apple news/media reports
09/11/2006, 10:15pm, EDT
Monday, September 11th
Apple's "Showtime" event [images]
Apple's special "Showtime" special event on Tuesday will begin at 10 a.m. PT with the industry expecting Apple to launch its iTunes Movie Store with Disney as one of the few studios on board. On heels of new faster and larger iMacs and upgraded Mac minis, analysts believe that the event may be the beginning of Apple's new push into consumer electronics announcements, which will likely include the much-rumored iPhone, according to analysts and could include other ultra-portable mobile computing devices as noted by a recent multi-function device patent application. Update: The Apple store is offline ahead of the 10 am PT event.
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A media center. A mini with a very large SATA HD, Firewire for extra storage, software to store a DVD in MP4/AAC format on the drive so that users can have a movie jukebox like iTunes and the next generation of Front Row seem to be something people would pay for. Since TV is in a state of flux around the world with the transition from analog to digital and the further transition to HD, internal TV support would be a bad idea, but what's to stop Apple from having an external box that holds TV receiving circuitry and communicates via FW, like El Gato. Add that to Front Row and you've got a movie jukebox, tuner and PVR where you can easily change the tuner when you change your method of receiving tv.
Then again. Maybe Apple will wait until the TV market settles before releasing a true media center. I just find it real interesting that no one is even talking about it at all. It's all movie downloads and video iPods. They are all very obvious ideas. But what ever happened to all the people who were chanting for Apple to turn the mini into a media center?
They'd go USB, not Firewire, for external storage (Firewire is dead as an external drive interface). But, again, neither people nor Apple want external storage (how about a component size mini, which would give people enough room to add like 4 or more hard drives? Then it would also fit most people's media center.
DVD ripping will NOT exist in an apple product, because the studios would kill apple about it.
And Apple doesn't want you recording TV content. They want you BUYING IT!
But besides all of that, you're spot on!
BTW, if its ever released, how many rumor sites will be touting that they said it first, or state "As we first said here (back in 2001), Apple announced the iPhone..."
this is it.
Mind you, there are plenty of people out there willing to buy postage stamp-sized videos of TV shows from iTMS...
iPod refresh is what I'm looking for. My old 3G needs replacing.
One thing which everyone seems to be missing when mocking up designs for an iPhone is the question of where the sim card goes. I can't imagine Apple putting a wee flap/door on the device and there's no way it'd be pushed in beside the dock connector, so where will it go?
You can say exactly the same about CD-recording and free podcasts, iTunes will be much bigger and extremely important in the future but for now it's only for the iPod sales.