Clive At Five said:
What?! There is no Hard Drive in there. There's absolutely no need and would complicate the equation indefinitely, especially concerning digital rights. It's likely only some sort of an iTunes-esque client that searches certain folders of your home network to find movies and music.
It's just a gateway with a GUI.
-Clive
*sigh*
I'll repeat the points I made just now slowly:
1. Nobody knows what's in the box. Nobody. You think you do. You don't.
1.1 Not even Apple knows, because they haven't finished it yet.
1.2 Anyone saying anything more than "I definitely know that it does this because this specific fact was mentioned at the keynote" is talking out of their Ars.technica.
1.3 If it wasn't announced, it isn't known.
1.4 Responding to a comment that suggests that the box looks too small for an HD with a exclaimative reply as if I'd just said it definitely had one is, frankly, ridiculous.
2. The box is small. It's been described as half the size of a Mac mini.
2.1 Therefore, as I just posted, I can see them as having difficulty fitting an HD in this box.
3. We don't know what else Apple is coming up with. There are a variety of possibilities:
3.1 Apple intends to put an HD in this machine so it can act like a hub. This is a possibility, but as I mentioned in point 2.1, it seems unlikely.
3.2 Apple intends to only allow it to be used with computers, as suggested by many critics posting here.
3.3 Apple intends to release more hardware, for example, a cheap, dedicated, home server box.
3.99 But all of these are possibilities, some more likely than others.
You don't know, and criticising it for doing/not doing any of these is premature
(In addition to the 3.x options described above, it's also possible that Apple intends to allow the box to be hooked up to a .Mac account, with everything streamed to it. I meant to mention it at the time and forgot)
As far as the comment about making it needlessly complex, no, putting an HD in the machine wouldn't make it more complex. For users who intend to use it with their existing networks, they can ignore the HD. For users who intend to use it as their sole media access point, it simplifies the situation as it means they don't have to set up a seperate server. In terms of the hardware, it strikes me as quite likely the machine will have some kind of storage, if only a limited amount of flash enough for buffering, storing settings, and containing the OS, so the hardware itself should not become any more complex though including an HD.
Let me repeat my main point though:
What we know so far are the minimum specs. We know it'll provide access to iTunes content, onto a TV, in full HD. We know that for some reason it has USB ports. It has full wireless and wireline networking access. It's half the size of a Mac mini. It certainly isn't a "Video Airport Express" as some suggest.
- Criticising it for needing to be used with a computer is premature. You don't know that.
- Criticising it for lacking storage is premature. You don't know that; even assuming it does there are multiple ways in which Apple can overcome that.
Not even Apple knows exactly what it will release next year. It has an idea. It has minimum specs. It's still under development if close to completion. The full story will come out when the device is released.
Right now, there's enough information for us to know that even the minimum that may be in the machine's a good thing.
Makes sense of the price also.
