Brand: MacNews

An article in the Commercial Times of Taiwan notes that the country’s shipments of CD-RW drives are expected to come in at 10.6 million this year, with shipments expected to rise to 62 million drives in 2002. Lite-On Technology Corp., one of the country’s major CD-RW producers, says it will ship five million drives this year thanks in large part due to contracts with Apple and Gateway. Apple is currently using Sony CD-RW drives in its PowerMac G4s.

Handspring today reduced the price of its Visor Edge PDA in Japan by 7,000 yen (US$56.50) to 37,800 yen ($305). Meanwhile, the Prizm, Platinum, and Deluxe models all were reduced in price by 5,000 yen ($40). The price cuts make the Visor handhelds $50-$95 less expensive in Japan than the US.

AOL has posted Instant Messenger for Mac OS X 4.5.237, which adds buddy icons support and an account settings interface. Fans of instant messenger should also check out Fire, an application that supports several messaging services including AIM.

After announcing on Wednesday a US$232 million second-quarter operating loss, G4 processor supplier Motorola said Thursday it expects to post a loss of “several cents per share” in the third quarter, but should be “slightly profitable” in the fourth quarter. Analysts had been looking for a break-even third-quarter and an 11 cent per-share profit in the fourth-quarter. While the news at first glance appears to be bad, stock analysts took it as good news that things wouldn’t be worse.

Johnny CN Lee has posted VCD Player 1.5.1, an update to the application for easily playing VideoCD discs on a Mac. The new version adds a help screen. VCD Player is US$10 shareware.