the info and even went to the site to "order" the new product using the discount, but i still can't tell: what's the required proof of purchase? does this apply only to new purchases? If i bought 04 a year or so ago, am i still eligible for the new edition? do i need any proof of purchase other than having registered the original (qualifying?) product?



    does anyone know?



    They want the original product box top with the product name and barcode clearly identified, and a copy of the sales receipt that clearly shows the date and store name where it was acquired.
  • Reply 9 of 22
    Ah yes.



    Please buy our product because the one we've promised to be finished is going to take longer than expected.



    Why?



    Because we don't want to have to be ready to leverage Leopard.



    The more Apple finally sheds it's Carbon the longer it will take Adobe and Microsoft to port.



    The reason this OS has taken so long to really make strides is because of Adobe/Macromedia and Microsoft.



    Now that Apple doesn't need their sales to be viable they can finally say, "Get on the bus or f*** off!"
  • Reply 10 of 22
    Microsoft globally is pushing very agressively Home/Student/Teacher 2004 etc Office to compete with iWork'08 which whips Office.



    Good points on licensing by all the posters here. I was very confused by the recent changes.
  • Reply 11 of 22
    That is BS. The Office deal is a good one. Having played with the Beta, the Office Suite is much nicer then the current one. I am looking forward to its release (or for somebody else to come up with something better). I am not a big Microsoft fan, but unfortunately it does make the best Office Suite for the Mac.



    People forget, Apple announced practically out of the blue that is was switching to Intel processors. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft were already into their development cycles for CS3 and Office for the Mac respectively. To make applications Universal (e.g. work on both Power PC and Intel based Macs) there was only one set of developer tools that would work: Apple's. Prior to Apple's announcement, many big developers like Microsoft and Adobe used Codeweaver to write their applications. So not only did Adobe and Microsoft's developers who were accustomed to using Codeweaver have to learn a new set of somewhat complicated developer tools quickly, they had to work with Apple's not as fully developed tools. So part of the hold up for both Adobe and Microsoft were for the developers to learn Apple's developer tools, and part of the hold up was for those companies to work with Apple to quickly improve Apple's tools to include features that were in Codeweaver but not in Apple's own tools.



    Moreover, Adobe had it particularly tough because it had just acquired Macromedia. Not only did it have to worry about how to integrate Macromedia's products with its own, but now it had to slow things down to work through the change over to Apple's move to Intel processors. Apple also told people the move would be completed in two years. It finished it in a year. That is great for consumers, but bad for companies trying to write complex applications. You can't expect companies to finish their products on Apple's every changing schedules. Moreover, Adobe hadn't had CS2 in the wild for very long when Apple announced the change over. Adobe wasn't going to rush out CS3 depriving itself of income it expected to make on CS2. In addition, it wasn't going to rewrite CS2 to work on Intel Macs. If it had done that, we wouldn't' be looking at CS3 right now.



    Truthfully, I am surprised Apple got Microsoft to come out with a new edition of Office at all since Microsoft had to essentially rewrite every line of millions of lines of code. I suspect Apple paid Microsoft something to do this. That is why they came up with a new five year deal concerning Office. Otherwise, why was a deal need? Microsoft is making a lot of money on Office for the Mac. Usually companies making profitable products do not need a deal to continue making them.





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by mdriftmeyer View Post


    Ah yes.



    Please buy our product because the one we've promised to be finished is going to take longer than expected.



    Why?



    Because we don't want to have to be ready to leverage Leopard.



    The more Apple finally sheds it's Carbon the longer it will take Adobe and Microsoft to port.



    The reason this OS has taken so long to really make strides is because of Adobe/Macromedia and Microsoft.



    Now that Apple doesn't need their sales to be viable they can finally say, "Get on the bus or f*** off!"



  • Reply 12 of 22
    I's not a Microsoft fan, but to say iWork's whips Office 2004 seems like a bit of a stretch. Better in some ways? Sure. There are a lot of nice things about iWorks. I love Keynote, and prefer it over Powerpoint. However, this is mostly because I think Keynote is laid out better. If I were honest, however, it lacks some of the functionality of Powerpoint.



    Numbers is nice for people with basic needs, but Excel has a lot more features then Numbers. If you work with Excel's macros a lot, you are not going to switch to numbers.



    Pages is great for people with basic needs, is laid out nice (especially the latest version), and has nice templates. However, it lacks a lot of the functionality of Word, and compatibility is not great.





    In my view, this is all by design. Apple isn't seriously trying to compete with Office. It needs Office on the Mac for compatibility. Lots of people would never buy a Mac if you couldn't use Office. So, Apple makes a basic Office Suite to appease people who do not want to spend the big bucks for Office.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by nvidia2008 View Post


    Microsoft globally is pushing very agressively Home/Student/Teacher 2004 etc Office to compete with iWork'08 which whips Office.



    Good points on licensing by all the posters here. I was very confused by the recent changes.



  • Reply 13 of 22
    I agree. There are plenty of great things to give Microsoft a hard time over. Yet, this doesn't seem like one of them. I have tried every word processor out there for the Mac (at least I think I have), and Office is still the best. Office 2008 solves a lot of the things I hated about the current version.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by camimac View Post


    Actually it doesn't get much better than this, what is there to complain about?



  • Reply 14 of 22
    Hey everyone!



