News Roundup for December the 11th

It’s turning out to be a bit of a roller coaster ride owning one of the new aluminium MacBooks. The latest ‘bump‘ in the road — keep reading and I’ll explain why that was funny — comes in the form of reports that the Nvidia GPUs in the new 15″ MacBook Pro suffers from the same manufacturing fault — which, without getting overly technically, appears to be ‘bumpy chips’ — which caused problems for laptop manufacturers, including Apple, earlier this year. This could be the cause of the occasional ‘black screen of death’ we’ve been hearing about. Meanwhile, Apple has released a flotilla of firmware updates, two for each new model. Which just sounds greedy to me.

Switching to web browser news — and sticking with the greedy aluminium MacBook owners theme — the latest betas of FireFox 3.1 are reported to have introduced swipe-to-navigate functions, with pinch to zoom and twist to change tabs. No word on what they’ve mapped to ‘quickly close the top window when my boss/Mom walks by’.

Good news, South Korea! You’ve dropped the silly law which prevented the launch of the iPhone in your fair peninsular. Now you too can loose entire working days reliving your equally wasted childhood playing ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ games. Return to Atlantis is in the App Store here. Alternatively, there’s the Star Wars Sound Board, with 16 brief sound effects but thankfully no Jar Jar.

Now, we haven’t reported before on the phenomenon of movies disappearing from iTunes, partly because we didn’t want to scare anyone, but mostly because we hadn’t noticed. Anyway, the mystery has now been solved. It’s all to do with ‘release windows’. Movies are getting pulled from iTunes so you don’t go buying them there rather than watching them for free on telly. Yeah, makes perfect sense to me.