Definitely NOT the ultimate home theater PC. If you mean utimately small, perhaps. Which is neither good nor bad I suppose. It really depends on how you want to fit the system into your home theater and how you plan to arrange your storage. 120GB is not nearly enough for anything beyond a marginal interest in home theater/video. $1300? Everything except the extra 1.5GB of memory and larger disk comes standard in the new Mini at $799. It's a $500 premium for those two things? Wow.

Since the machine goes so well with the software I'm developing, I'll probably pick one up sooner or later - though I still wish they were a little cheaper. The lower end system is about the same price as the previous model once you factor in the new extras (WiFi & BT standard).

Too bad the onboard graphics suck soo bad. I mean, the ATI 9200 in the old model was nothing to cheer about, but this is not much of an upgrade (slower in a number of tests according to Apple in fact). With an X1600 in there the system would be a lot sweeter. Though even with the slower subsystem, it should be plenty of pixel power for video and audio playback, especially when much of the previous bottleneck was CPU-based video decoding power.

Get your HDs and memory from third party vendors if you don't mind cracking the case open yourself.

Bruno