By AppleInsider Staff

Published: 05:00 PM EST

30-inch Cinema receives a boost

Ars noted this afternoon that Apple has quietly enhanced the specifications of its high-end 30" HD Cinema Display.

The display's brightness, which was previously 270 cd/m2, is now listed at 400 cd/2. Meanwhile, its contrast ratio also appears to have been bumped from 400:1 to 700:1.

Pricing remains unchanged at $2500.

Apple expanding presence in Asia

Apple today launched eight products in the Indian market, expanding its offerings overseas.

During a press briefing, Yeo Eng Yiong, the company's product marketing manager for Asia Pacific, announced the roll out would include the 1GB iPod nano, iPod AV connection kit, iPod Hi-Fi, iLife '06, the Intel Core Duo iMac, Mac mini, iWork '06, and MacBook Pro.

The products -- which were unavailable to Indian customers until today -- are being offered through Apple's existing network of distributors and dealers in the region.

New Mac OS X 10.4.6 seeds

Apple continues this week to seed external pre-release builds of its upcoming Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" update at a relatively swift pace -- usually an indicator that a release is in the near term.

Just days after it gave developers Mac OS X 10.4.6 build 8I1116 (Intel) and Mac OS X 10.4.6 build 8I124 (PowerPC), the company has seeded Mac OS X 10.4.6 build 8I1119 (Intel) & Mac OS X build 8I127 (PowerPC), tipsters and bloggers are reporting.

In these latest seeds, developers are reportedly asked to test Quartz- and ImageIO-based applications. No known issues are were reported to developers.

Apple joins BAPCo

Apple has reportedly joined BAPCo, the industry-standard Windows benchmarking consortium.

BAPCo is responsible for the SYSmark 2004SE and MobileMark benchmark suites used by media outlets, corporations, and government agencies worldwide.
 
The consortium's existing members include the likes of AMD, Intel, Transmeta, ATI, nVidia, Microsoft, Ziff Davis Media, CNET, Dell, HP, Toshiba, Seagate, VNU, Atheros, and ARCintuition.

The move is reportedly significant in that it indicates Apple is interested in Windows-based performance testing... Readers are free to speculate about the significance of this tidbit in the AppleInsider Forums.