Apple worth more than Dell now

With Apple closing at $85.58 yesterday, it now has a market capitalization of $72.13 billion US, compared to Dell's which is just under $72 billion. However, with the remarkable iPod sales the last quarter, one wonders if those sales will plateau soon, and if so, how investors will react.

QuickTime H.264 encoding is very slow on Intel Macs

According to this MacAddict forum post, Apple still has a LOT of optimization to do for QuickTime on Intel Macs, despite having more than than half a year to optimize for Intel. The recently released Intel dual-core Macs appear to be slower than even a Mac mini for H.264 encoding:

70 s, Mac Mini G4 1.25
35 s, iMac G5 1.8
94 s, iMac Intel Core Duo 2.0

If these numbers are accurate (and if it's true that QuickTime is already OS X Intel native), one wonders how much of this poor performance is due simply to lack of optimization, and how much is due to the actual capabilities of SSE (vs Altivec).

By any other name...

"McBook"? ;)

Now we've seen everything: AAPL closes at $80.86

File this under simply bizarre. Apple's impressive stock price run up over the last couple of years has led to AAPL closing at $80.86 today, the day of the Intel switch.

QuickTime 7.0.4 released, and then pulled

Warning: Do not install the 7.0.4 update for QuickTime in Software Update. Apple released it, and then pulled it with no explanation. However, there are reports on the net that state that 7.0.4 causes problems with Windows Media files.

[Update 2006-01-10]

The QuickTime 7.0.4 update is back again. Again, no explanation.

[Update 2006-01-13]

One error is that if you close a Safari webpage with an embedded WMV file played through QuickTime 7.0.4 and Flip4Mac 2.0, Safari would crash. However, Flip4Mac 2.0.1 has now been released, which corrects this problem.

Flip4Mac now free, distributed by Microsoft

Despite the fact that Microsoft has it's own Windows Media Player for Mac, they have chosen to start distributing the Flip4Mac QuickTime plug-in. Formerly a $10 shareware app, it is now free.

Flip4Mac is a popular plug-in, as it plays many WMV files that Windows Media Player for Mac itself can't even play, and it does it all from within QuickTime.