ctrl.altered.mind

My brother Sankalp sent me this video of a home-made Mac Mini Portable, by Peter Green. A really impressive system with an 8″ TFT LCD screen, and a Li-ion battery that powers the setup for over 3 hours. Its also supposed to be lighter than a 15″ iBook. While the touchpad and tiny keyboard may not look too comfortable (I may be wrong), the design could most certainly be improved upon with a custom-built LCD panel.

The MMP: The Mac Mini Portable Project Video

Engadget had a post on the MMP on Feb 9, which I obviously missed.

I came across this 2001 video of Steve Jobs announcing the new iPod. Its interesting to see how Jobs’ presentations have evolved, but not changed; especially for me, since I’ve only been following His Stevieness’ keynote speeches since 2003. There’s one slip-up, however, with Jobs calling the MP3 format open. Its not. Give Ogg Vorbis a shot if you want to try a true open audio codec that hopefully some day, will give the MP3 format some tough competition. Why would you care? Well, it would bring down some of the costs of digital music licensing, and therefore content prices. More importantly, it would be a triumph for open source efforts.

(via Digg, the Cult of Mac blog)

While looking for TV solutions for the Mac, I learned that the only (popular) option to add a TV tuner is through third party hardware offered by Elgato Systems, ConvertX by Plextor, and the TV Mini ATSC by Miglia.

As far as Elgato’s hardware options are concerned, the USB-based EyeTV EZ is the most economical (at $149), while the FireWire-interfaced EyeTV 200 (priced at $329) is the way to go if you need really great quality. It’s also needed if your Mac has an entry-level processor, for the (USB) Eye TV relies on software encoding (as compared to hardware encoding on the EyeTV 200). There’s an EyeTV 500 option for HD content as well.

Elgato’s EyeTV 2 software (also sold separately) was a MacWorld Best of Show (2006) winner (news reviews).

Hope this helps, Sean

“Go ahead, just try to play Halo on a budget PC. Most say they’re good for 2D games only. That’s because an “integrated Intel graphics” chip steals power from the CPU and siphons off memory from system-level RAM. You’d have to buy an extra card to get the graphics performance of Mac mini, and some cheaper PCs don’t even have an open slot to let you add one.

So view your digital life at the highest resolution with Mac mini and the world’s most advanced graphical user interface.”

These were Apple’s exact words on the original Mac mini page. Guess what the new Intel Mac mini announced today has inside? The integrated Intel graphics chip! Well done.

See the original web archived page here.

Apple announced their new line of Intel processor-based Mac mini systems today, featuring the Intel Core Solo and Core Duo processors. Obviously, a big performance boost over the older G4 processors, but there are a couple of disadvantages in terms of graphics capabilities as well, in my opinion. The new systems have integrated video as compared to the G4 minis, which had dedicated 64MB of memory with decent Ati Radeon chipsets. Not sure how good the new chipset is going to be in comparison. However, the Core Duo mini is definitely a great system, with Front Row and the Apple Remote. Adding the ElGato TV tuner hardware and software would make the machine a true HTPC.

I’m not too impressed about the iPod Hi Fi boombox, but I understand there’s a big market for them. If you need a dock/stereo system, the iPod HiFi might be good addition. However, paying $350 for just the remote functionality is bizarre - everything else you can do with the standard dock and a half-decent stereo system.

I wonder why Apple stock (AAPL) fell 4 points today after the product announcements. The media probably got too worked up over the simple “fun, new products” announcement. Maybe Steve Jobs has great stuff lined up for the anticipated April 1 meet.