I didn’t even know about today’s announcements from Apple until I saw a “hey, it’s starting” forum post somewhere. The cases and Hi-Fi are kind of underwhelming and are really just more expensive and underperforming accessories.
The new Mini is a bit more interesting to me though. I’ve been thinking of putting together a home theatre PC for a while now, and this Mini slides into that role fairly nicely. The only sticking point is that it still doesn’t have video capture built-in, so it wouldn’t entirely replace my MythTV server, but it could act as a front end to it. It’s also not clear if it’ll be quite powerful enough to decode HD video, but that’s more of a future concern and there are still a bunch of other unsolved problems surrounding HD anyway.
Then it’s just a question of whether a home theatre computer is worth the cost…
According to HD Beat, the Mac mini “is perfect for HDTV.”
It’s sounding like it should be able to handle it; people are reporting they could do full 1080i with other similar or even less powerful systems.
The integrated video supposedly also supports the HDCP that might be legally required (in the US, but it spills over to here since we get our parts from you) when HD-DVD and Blu-ray drives are released.
I’m not really worried about HD in the short term, since I don’t even have an HDTV and the HD content available here is extremely limited. But if I were to put together a home theatre PC in the near future, it would be nice if it’s already ready for it so I don’t have to replace it in a couple of years.
(Of course, being a lower priority, there’ll probably be two more iterations of the Mini out before I finally get around to it…)
MacDailyNews says it works but has to work really hard.