“The rumor mills are abuzz about an Apple-branded digital video recorder. According to a couple of sources who claim to know, the next Mac Mini — that’s the small metallic computer that sells for $499 and up — will have the ability to record TV shows,” Arik Hesseldahl writes for BusinessWeek. “A DVR Mac wouldn’t exactly put Apple Computer on the cutting edge. Microsoft and its PC-making partners, including Hewlett-Packard and Gateway, have been down this road already with the Media Center PC. Chipmaking giant Intel grabbed headlines Nov. 30 with its Viiv (rhymes with ‘five’) technology that’s designed to transform the PC into a home entertainment hub.”
“Having built success on the audio front with the iPod family of products, Apple clearly has designs on the video-entertainment business, as the latest iPod already shows. But if the rumors are true, then I have a suggestion for how to make an Apple-branded DVR truly shine: Make it fully wireless,” Hesseldahl writes. “Ultrawideband (UWB) technology is good at transmitting a lot of data at a very high speed. It’s not very good at doing it over long distances, but within close range, it’s a gem… Imagine how much better the iPod would be if you didn’t need a dock or a USB cord to transfer songs to it: All you’d have to do is bring the iPod into the same room as the PC to sync the latest version of the playlist on your computer with the player. How cool would it be to easily and wirelessly take video stored on your PC in the den and play it on a TV in the living room? In both cases, the data could fly across your home without restrictions on where you have to place the hardware.”
Hesseldahl writes, “To say nothing of the aesthetic improvements that would result from eliminating the rat’s nest of data cords — USB, FireWire, and the bulky, clumsy hubs for each — which is only compounded by the cords connected to the power strip. I’ve got just such a mess under my desk at home, connecting my PowerMac, a couple of external storage drives, and a USB hub for my digital camera. It’s not pretty.”
Full article here.
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Related articles:
Analyst: Microsoft should be concerned about Apple’s rumored Mac mini DVR – November 30, 2005
Is Apple working on a DVR or not? – November 30, 2005
RUMOR: Apple preps ‘Kaleidoscope’ digital hub ‘TiVo-killer’ for January Macworld Expo debut – November 29, 2005
Apple’s brilliant, deceptively simple Front Row software has a bright future and raises questions – October 28, 2005
Misleading headline MDN…. tut. tut. You make it sound like the rumors are that it will have these techs, when it is just someone’s opinion that they should …
Forget ultrawideband! Automatic Mind Control is where it’s at.
Imagine if you could just think of a movie and it would fly across the house directly into your head.
“Dum & Dummer” anyone?
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You mean “Dreaming” ?
MDN must be desperate. Very misleading.
… and I’m getting so tired of these popup ads. They disappear immediately in Safari (after a flash), but aren’t blocked in FireFox. I don’t get it why MDN is so darn stubborn about this subject. Just lose them!
If you weren’t Dumb, that would be Dumb and Dumber.
i like the pop-up ads. i want more of them. and much bigger too. automatic fullscreen.
Semantics maybe.. but I read MDN’s headline as they meant it; ‘should be’ is not the same as ‘will be’ or ‘may be’. They said what it should be if it isn’t just a rumour!
hey gang,
without ads MDN does not exist. Just download the cookie that tells the ads to stop and they are gone.
Apple needs to make a decent display. I like this DVR idea because given the choice I would choose to buy an Apple product. BUT–is there any reason why Apple and Motorola cant make a blackberry type device?
i want one now.
already had elgato.
PRO MAC all the way
I read the headline’s “should” to mean “will probably.” I would change it to say “I wish it would.” I hereby cast my vote that the headline is misleading and that those responsible should be sacked. And then after the headline is changed, those who sacked those responsible should be sacked.
dab2 “without ads MDN does not exist. Just download the cookie that tells the ads to stop and they are gone.”
You are preaching to us that MDN needs for us to look at the ads and then you tell us a way to avoid them….what word am I looking for?….hypocrite????
Okay, so we all do what dab2 says and then no one sees the ad…so why doest mdn just save us all the trouble and don´t do it?
Also, I’d humbly submit that the author is a moron.
How is adding wireless support to the Mac mini going to fix this poor guy’s jumble of cables and power strips? Is he also hoping the Mac mini will feature wireless power as well as wireless data transmission, not only for itself but also for his cameras and external hard drives?
