TDL Live This week: (11/17-11/24)

We understand not everyone can watch TDL Live Monday nights at 9PM ET. So from time to time, we like to get you caught up on what you missed:

Also, straight from our secret vault, here are the show notes and links that made the show possible:

Apple to launch ‘aggressive’ Black Friday sale?
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=495
As Black Friday sales begin to leak on the Web, experts at Barclays Capital say they expect Apple to counter rival PC vendors’ promotions with a one-day sale more aggressive than usual, offering deep discounts on a number of Mac models.

Low cost notebooks top the list of the most heavily-discounted electronics items poised to dominate this year’s sales, with Dell planning to offer a $299 Linux model via its website

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USB 3.0 full specs promise 10X speed boost
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/11/17/usb.3.final.spec/

The USB 3.0 Promoter Group today revealed the full specifications for its namesake interface standard and so greenlit development of computer platforms and devices using the technology. The new peripheral format will now officially peak at 5Gbps, or about ten times faster than the 2.0 protocol. In actual tests, 25GB of data transfers in nearly 14 minutes over USB 2.0 but just 70 seconds over USB 3.0, significantly outpacing FireWire 800 as well as many hard drives.

FireWire isn't remaining static and should be upgraded to the S3200 standard ahead of USB 3.0 to provide about 3.2Gbps of bandwidth and similar power managementfeatures.

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LEGO Indiana Jones for Mac slated for November 28th
http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/11/17/lego.indy.jones.on.nov.28/
The Mac edition ofLEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures should be released on November 28th, conversion companyFeral Interactive has announced. The game is a port of a title already available for Windows and console systems,

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Eric Wilfrid is the new MacBU GM at Microsoft
http://www.officeformac.com/blog/New-MacBU-GM

Eric is a 14-year veteran of Microsoft's Mac team, having most recently worked as Product Unit Manager of the MacBU Silicon Valley team, based in Mountain View, CA. In that role I managed a team of engineers in developing Office for Mac and other MacBU products.

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Apple quietly discontinues the 23" Cinema Display
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/11/17/apple-quietly-discontinues-the-23-cinema-display
The discontinued status means that Apple is out of stock of the remaining new 23" Cinema Displays, and those waiting patiently to get their hands on the 24" LED Cinema Display have good reason to believe it should be coming any day now.

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Apple set to release Mac OS X 10.5.6 soon
http://www.macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/apple_set_to_release_mac_os_x_1056_soon/
The release of Mac OS X 10.5.6 could be just around the corner. The update is slated to deliver wide-ranging fixes to Apple's operating system," Stephen Withers reports for iTWire.

"Developer notes accompanying various seed versions of Mac OS X 10.5.6 have been leaked by Portuguese-language web site hmbt.org. Those purportedly accompanying build 9G38 say there are no known issues with the update," Withers reports. "While that does not guarantee that 10.5.6 will arrive in the next few days, it is a sign that the project is not far from completion unless some significant problems are found in the latest changes."
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iPhone: Has Google lost its voice?
http://apple20.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2008/11/15/iphone-has-google-lost-its-voice-search/
John Markoff’s story in the New York Timesabout Google (GOOG) bringing voice activation to the iPhone, letting you search for everything from pictures of the Golden Gate Bridge to the length of a giant squid just by talking into your phone.
Google was under the impression that the application would be live on the App Store on Friday (obviously, since they pushed all significant press attention to it). Sometime Friday they found out Apple wouldn’t be pushing it, despite the fact that Google submitted it for review earlier in the week and got a thumbs up for Friday. One source says they’ve had little direct contact with Apple during the review, instead getting their updates via the standard iPhone developer tool, which has said “in review” for the last few days.

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Obama faces BlackBerry and Apple laptop ban

http://apcmag.com/obama_faces_blackberry_and_apple_laptop_ban.htm

His campaign embraced Web 2.0 technologies. He’s promised to appoint a ‘chief technical officer’ for the USA and will broadcast his weekly Address to the Nation via YouTube.

But from the date of his inauguration on January 20th 2008, if not beforehand, President-elect Barrack Obama will have to part with his beloved BlackBerry smartphone and maybe Apple laptop.

Concerns over email security and the need for all presidential correspondence to be entered into an official record, and eventually be open to public perusal, are expected to trump Obama’s own enthusiasm for technology.

It’s a tough break for the Geek-in-Chief, who according to The Telegraph’s list of ‘50 things you might not know about Barack Obama’ admits his ‘worst habit is constantly checking his BlackBerry’. ).

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Apple flirting with another record quarter for Mac sales

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/11/17/apple_flirting_with_another_record_quarter_for_mac_sales.html

fter spending 25 hours counting sales of iPhones and Macs at Apple's US-based retail chain, investment bank Piper Jaffray said it believes the company this quarter could meet or beat last quarter's record 2.6 million Mac sales total while again selling more than 6 million iPhones.

The firm's checks reveal the Cupertino-based company is selling an average of 28 iPhone 3Gs per day through each of its retail stores, down from 95 units per day in July, immediately following the handset's launch.

While those results would suggest a stark decline in quarterly sales, analyst Gene Munster said expanded international availability, the upcoming holiday shopping season, and the addition of Best Buy as an authorized iPhone reseller in US should combined to offset any slowdown in sales at the company's stores.

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Flash and AIR coming to ARM, but not necessarily iPhone

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/11/17/flash-and-air-coming-to-arm-but-not-necessarily-iphone

At the Adobe 2008 MAX conference today, Adobe announced a partnership to bring Flash 10 and AIR to ARM processors that power, among many other devices, Apple's iPhones. While this marks some progress on answering complaints about poor Flash performance on the device, we don't think it's a good idea to start holding your breath for Flash (or especially AIR) on the iPhone. Yet, anyway.

As you probably remember, Flash hasn't had much luck in its quest for the iTunes App Store. While Adobe has practically begged Apple to allow one of its most profitable products onto the best-selling phone in the US, Steve Jobs ain't havin' it, publicly stating that Flash is too slow on the iPhone and Flash Lite is "not capable of being used with the web.

If you look at Adobe's news, it's really just an announcement of a forthcoming announcement, as Flash 10 and AIR won't arrive until the second half of 2009.

Could Education Sales Sputter?

In Tuesday's results call, it was nearly nothing but good news as Apple had arguably their best quarter ever when looking at revenue generated across the product lines. Steve Jobs joined the call, and briefly discussed some ways in which the economic downturn could affect Apple.

He said, and rightfully so, that Apple has some of the best customers in the world, and if times get tough, they are more likely to put off a new Mac purchase until the economic environment changes, rather than buy a competing product. For retail customers, that could be very true. But there's one major market for Apple in which the almighty dollar trumps brand loyalty: education.

Tim Cook reported in the call institutional education sales in the US were down 7%. They were also down 28% in California. In an otherwise stellar financial quarter, these numbers could point to future problems. If the economy sputters through several quarters of educational purchasing, districts will feel the pressure to either purchase lower-priced PCs, or hold off altogether. This makes it all the more frustrating that sources point to an impending discontinuation (but hopefully a revamp instead) of the Mac mini.

Apple can make as many computers out of a single piece of aluminum as they want, but it doesn't mean anything to the institutional education market. Districts don't want to spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on adapters to attach Apple's latest and greatest to existing monitors for example.

With the educational discounts gone from the iPod, and reduced on laptops, maybe this market isn't as important to Apple as it once was.