thomas fitzgerald.net

I just came across this interesting rumor thanks to a tweet from Ian Betteridge. Short version: Apple have told Nvidia to go stick their gpu’s where the sun don’t shine. On the face of it this seems unlikely, considering how fundamental Nvidia GPU’s and architecture seems to be to Apple’s latest Laptop Line Up. But then there’s this page on Apple’s support website about the Nvidia Graphics failures that I like many others was the unfortunate victim of. What’s surprising about this is the language from Apple:

“In July 2008, NVIDIA publicly acknowledged a higher than normal failure rate for some of their graphics processors due to a packaging defect. At that same time, NVIDIA assured Apple that Mac computers with these graphics processors were not affected. However, after an Apple-led investigation, Apple has determined that some MacBook Pro computers with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor may be affected. If the NVIDIA graphics processor in your MacBook Pro has failed, or fails within three years of the original date of purchase, a repair will be done free of charge, even if your MacBook Pro is out of warranty.

This seems uncharacteristically bitter for a support document. You can sense the seething anger filtering through in that, so I guess it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Apple will say goodbye to Nvidia for a while. Apparently Dell have already told them to shove it. I also can’t help but wonder if Apple’s takeover of PA semi might lead the company to start doing their own GPU designs, as other manufacturers haven’t exactly been jumping on board with enthusiastic Mac support. Interesting times ahead.

There’s been a couple of fairly unbelievable rumors floated recently, that seem to be somewhat unlikely. The first is that Apple plan to buy Electronic Arts. I find this highly unlikely. While Apple is certainly making inroads into the hand held gaming space, EA’s portfolio covers a range of platforms and it just doesn’t seem like something that Apple would be interested in.

Even more unbelievable is the rumor that they plan on buying Twitter. This just seems rediculous. Great and all as Twitter is, Apple have shown no interest in social networking what so ever and I can’t see a single reason why the company would want control of something like twitter, other than possibly keeping the service out of another company’s hands, or as a showcase for apple server technologies, but both seem equally as unlikely. Move along, nothing to see here.