Apple's known for keeping secrets, though rumors about new MacBook SKUs soon to hit retail got out. Just a day after fellow blogger Tim Y. reported on a plausible product list hinting at the new models, the Cupertino-based company decided it was high time to make it official. The 2008 line of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops have been introduced, with specifications updated for the current mobile generation.

The US$ 1,500 Tesla computing powerhouse might not be a PC-only affair after all - not with the news we've just heard. It looks like NVIDIA is gearing up to compete in the Apple segment of the personal computing market, and their latest offering includes the next-generation of GPUs: the general purpose graphics processing units or GPGPUs for short. More on that at the full story.

Reports of new iMac lockups have been streaming within the Apple tech community lately, and speculations that the issue was software-based soon bloomed after Apple attempted to resolve the issues with a driver update. A recent report identified graphical artifacts as another symptom of the lockups and were reminiscent of defective or failing video graphics adapters.

This new find now mounts against collective speculations and points fingers at a totally different culprit - away from gripes at badly written drivers or Apple's Mac OS X Leopard. More at the full article.

Just in case you're having the same problem as Paynegwynn, whose WoW won't run its video recording feature properly on his Mac for some reason, then here's an explanation.

It turns out that there's some conflict between the video recording feature and a GPU bug. The folks at Blizzard have noted this already and it turns out that they've actually already disabled the option to record videos. Here is Blizz poster Tigerclaw's full explanation:

At present there is a bug in the driver software for that GPU which inhibits our video recording feature (in fact can lead to a crash) - so we disabled it for now on that hardware. However, once an updated driver is released for that machine which addresses that issue, we can post instructions on how to re-enable video recording on that configuration. It's not ideal but this is the best we can do given the bug that we ran into.

Though the solution implemented (meaning the disabling of the recording function) is rather off-putting, it really is the best thing they could do, given that the problem is hardware-based.

For those who have already gotten a new Mac Book Pro and have found the heat generated by the system a bit excessive, you may want to see this. A poster on the MacRumors forums Nikhsub took apart a week-old MacBook Pro after reading some news on the horrible application of the thermal paste on the units chips.

After opening the unit, he discovered that the GPU, CPU, and Northbridge were indeed overly slathered by thermal paste. For those who don't know the recommended amount, lets just say that a small pea-sized dab would be good enough for a processor chip. Check out the amount that was found on the unit that Nikhsub purchased.

   

He also found the heat pipe cooler heatsinks covered with thermal paste (third image). This shouldn't have been lathered with the stuff in the first place! So after cleaning up everything that needed to be cleaned and reapplying a thin coat of thermal paste, the unit was found to be running a full 20 degrees lower then before the clean up. Here are a few pics of the board and heatsinks cleaned up.

   

Nicksub may have done a cool job of cleaning his Mac Book Pro but if your system is running hot, you may want to have an Apple specialist open it up and check it out for you.

We're not one to pull the Apple fan's leg here, so we're just going to go out on a limb and say that we're kind of skeptical about this leakage. While the document itself actually highlights very interesting features of a possible phone, the name Apple Computer, Inc. hasn't been used for quite a while. Apple goes by Apple, Inc. now, as registered in NASDAQ (NASDAQ key: AAPL).

But in credibility of the document, there are a lot of interesting things that can be derived. First and foremost is the name Aloha OS X, which this document illustrates the architecture of. "Aloha" is a trademark by Apple in Hong Kong that has links to the iPhone that is under development. Let's get the other details from what we could derive from this so-called "confidential document" from "Apple Computer, Inc.":

• WebKit Module, Apple80211: surf, chat, e-mail features seems to be covered here
• Sync Services, Core Audio: music playing capabilities and music file syncing
• Core Video, Codecs: video playing capabilities, probable video recording capabilities
• GamesEmulator.app, OpenGL, GPU: if it's OpenGL 1.2, then games played on this puppy phone are "hawt"
• Onyx: "OMG" doesn't even begin to cover this part; next-gen mobile and VoIP services soon to come

The most interesting points are the GPU and the integration of Synaptics' next-generation mobile phone concept, called Onyx (not OnyX, although we could be mistaken and "Onyx" is a typo). These both highlight that the "device" is being ambitiously developed for the new age of telecommunications and mobile lifestyles.

But whether these features will actually make it to the iPhone by June 11 remains a mystery until the next official announcement. You could say that the document could be representing the Apple's iPhone after all. Imagine if Sony gets their hands on this document...

The people behind Joost, which has been formerly known as "The Venice Project", have just recently announced that a beta version of Joost for Mac Intel is now available.

Thanks to the work done by the Client team for the Windows version as well as the cross-platform power of Mozilla, Mac users can now enjoy a version of Joost that "looks very much like Joost for Windows, while behaving very much like a Mac application." The Joost FAQ notes, though, that while the application works fine under Bootcamp, it doesn't work under Parallels yet. Joost needs to access the GPU for some of its operations, and Parallels does not support that at the moment.

If you want to try it out for yourself, you can still sign up for beta testing by clicking on the "via" link below. Remember, the whole thing's still in beta, so be on the lookout for bugs. The devs are going to be giving out t-shirts to those who submit the best bug reports, so keep your eyes peeled.