    I found out that the Super Suite Deal has some hooks to it. You have to buy Office 2004 (any version) between November 1, 2007 and January 14, 2008. You have to provide the product info as well as a copy of the receipt that shows when/where you bought it. I take it to be price/product protection by Microsoft should you buy Office 2004 between now and when Office 2008 comes out. MS is not giving out free upgrades to everyone.



    There are two ways to redeem. You can go through online registration which will register you for the upgrade. You wind up registering for a single license for Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition. They will not honor the registration until you send in your proof of purchase info (product info as well as receipt). Or you can print out a form, fill it out, attach your proofs and mail it off. If you do it this way, you have the option of a single license of Office 2008 for Mac Special Media Edition or a standard 3 license version of Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition.



    All of this has serious implications. If you are running Office 2004 for Mac Student and Teacher Edition, you can install on up to 3 Macs. If you have it on more than one Mac, your best bet would to be opt for Office 2008 for Mac Home and Student Edition. If you get the Special Media Edition, you get extra bells and whistles but you will only be allowed to install it on one machine.



    Johnny
  • Reply 15 of 22
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by TerrinB View Post


    I's not a Microsoft fan, but to say iWork's whips Office 2004 seems like a bit of a stretch. Better in some ways? Sure. There are a lot of nice things about iWorks. I love Keynote, and prefer it over Powerpoint. However, this is mostly because I think Keynote is laid out better. If I were honest, however, it lacks some of the functionality of Powerpoint.



    Numbers is nice for people with basic needs, but Excel has a lot more features then Numbers. If you work with Excel's macros a lot, you are not going to switch to numbers.



    Pages is great for people with basic needs, is laid out nice (especially the latest version), and has nice templates. However, it lacks a lot of the functionality of Word, and compatibility is not great



    Hear, hear. Right on.



    I have been trying out iWork for over a week now. Numbers and Pages are rather basic.



    Keynote is better that those two, but my overall verdict: It's a lot of great eye-candy, but lacks a some of the basic functionality that PPT offers (e.g., the ability to print in B&W) and has some mildly irritating features (e.g., non-intuitive icons). I will primarily use it in situations where I can get a little bit of "wow" on the animations. I will still largely use PPT, but (having spent the $79) use Keynote in situations where I can import some fairly simple PPT files (that I do not have to spend a lot of time editing).



    iWork is zero immediate threat to Office.
  • Reply 16 of 22
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by filburt View Post


    You do not have to a teacher nor student to legally purchase and use Student and Teacher Edition. Well, it used to be, but Microsoft has changed the licensing term to allow home use (non business).



    With Office 2008, Student and Teacher Edition will be renamed to Home and Student Edition.



    Hi,



    I can't find this anywhere. Microsoft's page (http://www.microsoft.com/mac/product...=qualifiedUser) still says that you must be a qualified student or teacher for the 2004 Student/Teacher Edition... but it hasn't been updated since 2005. Amazon says the same thing. If you (or someone else) could point me to a link with the new requirements I would be much appreciative.



    Thanks!
  • Reply 17 of 22
    jeffdmjeffdm Posts: 12,951member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by anantksundaram View Post


    iWork is zero immediate threat to Office.



    I really don't think iWork can displace Office except maybe in the home, or maybe the home office, Office is out of place there anyway.
  • Reply 18 of 22
    zanshinzanshin Posts: 350member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by JeffDM View Post


    I really don't think iWork can displace Office except maybe in the home, or maybe the home office, Office is out of place there anyway.



    I must disagree. If you've used MS Office in jobs and traditional offices, there's good reason to leverage your experience with those applications at home. If you do computing work in your home office and share files with people in traditional offices, MS Office provides file compatibility not possible with iWork. Those are two reasons why it's not "out of place" as stated.



    Lastly, I assume everyone knows this, but it bears mentioning: the license of MS Office Student & Teacher editions prohibits use for any commercial activity. Just because you work at home for a traditional job or run a SOHO business from your home doesn't entitle you to use the less expensive version of MS Office to get your work done. That's theft, no matter how you pretty it up to justify it.
  • Reply 19 of 22
    zanshinzanshin Posts: 350member
    Sweet! Wish it were cheaper, but what the heck -- it should allow you to buy your computer and RAID all on one ticket, with an AppleCare warranty, and no multiple suppliers all pointing fingers at other vendors if it doesn't work right. (of course, if it doesn't work right, you still have some pretty big problems to deal with.)
  • Reply 20 of 22
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by zanshin View Post


    I must disagree. If you've used MS Office in jobs and traditional offices, there's good reason to leverage your experience with those applications at home. If you do computing work in your home office and share files with people in traditional offices, MS Office provides file compatibility not possible with iWork. Those are two reasons why it's not "out of place" as stated.



    Lastly, I assume everyone knows this, but it bears mentioning: the license of MS Office Student & Teacher editions prohibits use for any commercial activity. Just because you work at home for a traditional job or run a SOHO business from your home doesn't entitle you to use the less expensive version of MS Office to get your work done. That's theft, no matter how you pretty it up to justify it.



    You should ask yourself is stealing from a thief really stealing? Copyright law has been so skewed to favor corporation's interests over the public's interest, that I personally will shed no tears for companies like Microsoft for people stretching the confines of their licensing. Microsoft should just be glad somebody paid it the ridiculous amount of money it wants for the software.
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