Speculation on Tuesday

[barryhf]

I'm betting on another device along the lines of the iPod--perhaps even another device built on the iPod platform.

A digital camera--even a digital camcorder--would be a nice extension of the concept. A digital camera with 5 gigs of hard drive space would hold 50,000 images at 100K/image. That's pretty good quality jpeg. Or 833 uncompressed 2MPixel images. Wow.

I like the idea (though it's not original to me) of a console device which communicates to the iMac via 802.11 (AirPort). You can easily stream high-quality audio at those bit rates. Then stream QuickTime audio channels or MP3's from the Mac (jukebox) to the stereo without having the Mac connected directly to the stereo.

If the system is wired (100Mbit ethernet), then you could also stream video. But we need more banwidth to stream DVD-quality video over the internet--we're not quite ready for QTTV.

I fully expect an announcement from Apple and Real unifying their data streaming formats to MPEG4 (though not necessarily next week). I'd really like to see that--let's start concentrating on the content and stop haggling over who owns the format.

just idle speculation...

Barry F.