Here in canada, we saw the first bunch of iMac Core i5 and Core i7 on the Applestore Refurb, with iMac Core i7 at 1949$, 370$ less, a good deal 
And at least it is a proof that Apple delivers them, finally!!!
nVidia’s Ion was a chipset designed for Intel Atom processors found in netbooks and low-cost desktop. Based on a GeForce 8400 evolution, with 8 or 16 SP (Scalar Processors), it integrate chipset and graphic processor in one-chip.
Due to Intel licensing schema, and moreover the desire for Intel to close chipset market to nVidia, Ion 2 could no more integrate the chipset, so it’s only a graphic processor with same 8 or 16 Scalar Processors, interfaced by PCI-Express (1 to 4 lane, 250MB/s to 1GB/s) with new Intel CPU. It is accompanied with dedicated video memory, DDR2 or DDR3, up to 512MB.
When a graphic processor comes alone, with it’s dedicated memory, communicating with a PCI-Express bus, it’s just called a graphic card. That’s Ion 2, a dedicated graphic card extension. No more an integrated chipset with graphic processor.
Worse it have to copy it’s generated 3D images or HD video decoded images to the IGP integrated on the new Intel CPU, and it’s a huge amount of data in Full HD: 1920×1080 x 24bits x 24fps ad-minima, or 150MB/s! And interfaced on a Netbook with PCI-Express x1, theorical bandwidth of the bus will be 250MB/s, leaving nothing to exchange data 
I don’t think it’s a great idea, Ion 2 is just another GeForce 8400 in disguise, too slow to really play games, too expensive and consuming too much power to be competitive with dedicated HD Video hardware decoders (that don’t do 3D), in fact this “graphic accelerator” is on the same performance-level than integrated GeForce 9400M of Mac Mini or MacBook Air/MacBook.
Probably not the expected middle-level 3D chip that everyone would have expected to be able to play on netbooks!
This week-end my conjoint and me did a road-trip from Montreal to Toronto, for the Mirror Awards (Canadian hairdressers contest), and we have been deceived: finalist in 2 categories, my beloved ones doesn’t won any
But this is not the point here. We didn’t really enjoyed Toronto and we couldn’t have a reservation for the CN Tower restaurant, I dreamed to eat at 351m (450 feet) with a panoramic view! So we decided to go to see Ottawa, and quickly drove there…
To find a hotel, some (good) restaurants, bars, night-club to go out, we stopped at a coffee. Our iPod is not easy to use to browser many pages, look to the map with enough space on the screen, so I used myMacBook Pro 17″ (yes screen is bigger and totally gorgeous! lol!).
But here got the point, I couldn’t connect easily, we go to a Starbuck coffee, were it happens the connection was so slow it took minutes to display just one page. I was digusted.
What we needed was an iPad, something with a bigger than smartphone (and iPhone) screen, easy to use, able to take the micro-SIM card of my iPhone or have it’s own 3G plan, for me to browse locations on Ottawa while moving, discuss things, use the time lost in our car as a cool time to discuss our envy, and quietly choose an hotel, do an hotel reservation online while in the highway, select a restaurant to enjoy sea food, look at ratings and comments…
Finally we do it from an iPhone, but hotel reservation screen was really too large for it, and even if everything goes well, I do an error on the date: default date was tomorrow instead today on their page and I couldn’t see it if I didn’t check it by zooming!
We ended-up with a suite on Best Western, and sea food on Metropolitain Brasserie. A restaurant that is so a french brasserie, and so good, that I thought many parisian brasserie may take lessons! The suite was real great too
But with an iPad it would have been more simple, much more enjoyment to use while on the road, that I think it will be my next toy when the 3G version will be available!
It is not entirely clear what technology the trademark “Magic Trackpad” is meant to apply to and whether it would be some aspect of existing trackpads using in Apple’s notebook computers or if it would be some other device offering trackpad functionality.
A trademark is not related to any technology, patent, or anything else. A trademark is a reservation on it’s own, in one or more class of product or service, enabling the registrant to use it at will.
Trademark like iMac, iPod, Apple, Core i7, anything could be associated with them by their owner, it’s no technology or patent-related in any way. Example might be Apple changing iMac internally from PowerPC to Intel Core Duo, iPod as an hard-drive music player with a screen and rotating wheel used for a thumb-drive without hard-drive screen or wheel, Core i7 describing as welll 4-core 8thread processor or 2-core 4thread mobile processor, and so on…
A Trademark should just be considered as is, just a word, logo or sentence usually used to give confidence to customers or even trying to fake reality
PS: In fact, I think that this is related to the “Magic Mouse” trademark, that was not owned by Apple, needing to rename their “Magic Mouse” to “Apple Mouse” last year. They probably don’t want the owner of “Magic Mouse” trademark to be able to use “magic” with a trackpad. Vengeance?
I just bought an used (3 month old) Kingston SSD Now! 64GB SSD, for $130. It was a great SSD when launched, but for now, it’s under average on write speed, even largely under hard-drive speed, not talking about my RAID-0 2×1TB 7200 rpm system disk, but really actual when talking about read speed, with 220MB/s.
I would like to test a SSD for Mac OS X system, applications, and a bunch of usual files, including Windows and Linux Ubuntu VM, to see how it far compared to hard-drive, especially 2 hard-drives grouped in RAID-0. You have read many many benchmark, I suppose, and me too
I am not equipped to bench it, and anyway it doesn’t interest me. I would like to see if an average (by today metrics) SSD could do a difference in day-to-day use of Mac OS X, and what will be the feeling I have with it, compared to physical hard-drives in RAID-0, on a fast Mhackintosh (4×3.4Ghz, 8GB, GeForce 8800) extensively using firefox, mail, VMware fusion, Parallels, NetBeans (Java-coded tool I use for PHP development), MySQL database and more than that Adobe Lightroom for my pictures as a photographer.
Let’s playyyyyy!!!!! I will come back next week with more than MB/s, a feeling, a human report, maybe some advices!