Cringely's take re Apple this week: It is finally becoming clear just how the company is about to remake the music and movie businesses.
A Slashdot poster (it's in this week's links) purporting to be an Apple employee dropped a couple tidbits that fill-in the blanks for understanding Apple's still unannounced movie download service. The man or woman said that Apple would be fudging somewhat its definition of High Definition video to save bandwidth and required processing power, starting instead of 720p-24 with half-HD and anamorphic 720-by 486 (look in the links for what anamorphic means). Apple may well offer those sub-HD versions of HD, but from the music videos they are already starting to offer in HD I think they'll offer 720p and 1080i, too. Remember, the real market is download-and-play, not streaming.
The more interesting item in this Slashdot post, however, was the idea of Apple doing a video equivalent of its AirPort Express WiFi repeater that has audio output to link iTunes to your stereo system. This AirPort extension is the last piece needed for Apple's video service and answers a lot of questions. Why doesn't the Mac Mini have an optical audio port? Because the AirPort has one, instead. Why isn't the Mac Mini more powerful? Because it doesn't have to be. The Mini becomes a storage and downloading device and H.264 decoding is handled in the AirPort gizmo using one of the H.264 hardware decoder chips coming on the market for around $20.
So Apple takes over video and movies while Yahoo threatens with a low-priced music subscription service and Google threatens to take control of, well, everything.
And Microsoft? Microsoft kicks the dog.
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