Here’s my abstract of the article: “I really wish there were no more cables any more and that Apple could magically change the physical characteristics of my unwieldy collection of devices.”
This is news? This web site should be renamed macdaydreams.com.
The problem is not ads, Randy. The problem is pop-up ads. It is simply untrue that without pop-up ads, macdailynews.com would not exist. In fact, they would probably double their readership as word gets around that the site doesn’t intentionally annoy its users any more.
Don’t forget that this site’s staff used to dishonestly claim that they didn’t know how the pop-ups were getting around Apple’s pop-up blocker. They know. If it were a feature of the pop-up software, then we’d get pop-ups on other sites too, not just macdailynews.com.
Sum Jung Gai,
So, you know the internals of MDN’s ad revenue? Please share. I don’t get any pop-up ads via MDN. I do get one pop-under ad per day, which I gladly accept. I’m sure they’d kill that form of advertising if it was meaningless to their bottom line.
MDN seems to be very transparent about what’s happening and how to opt-out if you wish here:
Safari’s and Firefox’s Pop-Up Blockers broken?
The DVR rumors are interesting. While I was really impressed with Front Row and the remote control (although it should have been Bluetooth!) on the iMac, they seem very misplaced. The iMac isn’t big enough to use as a TV screen in your living room, and since it doesn’t come with a TV tuner, it could take the place of one anyway. So if the computer sits in your office, why do you need a remote? These features would be much better on a living room based entertainment hub. DVR would have to be part of it. There’s no way it could succeed otherwise.
Well, I finally joined the 21st century and went HD, so unless this DVR supports HD, I won’t get too excited. (Is there any wireless technology that can handle that kind of bandwidth requirement?)
Am I spoiled? I don’t mean to appear ungrateful.
mud
I’m not sure where this guy gets his information from, but it seems to me who doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about…. which is typical.
As others have already posted, he is just writing a holiday wish list for Apple’s alleged new DVR.
I’m not sure how he has the balls to say Apple will use Ultra-wideband in its upcoming product line when the standard for UWB has not even been ratified. Most recently, there have been talks to merge UWB and 802.11n (NOT Pre-n). And for those wishing that Apple would pre-N WiFi technology into their products, well, if you don’t want compatbility with anything else out there, then go ahead and put it in. If you want compatability with all other “N” products and UWB products, Apple needs to wait until the standards are finalized by IEEE.
Intel does have chips for both 802.11n and UWB (they have submitted proposals for both technologies to IEEE) . Apple could leverage this from Intel, but they would be foolish to until the standards were completed.
Apple will probably sport some high-speed wireless networking technology, but they better hope that more progress is made in the standards bodies before January (or before the actual product is released).
And to Sum Jung Gai:
UWB is intended as a cable-replacement technology. In the MDN snippet of the article, the author says he would like to eliminate the “nest of data cords”. He does not say he wants to get rid of the power cords. UWB can replace all your USB, FW, VGA, etc. cables — granted, that will only apply if there are peripherals and products that also support and sport UWB.
Does anyone have this author’s email address? He’s a dumba$$.
They could make it completely wireless but then opening up the back and replacing the Duracells every other day could be equally annoying.
Why make it wireless? For streaming media, I prefer the reliability of good ‘ole Ethernet. It’s gonna need a bunch of wires for connection to cable, antenna, TV, etc. anyway. What is the point of messing about with ultra broadband wireless?
But what I really want from Apple is a media receiver – something that will allow me to move pictures, music and video from the G5 in the office to the entertainment center in the family room. Yes, I realize airport express can receive streams from iTunes, photos and video are only the next step. The ability to capture and record TV would be a nice bonus, but I’ll settle for taking an MPEG2 or MPEG4 stream and outputing component video. We should assume the content will come from iTunes.
And it’s gotta support HDTV. Who wants to look at photos on SDTV?
So basically I am asking for a box that takes IP streams over Ethernet in, HDTV and 5.1 sound out.
lame headline, agree with first post
Misleading headline. Anyway, my airspace is awash in signals already.
As for popups/popunders, I haven’t seen one in a long time. Those that used to get through a long time ago added a tab to my browser in the background which I immediately killed.