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Mac mini All About Movies?
bikerguy99 writes "Robert X. Cringely, who had a good nose for the Mac mini from the very beginning, has published another bit of his thoughts on PBS. This time he speculates that Mac mini is all about movies - his thoughts on the subject are quite logical and provide intriguing insights into Apple's interest in producing a cheap headless Mac in the first place."
That may not be how it's marketed, but why would they do that if such a store doesn't exist (yet)? If someone wanted to use the Mac mini as part of a home entertainment system, its size (and presumably low noise level, though I've never seen one in person) make it perfect for such an application.
Apple employee: They seem to want the mini to act like a video iPod
Jobs: But that's just stupid, the drive it's so tiny!
Apple employee: They think that once the movies are compressed for downloading in AVC that they'll be both high quality and small file size..
Jobs: Excellent, I'm a genius. We'll release in Spring, now sue think secret for springing the idea early, we don't want anyone copying our genius today.
It must be nice to be cringely. Just make a different totally random prediction every week, and you'll be hailed as a visionary because just by the law of averages at least some of your predictions will turn out to be true, sort of, eventually.
But one of the problems is a lack of HDTV tuner. You could get Elgato's EyeTV 500 to make your Mini Mac into an HD PVR but you're still lacking 5.1 digital audio. I don't know what you could do about that. If you're spending the $$$ to get an HDTV then you probably already have, or would want to get a nice 5.1 or 7.1 sound system. You wouldn't want to be stuck with stereo from you Mini Mac.
I'm not sure Cringely's HD movie service would catch on either. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it would be very successful. One thing is certain though, a lot of people are going to have a lot of fun and do some cool stuff with their Mini Macs.
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This is one of Cringely's less-original flights of fancy, (lots of people have been suspecting that iTMS could expand to movies for some time now), but also one that seems to me to be very on-target.
My mini arrived at my office via FedEx on Thrusday, and I've been setting it up for exactly the same purpose as almost everybody else I've heard from who's buying one: It's going into the media room.
A $300 digital tuner called the EyeTV gives me PVR features, and a $60 USB break-out box gives me DTS sound for DVD's. (The G4 solution can't quite do 1080i in full-screen mode, but I only need 720p anyway...) The DVI port is compatible with the wide-screen projector I'm planning on buying next month. In spite of the relatively light-weight video card, it plays World of Warcraft nearly as well as my AMD Frankenstein box with a 256 MB GeForce card.
So this thing is already serving up movies, TV, music, and games, and will be just about the only media device in the room (I might consider moving the X-Box into whatever room my old TV goes to.)
However, like many geeks, I also sometimes watch downloaded materials. I'm not as big on bootleg DivX's as some folks, but the occasional anime "fan-sub" has found its way onto my HD, and there's also plenty of legit stuff out there, such as "Red vs. Blue."
If it was possible to click on a movie or classic TV show in the iTMS, and download it as an MPEG2 stream for a reasonable price, even if it took overnight to get it, I would probably snap it up.
I passed on the DVD burner option for the mini. I figure I can get a better & faster double-density burner sometime down the road as an external firewire option. If this movies-on-demand feature of iTMS actually comes to pass, I might find myself buying a burner sooner rather than later.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
At least, that hard drive in there isn't. It's a 4200 RPM laptop drive.
Also, maybe it's just me, but doesn't 40 GB or 80 GB seem awfully small for the storage of feature-length HD video? We're talking what, 10-20 movies at best?
For there to be a true digital DVD library device, hard disk storage prices are going to have to come down to a fraction of what they are now. Time will provide this, but right now, it doesn't seem like the hardcore movie buffs -- who seem like the target market for something like a digital DVD library -- would be satisfied with the comparatively tiny amount of storage available in the 2.5" hard disk form factor. A Mini with an external terabyte of storage would be better, but that's going to more than double its price.
Maybe I'm just not getting it, but I really think Cringely missed the boat on this one.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
I suspect a lot of peoople who are recommending PC alternatives aren't paying for the OS or the S/W, if you DIY a system you pay way over the odds for these compared to what a reseller adds to a bundled price (eg Dell).
Then there is support, do you want to do this or would you like help with it.
