Apple getting into HT?

[rotel&energy]

http://www.avrev.com/news/0105/20.apple.html - NY Times via Audio Revolution.

I know Apple products do not garner anywhere near the amount of discussion Windows PCs do in this forum, but it does seem that they would be a good fit for HT. I own a powerbook and I'd love to see Apple head down the "media center" PC route.

[Andrew Pratt]

I think in the next year or two we will see a lot more PC's moving into more mainstream AV markets. It just makes sense to have a multifunction PC sitting in your rack if its quiet and easy to use. I actually see Linux being a base for a lot of the stuff we'll see as its cheap and stable but it'll be interesting to see what Apple comes out with

[aud19]

The biggest advantage I see apple having right now is their firewire support. As of right now there is no way to easily connect an XP PC to the firewire port of a STB and use the PC as an HD PVR, a big need in modern HT's IMO.

Let's hope the hardware and software catch up FAST in this regard for PC's

[Brandon B]

There are those theorizing that Apple may soon release a similar form factor box that sits on/under this thing with digital audio in/out, and some additional stuff to allow the machine to become a more credible media unit.

That'd be cool.

Either way, I may buy one of these this summe to replace my 6 year old blue&whie G3. I want one now even though I have zero need for it. Stinking Jobs reality distortion field.

BB

[JonMarsh]

Either way, I may buy one of these this summe to replace my 6 year old blue&whie G3. I want one now even though I have zero need for it. Stinking Jobs reality distortion field.

BB

Yeah, what he does is amazing, isn't it? I almost bought a NeXt box at one point, and I almost certainly wil buy one of these in the next few months. If I'd known it was coming, I might have held off on some other things at Xmas time.

I've looked at iBooks and PowerBooks, too, but the relatively high prices have held me back. This intrigues because I can carry it around and use it with whatever display I have available at home or work.

Of course, I'll have to get the higher capacity disk upgrade and memory expasnsion, plus the wireless, but maybe not the bluetooth, though I have some bluetooth stuff. Hmm...

[Brandon B]

Jon, inside rumors indicate Tiger (OS 10.4) will ship on systems at the end of March. Might be worth it to delay until then to save the $129 upgrade. That's sort of my plan.

I have a lovely NeXT computer swag T-shirt from an in-house demo at SAIC where I worked back when they'd sort of given up on the cube and were trying to ship pizza-box units instead. I wanted one too.

BB

[JonMarsh]

Thanks for the tip- it fits well with my possible timing, anyway.

Let's hear it for great ideas, even if they didn't commerically make it...

my favorite oddball computing experience is the OTHER disk drive I have for my Audio Test PC, an Athlon 600, running BeOS. I've got an old P3 system I keep telling myself I'm going to drop a 1.26 GHz Tualitin in, so I can run Be on it... or rather, Zeta, the new incarnation of BeOS.

[Brandon B]

Also saw an article that you can buy brand new Amiga motherboards to run the just released current Amiga OS.

Boy computers are hard to kill.

BB

[Brandon B]

Also, here are two links with some interesting (and plausible) speculation about the Mini being the video iPod everyone is wondering when will appear:

http://www.osviews.com/modules.php?o...ticle&sid=3320

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050120.html

BB

[Ten 99]

Wow, trips down memory lane. I can remember when the NeXT cubes were out, and I was a teenager. These were really cool at the time. Steve Jobb's babies, weren't they? I actually thought these were going to take off in a big way. Didn't happen.

Amigas. I actually owned a few of them. I had an Amiga 500 (first one I owned) that I bought mostly as a second computer (again as a teenager) because I really liked the OS. It was the only "real" OS at the time that could multi-task. At least not considering Unix. I really fell in love with it, and later sold it and my PC and purchased a 2000 which I did quite a few upgrades to. This carried me through my military career (4 years) in the USAF and the gulf war. This was in the midst of the '386 computers taking a big hold, and precursor to the '486 computers. During this same time, PCs stepped up and took big leaps in both the graphics and sound departments, where the Amiga had truly held a great edge until this time. This was also around the time when Doom, or was it another pre-cursor game came on big. At the time, I couldn't understand the reason so many people got into it. I thought it seemed pretty monotonous. Apparently, it caught on in a big way (1st person shooters).

Back to now.

Chris.