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 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.