It’s been a while since I have sold off my PowerBook 15″ (almost a year!) and primarily been on a non-mac machine *gasp*. Don’t worry.. we still had a mac at home a new MacBook Pro that I got for Diane.
In anycase, I’ve been going through a delayed mac withdrawal of late and been trying to decide between two different scenario:
- Buy MacMini for now and upgrade to MacPro later. Convert MacMini to a dedicated media server for the TV (which we still need to pick up). There are projects like center stage that make this option very compelling. On top of that, I will end up with three potential xgrid nodes (including Diane’s MacBook Pro). Of course, the final cost is more this way.
- Wait for the new MacPro dual Quad model to come out and buy the AppleTV and MacPro together. AppleTV is turning out to be a very customizable (read Hackable) as being proven by number of people. It turns out AppleTV is a scaled down computer with a customized OS X driving it. Which means there is a possibility of turning it into an xgrid node as well. This will cost less but not as easily expandable like the MacMini Option.
I guess I have alot of additional thinking and waiting to do… darn it.. I hate waiting.
Friday, March 30th, 2007, 9:48 am | 
He Says | 
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4/2/2007 at 9:33 am
I have the former of your options (without the need for a future MacPro, but with a future MacBook Pro in the plans). And it’s my dedicated BitTorrent machine, sitting on top of a LaCie harddrive that’s my iTunes and movie server, and it’s great. I can Remote Login to the machine to use it and the TV then acts as the monitor, but that’s a double-edged sword, because it interrupts the full-screen viewing of whatever movie you’re in the middle of.
Of course, the Apple TV is great in all video hardware respects, but as a mini-machine, it only has 256MB of RAM. Not sure if that would affect you.
4/3/2007 at 1:43 pm
With all the hacks happening on the AppleTV, nothing stops one from running bittorrent client on the AppleTV as well as the cost benefits. I’m leaning towards AppleTV right now.