9to5 Staff

Next Media’s Chinese Language Taiwan Apple Daily today reports that New MacBook Pros are going into production this month.  The report says delays were due to short supplies of Intel’s Core iX series of laptop processors.  The new MacBooks had originally been scheduled to be released in March.  

The report also says that updated MacBook Airs will receive the Intel Core i3 series chips.

They list Quanta, Hon Hai, Hong-jun, Nikko, Chao Li as manufacturers.

Finally, the report states that new MacBook Pros will top out at 640GB Hard drives or 248GB SSDs and that battery life had been increased to eight hours. 

Apple holds its annual WWDC conference in June, which would make a great place for an introduction.

Update: There is some ambiguity as to whether the MacBook Pro will actually ship in April.  Even our Chinese readers are having a difficult time understanding the verbiage.  As near as we can tell the release will start in April but orders may not catch up to demand until June?

Word to word translation:
?new??notebook?though?than??before??expected??release??time??delay?about1??month??but4?April?start??supply?increase?quantity?[supply notebook or parts?]??????6?(Can see orders through June)

Thanks tipstar!

You can’t argue with these numbers:

Image:Engadget

Gene Munster was at the 5th Avenue Apple Store today counting customers, which he used to extrapolate an extremely high figure of iPad sales, according to the Loop.  600,000 ? 700,000 to be precise.  In one day.

That would be the highest estimate so far and would put Apple well on its way to selling my first year prediction of: ‘As many as they can make’ units.

First things first: The iPad is fast.  Web browsing is fast, games are fast, app switching is also fast, especially compared to the iPhone.  

But if you think there are some crazy specs under the hood, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise.  Doing a little coding, we’ve discovered that iPad apps only have access to 256MB of RAM and the processor thinks it is a single core (probably ARM Cortex A8) processor.

You can verify these results by building an app with the following code in Xcode: 

int getRamSize()
{
int     count ;
size_t  size=sizeof(count) ;

if (sysctlbyname(“hw.memsize”,&count,&size,NULL,0)) return 1;

return count;
}

The relatively small CPU requirements (first speculated by Ars’ Stokes) might also explain the iPad’s incredible battery life.  So how does Apple get applications to run so fast?  Thanks Thomas!

Updated: Clarification of physical RAM vs. accessible RAM.  Craig Hockenberry found similar RAM results.  (below)

When using sysctl() to query the amount of memory available to the iPhone OS, the following values are reported:

Again, it