PBS tech guru Robert Cringely is going around spreading rumors about an upcoming Apple upgrade. Here's the deal (best taken with two asprin and a grain of salt): Apple will add a chip that handles video decoding and encoding to all of its computers this year. The chip will be capable of proessing H.264 videos, meaning you can watch all of those videos downloaded from the iTunes store without putting any real strain on your CPU at all. The bigger story will be the chip's encoding power. Because with great power comes... great capability of recording television programs.
It'll cost Apple about $50 per device to add the new chip. But the chip could pay for itself in no time flat by ensuring that every Apple computer sold, from the Mac Mini to the high end Mac Pro will be able to handle all sorts of multimedia and video functions. And in a world where computers are increasingly used to consume, create, and upload videos to YouTube, that's a killer app.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-09-2007 @ 10:43PM
Ben said...
Whatever you call it when a columnist jumps the shark this guy has done it.
Just a few weeks ago he was trying to figure out why Apple didn't tell anyone what the hard drive was for in the Apple TV, yeah I guess he was under a rock for the past fews months when Apple told everyone it was for syncing content with iTunes.
In this post he goes on to ask why computers don't include hardward encoders/decoders and thinks it is to sell more computers. Ignoring the fact that most of the chips in the past have had limited codec support and since as long as the Internet has been around we have had 5 different video formats, decoding in software just makes sense.
While Apple might start including decoders in their computers since they really only care to support iTunes content, it isn't because current Mac's need the help, even the slowest Mini sold today can handle 1080p H.264 movies and still have enough juice left over for email.
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3-12-2007 @ 2:47PM
Jake said...
Um... hardware encoding/decoding does not a PVR make. Dude thinks that Apple will sink a bunch of money into H.264 chips, but that doesn't mean a think with regard to PVR. You still need a tuner and an app to manage recordings. So this "rumor" is a non-starter on the PVR front. If anything this is an upgrade that will influence the (already Mac fanatic) home video processing crowd, as built in h.264 hardware will make video processing wicked fast (way faster than a quad-core Intel could muster).
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