control, shift, cheeseburger

Today’s Apple Special Event included:

The new iPod (again) announcement. The new one has no Firewire, at all, no I/O controller (you do all of the external controlling from the dock connector) and plays videos.

The iTunes Music store now includes TV shows in 320 x 240 (1/2 VGA resolution) for $1.99 a piece. No word on the selection, yet.

They have new media center software for OS X called front row (that comes with the iMac–more in a minute) that is feature rich and appears to blow the door handles off of Windows Media Center 2003.

Now, the new iMac G5, 17 or 20 inch, slimmer than last season’s, built-in iSite camera on both models, Front Row remote control that you stick to the iMac by magnet when not in use, and 128 MBs of dedicated VRAM on the new ATI x6 or XT chipset. $1,299 for the 17″ $1,699 for the 20″. 17″ is 1.9 GHz, 633 MHz frontside bus, 160 GB SATA hard drive, 20″ is 2.1 GHz, 700 MHz FSB, 250 GB SATA HD. The only drawback, no optical digital sound (SPDIF) output.

This is BEGGING as John Gruber sez to be coupled to a TV, and in fact I could see el Gato coupling their Eye TV product with this and using Front Row as the interface. I believe though, Apple will solve this themselves by building an iMac with a TV card in it eventually and doing it all there.

This is a no brainer, before I was going to get a G5 tower, but the low end is now gone, replaced by the iMac. You actually now get pretty good bang for the buck with an iMac, so that is where I am headed now.

Filed under: Hardware