Ease of use. If you want a Nix then the Mac is something you can use and the wife. Can't say that of many.
Then there is size. It seems pretty hard to beat on the size front.
The Dell for instance will be large and noisy in comparison.
Let me give you an idea of how quiet this little sucker is...
Most of the time when it's in operation, the fan does not appear to run at all, meaning it's as silent as a laptop.
By way of comparison, the eMac has a big, slow-turning fan (about 4" wide) in order to ensure fairly quiet operation. It's quieter than some of the amps in my music studio... When the fan on the mini does engage, it's actually somehow quieter than the massive fan on the eMac.
The loudest component on the whole darn thing is the DVD drive, which is far from the loudest drive I've heard, but still about what you would expect from a slot-loading computer drive.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Just look at the Accessories page, for the M-Audio-Transit AC3/DTS TOSlink adaptor.
And, it's also an input!
I was confused by that exclusion as well. But I really think they were just trying to make the box as cheaply as possible and realized most users would not need 5.1, so they could let it be a separate device.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Second, the movies have to be purchased ($10 per download, for example) and stored on the HDD. The HDD is either 40 or 80 GB, making it capable of storing anywhere from 20 to 60 movies. What the customer should do after the disk is full?
There are solutions to both problems, though. The bandwidth can be spread between users using BitTorrent, and the customer can be allowed to re-download the same movie at a later time, as long as he presents the same key to the web store.
But for an average user a DVD player and a DVD store and/or rental place work just as well, and with much less hassle. iTunes works because it is easy. But downloading of a movie is anything but easy, at least so far.
Possibly, though, Apple looks far ahead. But if they just wanted to set up a video distribution business they could have released some iFlicks software for Windows, this results in an instantaneous user base, no need to wait for anything built or sold, and they can have the video store running within days.
In case the sentence, "... he taught for several years at Stanford University..." leads anyone to believe that Cringely was on the Stanford faculty.
Cringely was a graduate student at Stanford, during which time, he TA'ed a few classes. He never finished graduate school. Since then he has claimed (and then retracted) that he had a Ph.D. and had been an Assistant Professor at Stanford. When confronted, with the truth, he first opined that he thought being a TA was the same as being an Assistant Professor, and then removed the Assistant Professor and Ph.D. bit from his official bio.
Caused more than a little stir in academic circles in 1998. Here's the link from the Stanford Daily online from 1998.
HDTV encoding is done at the source. If you have an HDTV tuner then what you get is the raw MPEG-2 stream that the station sends -- no need to encode. The camcorders do their own encoding right before they write down the stream, otherwise there would just be no space.
So you do not need a faster processor, just a bus and HD fast enough to get the stream. Playback of HDTV on the other hand may take some juice, but should be easily handled by most modern processors including the mini.
badness 10000
I wonder if you know that MHz means jack shit, especially when comparing across architectures as different as x86 and PowerPC. How can you hang out around Slashdot and not know about the megahertz myth? It's practically gospel. It also happens to be true.
However, I agree that the Mac mini would find it difficult to encode HD video in anything approaching realtime, not least because of its 4200 RPM laptop hard drive.
Now I'm as guilty as the rest, but has anyone stopped to consider that the mini is just a low-cost, small-footprint Mac aimed at potential switchers?
I suspect that deep down, we know that's all the mini is, but we're just trying to find some kind of rationalization for buying one. (I'll admit it: I've been wanting to get one to act as a dedicated server for my iTunes Library, a function I think it'd perform quite well.)
Reasons why Cringely is wrong:
... to me this is not even close to being a sufficient foundation to support his claims.
1. both models of the mac mini are currently shipping without support for either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Cringely glosses over this stating that the mini will exclusively be for delivering online HD content.
2. there is no IR/remote support on the mac mini, so no remote control. this is kind of a big and small deal at the same time. it would not have cost much for them to add support for this, yet it is a feature essential to media centers.
3. the current mac mini models are simply not powerful enough to decode HD video compressed with modern MPEG-4, WMA9-level codecs.
4. no component video out on the mini. Cringely once again glosses over this, stating that DVI is sufficient. while DVI does seem to generally work on DVI/HDMI and DVI/HDCP televisions, there are cases where it does not, and it is certainly not officially supported by most vendors. remember this is Apple, they're not going to push technologies that aren't officially supported. there is no evidence of HDMI/HDCP support on the mac mini.
