Apple, which already has a tendency to leapfrog competitors like a showboating amphibian, will overtake Samsung as a consumer of chips, Isuppli explained, as the fruit themed gadget flogger continues to order shedloads of them for its shiny offspring, the Ipad and Iphone.

LINK: Apple will gorge on semiconductors

See also all articles related to “fruit-themed toy maker…”

Anyone else surprised and a little underwhelmed by the apple “It’s just rock and roll but we like it” event today? For a music update, the nano got a vaguely bizarre video camera update as apple’s answer to the flip video. An answer to a question to a question I’m not sure who was asking.

While the most obvious device strongly rumored, and begging for a camera the iPod touch got nothing. Nothing except some minor and overdue price and capacity adjustments catching up to the continuing fall in flash memory prices.

No camera for the iPod Touch and, more significantly, no 2x the speed upgrade either like the iPhone received earlier this year. Instead the iPod continues to labour with a cpu architecture now three years old. Less than ideal for a supposed gaming platform and supposed wunderkind pocket web computer.

And as for any kind of augmented reality applications or fun games incorporating realtime video or picture taking, you can forget about those too.

Why would apple miss this boat?

Well my guess is that it’s not intentional. Look no further than the huge backlog on iPhone3GS deliver. As an anecdote, my girlfriend Michele ordered hers online back in July and it has yet to show up. Sounds to me like apple is continuing to suffer some serious manufacturing or chip-yield issues, my guess with the cpu or one of the other key logicboard chips like the graphics chip that both the 3GS and any would-be 3-series iPod would be built off of.

It’s not uncommon for a new chip or a chip built on a new silicon process to have yield (number of working chips per wafer) or binsplits (number of usable chips that will run at the desired speed/power requirements). And the new ARM 11 cpu and the new GPU are both new chips AND being fabbed on a new smaller silicon process.

If they are having yield problems it makes sense that the already launched 3GS is eating up all the chips that Apple can get their hands on.

It’s hard to believe that apple would have intentionally let the 3GS shortages carry on this long and it looks like an upgraded iPod touch is a casualty of Apples struggles to ship enough iphones.

UPDATE: correction – the two more expensive versions of the iTouch do have the new processor. perhaps the problem could be related to rumored issues with the camera module itself?

commented:

“I bought Robocop last night and was excited to watch it when all of the sudden iTunes crashed and poof, no ‘Robocop’ when I reopened iTunes. I guess I could call Apple and get a second chance to download it but at this point I’m too depressed.”

“DRM just makes the whole “rules” thing so tedious.”

“I have a Mac Mini essentially working as an AppleTV. Being locked out of HD content because it is not an actual AppleTV is rather annoying.”

“My head is spinning… back to BitTorrent.”

“why can’t life be simpler?”

Oh it can, it could have been much, much simpler. What the music industry has figured out already: drm-free downloads that Just Work wherever and however we want to use them, I can has it RIGHT NOW from bittorrent, or I can be happy to buy it for a reasonable price straight from an online retailer I know and trust – if such a format was only for sale.

They may think they are, but the movie studios are not even competing with the downloaders yet.

The apple TV mark2, is the best product we’ve seen yet for protected digital video content. After it fails, the studios will finally go the way the music industry went.

sigh. the thing is basically an iphone with a keyboard stuck to it. But with less wireless.

11. It sure looks pretty though.

12. Maybe it’s worth it?

UPDATE:Anandtech has an excellent and very thorough review of the Mac Book Air, including the first truly objective benchmarks of the SSD harddrive option swapped in and out of the same notebook. If I could summarize the review for you, as you might have guessed:

The MBA is very good at what it does, there’s just a bunch of things that it doesn’t.

Scoble meanwhile notices “the smiles as people pick it up for the first time”

It just so happens unfortunately that I actually need a new portable, and, my trusty but rather ancient Nokia is in need of an upgrade (and, let’s be honest, it was in my hand last saturday but I haven’t seen it for a week).

However, if there’s one universal about macworld, it’s that for each Apple product that is any good, the pre-hype and over-frothing speculation is at LEAST twice as much, so maybe, in the end, my poor Visa come off only half so bad. What are the chances?

HOWEVER the one remaining pricing problem that Rogers could themselves get screwed with is the price of the device itself.

When we last looked, Apple’s stores in Canada still had not updated their Canadian prices to reflect parity with the US dollar. And since then that crazy looney has gone up again (hitting 1.08 today). Meaning apple kit that was 10-12% overpriced in Canada is now 20% overpriced and if you count that you might get away without paying GST if you pick one up south of the border… apple stuff is now about 25% too high in Canada. That’s nuts.

In the US, iPhones are 399. How ready are you to pay a hundred bucks extra in Canada?

^{(Of course a hundred bucks is just a hundred bucks, the situation is a lot worse if you were itching to buy a macbook pro, or 30″ cinema display or something – like DON’T)}

So a redesigned dock, maybe enough to finally get me off my butt and switch? maybe. But if “enhanced 3d reflections!” is the best productivity enhancement they can offer I’d be worried. Aren’t you getting tired of reflections?.

Reflections aren’t the only things that’s new however. Do the new stackable and fanabale “collections” remind you of anything? Poor Anand, some of Leopard is straight out the BumpTop’s demo sensation of 2006. This is the trouble of trying to build a company out of a set of cool features. Especially cool features that are also self-revealing to your would-be customers or competitors*.

*I’m going to assume royalties aren’t being involved here. Then again, has anyone seen this before BumpTop?

UPDATE: Given the recent strength in the Loonie has as much to do with a free-falling Dollar, you might imagine that Apple will be as apt to raise their US prices on future products rather than drop prices in Canada. So head south and bargain-shop while you can?

As Lars suggest, keep an eye on the greasy Big Mac to get a sense of how/if cross-border prices will converge.