The MacMini HDTV revolution
Yesterday I was over talking with the team behind Retrevo, the consumer electronics search engine. — We all agreed that Apple TV sucks. More on that in a minute. — But we all notice a trend: hooking MacMinis up to your HTDV. I think it's a revolution.
Context & Ripple Effects
The living-room question has run all year: The Apple Blog opened 2007 asking which of Apple TV or the Mac mini belongs under your television, and by spring Wired found hackers dissecting the Apple TV to build the cheapest Mac ever — evidence that buyers wanted the full computer, not the appliance. AppleInsider even argued in March that the box was positioned to displace TiVo and Netflix.
Scobleizer's year-end take with the Retrevo team flips that framing: Apple TV 'sucks' as a product, while the quiet trend is people plugging Mac minis straight into their HDTVs. The syndicated pickup around Dave Winer's FlickrFan — pitched as turning the HDTV into an internet platform — shows the same thesis traveling beyond one blog: the TV screen is becoming a general-purpose computer display.
First-order effects
- Buyers deciding between Apple's $299 appliance and a full Mac mini now have prominent voices steering them to the mini, since OS X gives them the whole web and any codec rather than Apple TV's curated library.
- Retrevo, fresh off its November relaunch and AI-powered product-matching service, gains a timely use case: helping shoppers compare living-room Mac setups against set-top boxes.
Second-order effects
- Apple faces pressure on two fronts at once — either open the Apple TV platform or lean harder into positioning the Mac mini as the den machine, because its own customers are voting with HDMI cables.
- Software like FlickrFan targeting the big screen directly creates a new distribution surface for photo and video services that bypasses both cable boxes and Apple's storefront.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the living room splits into two camps — locked appliances versus general-purpose computers — forcing consumer electronics makers to decide whether the TV is a terminal or a PC peripheral.
- A Mac-driven HDTV weakens the traditional set-top box vendors' grip on the ten-foot interface, the same displacement AppleInsider projected onto TiVo and Netflix earlier in 2007.
The trend: Home entertainment is shifting from single-purpose set-top appliances toward general-purpose computers plugged into HDTVs, with Apple's own product line straddling both sides of that divide.