Apple has reportedly scrapped System Update 4.0 and shifted its soft-
ware development team on to System 7.5 Update 1.0. According to 
MacWEEK (Feb 27/95), the new operating system tuner will introduce 
the new MacOS logo on startup, feature performance improvements—
particularly to File Sharing—and fix a swarm of bugs. System 7.5 Update 
1.0 is expected to be available in April.

  
On February 13, Apple announced a US price reduction, ranging from 
14 percent to 17 percent, for notebooks in its PowerBook 500 series. 
Users should expect to see a new add campaign in print, television, 
radio and retail outlets carrying Apple products, along with a carrying 
case giveaway to the buyers of any PowerBook from February 15 
through March 31.

After a magnificent launch last May when the high 540c was in short supply, Apple now finds the top-of-the-line notebook isn’t moving quite so fast. The monochrome PowerBook 520 with 4MB of RAM and 160MB of hard disk capacity will now break the $2,000 US. level. At the upper end of the series, Apple's 540c 12/500 with 19.2k modem is now $4,999 (down 15% from $5,899). The popular 520c 12/320 with 19.2k modem dropped from $3,949 to $3,269. 

Apple is expected to ship PowerBooks based upon the PowerPC processor late this summer. PowerBook 500 daughtercard upgrades should be available at the same time. 

  Get ready to make earrings out of your 16MB SIMMs to match 
that 256k chip necklace you made out of used RAM from your 
previous Macintosh computers. In the February 20 edition of Mac-
WEEK, James Staten reported that Apple is changing over from 
72 pin SIMMs to 168 pin DIMMs (Dual Inline Memory Modules) for 
the new Power Macs due this summer. 

The new DIMMs, currently used in Sun and other high-end workstations, will use 64-bit dynamic RAM. An eight DIMM slot machine would be capable of providing up to one Gigabyte (1,000 Megabytes), of memory. Users are expected to be able to add one DIMM chip at a time in 4, 8, 16, 32, 64  and 128MB configurations. DIMM chips are not faster per se, but Apple will be able to implement memory interleaving (last seen on the 840AV) for a per- formance gain over standard SIMMs. Apple declined to comment on the MacWEEK story.

  
Apple and FujiFilm Microdevices have agreed to develop the FireWire 
(IEEEP1394) chip set for multimedia applications. FFM has licensed the 
FireWire technology to create products that utilize the high speed serial 
bus to make it practical to put a digital interface on consumer products like a camera. The FFM FireWire chip sets should make it easy to "hot plug" a camera into a printer, storage device, computer or other multimedia product.

According to an Apple press release, a user with a digital camera and a FireWire computer could download pictures from the camera into the computer for editing 500 times faster than currently available serial connections. FireWire enables high speed isochronous†, real time data transfers at more than 100Mbps and the "plug and play" addition of multimedia devices.
 
†Isochronous means equal, having uniform duration in time or recurring at regular intervals in time.

                                                                                                    Applebits compiled by