A lot of these could be fixed in the future, with an "upgraded" mac mini. but i just don't think it adds up. the mini doesn't even look like a home theater component. Cringely seems to be basing his entire theory on the Quicktime trailers site being down for an evening
I do hope one day Apple releases a media center solution. They are one company who could really shake things up and bring some attention to the media center concept, which I am totally into after installing Xbox Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com) on my modded Xbox. I just don't see this happening anytime soon, and in particular not with the mac mini. I sure hope I'm wrong!
They pretty much had to make a product like this. You had mac cubes selling on ebay for four to five hundred dollars a piece. Obviously there was a pent up demand for a small, cheap mac with no monitor. It's actually the ideal home server.
Get a free Mac Mini
And the fact that you're part of yet another one of these sales schemes doesn't make a difference.
Uh huh. Sure thing dewd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"What real computers are currently on the market to compete with this? When my wife asks for the "cute little MAC", what PC can I buy instead?"
Out of curiosity, why wouldn't a Mac mini be a 'real computer'? If your wife (a 'real' computer user...?) can do what she wants on it, what's not 'real' about it? I mean, if she wants to play a bunch of games.. well okay. But.. is she a programmer? 3D artist maybe? What is a 'real computer'? Is it something where the keyboard only has a 1 and a 0?
"Derp de derp."
if by "crush" you mean it would have run anti-spy-ad-thing-a-jig daily as opposed to the mini. then yes. it would "crush" the mini.
Strange, I just ran a spyware checker on my sole XP machine for the first time in 3 months and didn't find anything but a few cookies.
Perhaps it is because I use decent browsers ?
The unofficial
1) I think it's premature to call out lack of support for blu-ray when there are hardly any players anywhere yet! I think Apple did announce support in Tiger. Already the Superdrive is BTO, probably a blu-ray drive could be added later as needed and become another BTO option.
2) There is IR support, Keyspan USB remote which is an IR remote with a USB/IR receiver. Works by default with iTunes and the movie player. Is linked to from Mac mini Accessories page in Apple store.
3) Check out the specs for Pixlet which lets you play back "movie quality frames" on a 1GHz G4. But really the video card in the mini is powerful enough to do the job for HDTV, you just need players than make use of it.
4) Could use S-Video, though most real video people would cringe. I agree that is the major stickling point, I am OK as I have a projector but I have also heard of problems connecting computers to HDTV sets with DVi inputs. Perhaps Tiger will help in this regard.
I think it's very usable now, but I tend to agree they may well release an updated version later with a little more bundling (like 5.1 built in instead of requiring a seperate adaptor).
Sorry I didn't include more links to things but I've already done a bunch of responses, check those for more links.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When will people stop referring to Apple computer company as "MAC"?
Not only does MAC not make the Mac Mini (Apple does), MAC is an acronym, not to be confused with Mac(intosh).
I don't know *why* this bothers me so much, but it does.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
"When my wife asks for the "cute little MAC", what PC can I buy instead?"
You're not planning to stay married for very long, are you? I know when my wife asks for something specific, it's generally not a good idea to go against her wishes and arrogantly substitute some other item.
#DeleteChrome
I'm also amused by the "what is it for" crowd.
I think it is aimed at exactly the sort of people who claim to know what it is for. It's a computer, so of course there are a bunch of things it could be used for, and the small form-factor gives you the all of the usual non-desktop options that SFF systems are used in. All of these people who are saying "it's for $foo" are really just projecting their own ideas, and will likely go out and buy one and use it for $foo. Those who are saying "oh wait, it can't actually be used for $foo, because it lacks $bar" will probably go out and buy one anyway, and buy the add-on required for $bar.
The "it's for $foo" people must be working out great for Apple, as free advertising. All of the pundits out there (including Cringely) are collectively declaring more uses for the Mac Mini than Apple's marketing department could ever dream up, and spreading the word more widely than Apple's advertising budget could ever afford.
Your rock of choice is this thing you mentioned called "AMD64." (No idea what that is. Never heard of it. I'm taking your word for it that it's a real thing.)
