Children try out OLPC laptops in village in Kien Svay, Cambodia

The One Laptop Per Child Foundation have been around for a while (and a very worthy case it is too) however it looks like kids everywhere (the US – there is nowhere else is there) may be finding one of the green and white, MIT Media Labratory developed, kid-friendly, wind-up laptops under the tree this year according to Reuters. and at US$350-$525 I think some laptop and game console manufactures may be looking over their shoulders to get the license plate of the truck that hit them.

The wind-up laptop has some interesting specks too. An OS based on Red Hat’s Fedora Core 6 and lots of open source technology and nary a panoramic view or fruit in sight (software wise).

Poster at a News stand in San Francisco with the slogan “What's an Intel chip doing in a Mac? A whole lot more than it's ever done in a PC!”

Posters with this slogan have been blazoned across San Francisco since Steve Jobs made the big announcement on Tuesday, January 10, at 9 a.m. PST that Apple were shipping, as of this date, the new “iMac® featuring Mac OS® X running on the new Intel® Core™ Duo processor”. On this occasion I was lucky enough to be sitting, with the faithful, in the audience at Macworld (all be it in the spill-out room) with thanks to a scholarship received from the Apple University Consortium (AUC www.auc.edu.au). So what is an Intel chip doing in a Mac? Without getting too technical Apple were having a hard time making any new gains in computing speed or power with the chips they were previously using, so they made a strategic decision (which was announced twelve or so moths ago) to move to Intel based chips which are more commonly associated with the Windows platform.

The new iMac is reported to be twice as fast as its predecessor. Another new Mac with Intel inside, the MacBook Pro will be shipped in February. The replacement for the PowerBook G4 will purportedly be up to four times faster than the G4 and will have a built-in iSight camera. The MacBook Pro will also feature an ingenious power cable connector that is held in place magnetically and will leave go of the MacBook if the power cable is jerked so that tripping over the power cable or having the cat playing with it may no longer lead to the disaster it did in the past.

Other announcements at Macworld included new versions of their iWork and iLife software suites (iWork ‘06 and iLife ’06) and a new accessory for their current range of iPods the iPod Radio Remote. Not to be outdone Microsoft announced a formal commitment to Office on the Mac for the next five years.