No Wirless-N for Intel Imac Core Duo!?

[talkingmonkey]

I just called and talked to an Apple Rep from the Apple store in Novi, Michigan. She told me that there will be no way to upgrade my 1 year old Intel Imac with Core Duo to the wireless-N by hardware or software upgrade. I pre-ordered an Apple TV and was hoping to get a wireless-N router to get everything up to max speed but I guess that won't happen. I am at wireless-G right now. Does anyone know if this will be a big deal performance wise for streaming video from my imac to my Apple TV or should I just not worry about it. Thanks.

[tilman]

...I pre-ordered an Apple TV and was hoping to get a wireless-N router to get everything up to max speed but I guess that won't happen. I am at wireless-G right now. Does anyone know if this will be a big deal performance wise for streaming video from my imac to my Apple TV or should I just not worry about it. Thanks.

It's hard to tell until Apple TV starts shipping, and people experiment with it. In the worst case, you will have to find a way to run an Ethernet cable from your iMac to the router.

[speakerwizard]

yourll have to sync the appletv to your mac wirelessly rather than stream in real time, all this means is doing it a bit before you want to watch the video on the tv, appletv has a hd for this reason

[Krevnik]

yourll have to sync the appletv to your mac wirelessly rather than stream in real time, all this means is doing it a bit before you want to watch the video on the tv, appletv has a hd for this reason

I doubt this... video that you get from iTunes' store tends to max out at under 2Mbps, and I haven't ripped anything that exceeds 2.5Mbps. An HD stream at 720p (the highest rez that the :apple:TV supports) can easily peak out at about 6Mbps without introducing noticable artifacts.

802.11g is 54Mbps (theoretical), and 30Mbps (realistic). Apple TV should have no problem streaming video over a G network.

[plinden]

The Apple rep I spoke to at MWSF (a senior engineer I was directed to when I asked about N vs G) told me you would definitely notice a drop in quality when using wireless G.

This did indeed surprise me since I can stream video from my iMac to my wife's MacBook without any noticeable issues. Looking at Activity Monitor, I see a max network transfer speed of 1MB/s, barely below max wireless b speed.

By the way, I hope you have at least an EDTV since standard definition TVs won't work.

[talkingmonkey]

The Apple rep I spoke to at MWSF (a senior engineer I was directed to when I asked about N vs G) told me you would definitely notice a drop in quality when using wireless G.

This did indeed surprise me since I can stream video from my iMac to my wife's MacBook without any noticeable issues. Looking at Activity Monitor, I see a max network transfer speed of 1MB/s, barely below max wireless b speed.

By the way, I hope you have at least an EDTV since standard definition TVs won't work.

Yes, I have a widescreen HD Plasma set up so no problem there. Just concerned about the video streaming issue. I had not considered the
Apple TV hard drive as a buffer for the video but that sounds logical to me.
I just got rid of a D-Link DSM-320 Media Player which was built on the G standard. I was never happy with the video streaming performance or file and thumbnail access with that machine. It always chocked when streaming any decent quality video. Oh course it didn't have a built in hard drive either. I'm hoping to see some improvement with the Apple TV so I guess I'll find out soon enough. Thanks.