Never heard of AMD64? He's talking about the AMD chips (Athlon and Opteron) that are 100% compatible with x86 (think "Pentium") but are faster in just about every regard, no more expensive (sometimes cheaper), and also happen to run 64-bit code if you have any (think: more than 4 GB of RAM).
I'm sorry, but being excited about AMD64 is not a leet fanboy thing. They really are awesome processors, and they're beating the socks off of anything from Intel these days for the vast majority of high-end computing users.
What is a 'real computer'?
Real computers use punch-cards, you insensitive clod!
He never finished graduate school.
He has his masters degree (according to your link). Last time I checked that wasn't an undergrad degree.
But you're right to call him a sham. I still find him interesting and insightful, non-the-less. He's way better than Anchor Desk on ZDNet...
yeah they actually work most of the time. especially the high end audio cards you pointed out. Even the pci rme hammerfall pc cards work in the mac, just be change one jumper.
Pixlet is lossless, and the file sizes show it. It's meant for clips to be stored on the backend, as opposed to the delivery to consumers.
No, what Apple will deliver the content in is h.264, an open standard the allows HD at the same quality and the same bitrate as current codecs with normal-def.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server. The things people claim macs are good about have to do with intuitive gui, clean gui, conducive to productivity. These are not really important for servers.
What makes you say so? Imagine a small home network. It's quite obvious that in a home network, a silent machine running 24/7 might come handy - to share the printer among all home users, to share the internet connection via Airport/WiFi, to share the common iTunes Music Library for all the home users, to serve as a firewall for home network, to serve Apache to the outside world etc. Why do we rarely see setup like this in non-geeky households? Because it requires geeky skills on both Windows and Linux. That's why you think that servers don't need to be easy to setup and configure - because non-geeks don't even TRY. But if you use Mac Mini, you can setup all the services described above with a few clicks on intuitive icons ("Enable Web Sharing", "Enable Firewall", "Share iTunes Music Library", "Share Printer" etc). Plus - it's silent, so you don't need "server room" in your household, Mac Mini can provide all these services, like, anywhere you want. And just connect a keyboard/monitor whenever you want to change some services or configurations.
But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server.
Because there is far more to OS X than merely a pretty GUI. The entire underlying kernel is an excellent POSIX-compliant UNIX implementation, arguably better than Solaris. I've been using my PowerMac as a pseudo-media server for about a year now, and it's been rock solid and a pleasure to work with via ssh. With Linux I was frequently (sometimes constantly) having to fight with various installers, configuration management, etc. That is far less of an issue under OS X, and it has freed up my time to do other more intersting things.
Besides, even on a headless server you can access the GUI remotely. You want to see something strange, do a VNC connection to OS X via Solaris. :) There's something not quite right about seeing the dock inside of a Gnome window.
"Elgato had these devices out long before the mini, I think they just stumbled into a really successful market if they play the cards right."
Since I don't know this first hand, take it with a grain or two of salt. I read a report from the expo that Elgato plans to shut down production of the EyeTV 500 some time this spring. This is due to the dung infested legacy of retiring FCC chairman Michael Powell and his infernal Broadcast Flag. Since there is no practical way to implement it in a computer device, Elgato faces the prospect of selling an illegal device when the BF regulation goes into effect this summer. Rather than fight that battle it seems that Elgato will simply discontinue selling its HDTV device.
So the practical advice seems to be that you need to buy them before the feds make it illegal to sell them. The EFF has brought a lawsuit challenging the authority of the FCC to regulate the design of computer devices but who knows how soon that will provide a result or if it will be a favorable result.
> Of course, but the other half of my reason is that PPC is inferior in terms of price/performance and hardware compatibility.
What fucking hardware compatibility? Everything is USB or Firewire these days and you know what: You can put the same PCI and PCMCIA cards into PCs and Macs.
You might miss a software driver, but guess what: Linux isn't there, yet, either.
By the way: This comes from a former Linux user who had Debian installed exclusively on my iBook 2.2 (arguably best Linux-supported PPC laptop) for more than 18 month until finally I gave up and dumped Linux for Mac OS X. Never looked back.
Free Manning, jail Obama.