Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Monday, January 10, 2005
09:45 - Fake but accurate?	(top)
Following Damien Del Russo's line of reasoning, and these photos, which (if for real�big if) suggest that the new mini-Mac may be presented more as a set-top box�� la Windows Media Center�than as a standalone home computer, it seems to me that there's a pretty good case to be made for that type of product even if the photos are faked. I mean, this is what iTunes Music Sharing and iPhoto Sharing are all leading up toward, isn't it? A central computer in the house where you can pop open iPhoto, look over in the sidebar, and see every shared iPhoto album from every other Mac in the house�Dad's, Junior's, Kaytlyn's�and can browse through them and display them at full resolution on the HDTV in the living room so the whole family can sit on the couch and look? Isn't that worlds more useful than making people crowd around a computer monitor in someone's room? With a living-room computer sharing photos from all over the house, the historical usage suggestions of iPhoto (slideshows on your 17" monitor with music and funky crossfades and transitions; sharing photos from computer to computer) seem almost silly. And iTunes? Same thing: pop it open, and everyone's music collection shows up in the sidebar; the box is hooked up to the TV's stereo system, so you can use it as the central jukebox for playing any of the family members' music, after it's added as one of the five machines able to play purchased music from each of the family's iTunes accounts. Of course, to do this the box would have to come with AirPort built-in, which means it supersedes AirPort Express (though AE would still be useful for people who are already set up for music broadcasting from elsewhere in the house to the stereo, and who don't want the whole Media Center thing). That's a $100 part right there, and one that comparable Windows PCs don't come with; so there's your price competitiveness. There's the question of keyboard/mouse control, which you'd need in order to use this machine as a regular computer; the photos don't seem to show a keyboard or mouse in the box. Maybe they do expect people to be able to go out and buy Mac-compatible keyboards and mice at Fry's; I dunno. Either way, a set-top box would have to have a good universal remote that controlled both iTunes and iPhoto, as well as DVD functions. Not implausible, but it'll be interesting to see them pull it off. I don't know what kind of zero-config networking mechanisms Windows Media Center uses for sharing media from other computers, but it seems that any successful set-top box would have to have an infrastructure like the one Apple seems poised to deploy into any household right now, whether it's what will be unveiled tomorrow or not: a wireless-networked machine on the TV, gathering all the music and photos (and movies too, if iMovie 5 involves creation and sharing of a Movie Library for all your home videos, as now seems quite plausible now that I think about it) from all the computers in the house over the airwaves�without configuration�and outputting them to the living-room HDTV screen and stereo system. It seems blindingly obvious, squinted at the right way. Maybe even without the qualifier. And of course it works as a regular computer too, and I'm wondering how such a machine can be positioned as a "Home Media Center" and yet sell as a desktop computer for novices and a secondary "fashion" machine for PC geeks. I guess it wouldn't be too hard; even if the thing is packaged as a "Media Centre" (hey, we could be seeing the stock in the back of the Regent Street store in London), they could just slap a different name on the same box with the same specs and sell it as a beginner's PC. It's perfectly capable, if the numbers we've heard are accurate. So now I'm even more officially not making any predictions: I would be completely not surprised by the release tomorrow of a set-top Mac designed to be a combination music player, photo browser, DVD player, DVR (?), and wireless hub hooked to an HDTV and surround-sound stereo, and I would be equally unsurprised by the release tomorrow of a small desktop Mac designed to compete with the $500 Dells and gather the entry-level demographic. Either way seems like a solid business case, especially if they're not going to be selling it at a loss as Cringely predicts. This might well be a no-brainer with no downside for Apple. Which is one of those statements that I'll be looking back on in 2008 and laughing at ruefully, typing morosely on a Windows PC after Apple has disastrously gone out of business...