Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners (Mac people) Has anyone looked into this?

Hmm... I suppose. We shall see. My understanding is also that the HDD is for caching content. But being that the box runs on an Intel proc, I would assume it's running a fairly current version of OS X. Which of course means that the possibilities are wide open. Everyone is trying to pry open the door to your living room. This is Apple's entree, so to speak. Something is brewing down the road with this little contraption. I guess I'm paying the plankowners fee to find out what it is.

Jeez, I almost forgot: The AppleTV allows connections for up to 5 computers at a time. And believe you me, for the most part my wife's taste and mine for music and movies couldn't be more different. I won't have to keep updating a master folder for my current solution. Intriguing? I think so. Heck, a friend could come in with a laptop with 802.11(x) and entertain for hours without any fuss NOR muss. How're them Apples?

And BTW, you think I won't be working on blasting an image of that piddly 40GB disk onto a 500GB monster the same day I open the box?

For the record I don't consider myself an Apple basher at all. I prefer it to my PC but just happen to not like a few things that apple does.

Word.

J

I'm not especially a "fan" of either, as in "fanboy." The "coolness" factor of Apple is of course hyperbole. The "Microsoft makes crappy software" is extreme in its own right. I tend to work at the command-line level at work most of the time, whether in Unix (HP-UX) or Cisco IOS. But at home I want to spend most of my time pointing and clicking at my leisure when using my confusers. So everything serves their purpose. Compu-politics holds no truck for me anymore. I started out as an MS "hater," considered Macs the computer for people to stupid to use a real machine, and was an open-source jihadist. Years of experience plus I suppose maturity has made me much more pragmatic. Whatever gets the job done is fine with me. Couldn't possible care less anymore about the rest. Plus, guess what? With a little trial and error you can make all the frickin things work together in perfect harmony, thereby maximizing the best traits of all of 'em. So the heck with it.

As far as the AppleTV goes, I guess I'm intrigued by where they intend to take it. All things being equal, I think they plan much bigger things for it than what is being promoted initially. And it could be huge. This is their foray into your living room, and you know they aren't going to stop at simply streaming/caching media from iTunes. Just watch. There are big things coming from the likes of Apple and Google and such. Big Media just doesn't have the imagination to move things forward. They think trying to apply a pre-Internet business model to post-Internet media is the way to go. So maybe I'm wasting my money, maybe not. Oh well. It's my money, call me a fool if you will.

I have to say that I am an Apple aficionado. I'd never ever change it for any sort of PC, PCs feature in my worst nightmares. Obviously, it's all very personal. I just had very bad experiences with documents vanishing & all things going wrong with PC, while there's been years of sheer pleasure with Mac. Some programms are pricey & I am positevely tired of new i-pod models showing up every half a year or so. However, I definately want an i-phone, it looks so gorgeous. I am bit afraid that it won't actually do all that they say or there might be some issues with screen.

Umm, let's see: x86 architecture? Check. PCI-Express bus? Check. SATA HDD? Check. USB 2.0? Check. 802.3 Ethernet? Check. 802.11(x) Wireless Ethernet? Check. So, to summarize: An Intel-based computer that uses non-proprietary industry standard hardware and protocols. Nope, sorry. You own a PC. You just happen to run MacOS on it.

I am not that tech-savvy, just judging from experience. Whatever is that that makes my Mac run smoothly is great. I just thotoughly enjoy Mac, that's it. I am not very much concerned with protocols and stuff & that's exactly what I love about Macs (Mac Os) - is that it enables you to work efficiently without ever bothering about how it actually works.

Not alot of mystery to it. Apple used to control the hardware used in Macs by using mostly proprietary architectures. And they were extremely careful about which software was allowed to run on Macs (they are still much more rigid than MS). So it was hard to kill one. That started changing with the original iMacs, which used standard, off the shelf components and architectures for the most part, thereby reducing costs greatly. Next, the original and VERY, VERY archaic and tired MacOS was replaced by the Unix-based OS X. This gave them an extremely flexible and lightweight base for their current system. Last, Apple switched from the IBM/Motorola Power architecture to the ubiquitous Intel x86 architecture. This allowed them to get the performance gains they wanted with the benefit of the economy of scale built into buying x86 chips. So the conversion to the PC platform is now complete. It's just that the platform is running OS X. Unless like me you are running OS X AN WinXP in a dual-boot format using Boot Camp (I actually haven't booted to XP on the Mini for quite awhile). When booted to XP, the process is complete. I am literally using a classic "PC." Just happens that the hardware came from Apple.