Apple have a worldwide press launch on the 12th, which is generally assumed to be for the new ITMS movie download service. However there are also rumours that a video streaming device is to be launched to further (jump start?) their inroads into the living room.

Any good conjecture?

Rob

A gratuitous summary of what I've seen on rumor web sites:

- 23" iMac
- all iMacs upgraded with Core 2 Duo ("Merom") processors
- next-gen iPod Nano with colored aluminum skins (as in the earlier iPod Mini)
- bigger hard disks in 5G iPod Video
- some kind of video streaming variant on the AirPort Extreme

Notably missing from the rumors:

- Some kind of larger-screened video iPod, perhaps more suitable for movie watching
- Upgrades to the Mac Mini

That last point annoys me, because I've been planning to replace my aging G4 tower (dual 1GHz) with a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini. Hopefully, such a beast will be announced along with the upgraded iMac line. (I've already got a perfectly froody large LCD screen, so there's no point in spending the bucks for an iMac, plus the long-term plan is to press the Mac Mini into home theater duties.)

I have, and still use, a 2nd-generation iPod (20GB, purchased before the Rio portables were announced). I have to remember to charge it up before every time I might use it, since it suffers from the bad battery syndrome that resulted in a class action lawsuit against Apple and for which I got a $50 coupon toward the Apple store as part of the settlement. I expect the next-gen iPod Nano will make a fine replacement.

The video-streaming AirPort Extreme, if true, represents an interesting point in the design space. Maybe it will run a snazzified version of Apple's FrontRow. For bandwidth control, it will have to do the video decompression internally, but an interesting question is how it will deal with GUIs from the computer. I would guess they'd go for something simple and dumb like VNC. If they did that, it would have the potential to be very extensible, yet still quite cheap (not entirely unlike the design of the Slim Devices Squeezebox).

This leads to an interesting decision I'll need to make. I presently have an Infrant RAID box with 4x250GB of storage. I started ripping my DVD collection (uncompressed) and promptly filled it up, with many DVDs left to go. I could pursue a variety of different strategies going forward...
1) Buy 4x500GB or 4x750GB disks to replace the 4x250GB disks. Is there any resale value for Seagate 250GB SATA disks?
2) Sell the whole RAID box, disks and all, and buy a bigger RAID box.
3) Sell the whole RAID box and get a MacPro, loaded with big disks.

Options #1 and #2 work with the assumption of a Mac Mini as the home theater device, and NFS as the protocol for talking to the storage. Option #3 would be much faster, of course, but this depends on the alleged AirPort Extreme replacement being reasonable and sufficiently general. Can remotely display arbitrary Mac apps or can it only run some FrontRow variant?

Also notably missing are any laptop upgrades (Core 2 Duo + MacPro = competitive laptop) or the mythical Apple pen tablet, which is probably even less likely than the full-screen video iPod.

My guess is for the upgraded MacBook Pros. I won't say much on the subject, but anyone who knows where I *used* to work should be able to guess why I suspect this...

But I also hope we see new iPod nano models (as I need to buy one for my girlfriend - her birthday was this past Saturday and I bought her an Nike+iPod sport kit and told her the iPod nano would be coming after i'd confirmed rumors of a new model)

Digression: how hard is it to shoehorn the sensor into a non-Nike shoe? I'd be tempted to get this, but Nike shoes don't fit me...

Better yet, go buy yourself a pair of Roos.

If they don't do new MacBook Pro models on the 12th, it may be what they'll do later in the month at Photokina - perhaps with Aperture 2.0? I don't have any information regarding event/announcement plans of course, so that much is just specilation based on the announced dates coinciding with other information.

Okay, now we have a 24" iMac, and all iMacs have Core 2 Duos ("Merom"). Lovely. All Mac Minis are now Core Duo (the original) and not even the fastest ones. Very annoying. This means the Sept. 12 announcement is almost certainly all about the iPod and/or new laptops.

The speedbump to the minis was a very simple procedure for them. Just a chip swap. I'm almost certain you won't see something significantly better until their new revisions come out. And that could very well have something to do with heat and a desire for a more impactful update (which takes more time). The minis were but a footnote by comparison to the iMacs. I'd expect more on the mini front by January.

I'll be in Cupertino for the event - a chance to see what these events are like from the other side at last!

On the downside, it also means that I miss the empeg meet (well, friday/saturday - fingers crossed they'll let me come home at the weekend so I can join in sunday in a very jetlagged way!)

Hugo

And the mill keeps churning.

iTV sounds cool. Everything else was as expected, down to the lack of the touchscreen iPod.

Matthew

I'd definitely get one if content could be purchased in the UK (or even if it could just play content acquired elsewhere).

Rob

iTunes can house all sorts of videos, not just ones you get from iTMS. So I don't see why it couldn't be used to play arbitrary videos. Of course, you might still have the issue of whether it can attach to your TV.

Nope, still not good enough for me to buy an iPod. Maybe they'll get me on the next gen. All they seem to be doing is adding new bits to the same box.

Cheers

Cris.

Yup - hyped-up nonsense [yawn]. They've not persuaded me yet.

I just ordered an 8GB iPod Nano to replace my ancient 2nd-gen iPod. I'm also going to try out the Nike+iPod running attachment to see how well that works. I wonder whether it will interfere with my heart rate monitor. Seems like a setting, in a bad scifi flick, for something to go horribly awry.

The iTV thing may be utterly brilliant or may just be useless crap. A lot of that depends on what it does and doesn't support. If it's got a VNC-style remote display protocol, then it could turn your TV into a full-blown remote terminal for your computer. The million-dollar question is whether Apple will have licensed HD content available for download and/or whether this thing will be useful as a remote DVD player. Imagine if Apple supported DVD ripping / compression and managed to keep the DVD menus intact. That would be a hell of a winner, but it's probably held back as much by Hollywood politics as any technical issues. If we're lucky (or Apple's hardware people were sufficiently clever), then the protocols will be easy to reverse engineer and third-party hackers will add in all the necessary functionality.

Of course, you could just shell out the extra bucks for a Mac Mini, hook that into the home theater, and be done with it. (Which is what it looks like I'll be doing when I eventually get myself a shiny new flat panel...)

arg, the only black nano is the 8gb model

Interesting, how many years late is this:


Matthew