Mac Media Center (MMC)

The new Mac Mini was announced recently by Apple, and I was sad to see the results. There are a few things that Apple could do to make Apple the absolute final, uber solution to my media center desires, and it's so painfully close that I was legitimately angry at them for not taking even more dollars.

Idea 1: Add a Blu Ray device to the Mac Mini. Yes, Blu Ray won the war over HD DVD, and Apple in fact endorsed it a long time ago! But sadly even the most recent Macs don't have Blu Ray. Steve Jobs calls adding Blu Ray to its lineup a "bag of hurt," which may have more to do with cost than anything else (is there anything else that could matter?), but the fact remains that people all around the world are still buying PS3 just to watch Blu Ray movies on their big TVs. I don't even own a single PS3 game, but I sure do have the device to play Blu Ray films.

Idea 2: Add HDMI to the Mac Mini. Even if I managed to buy an overpriced external Blu Ray player, I still am hitting an issue that my TV wants HDMI so badly, but the Apple won't give it up! Come on Apple, seriously, FAIL. It's like you don't want the Mac Mini to be a media server. What, Apple TV should be instead? Yeah right, it doesn't even have an optical device.

Idea 3: Provide a subscription-based rental service. I pay for NetFlix happily, but I want to live in a world where I can subscribe to movies and "rent them" through a download service. I select my movies from a list, prioritize them, and my device downloads the first three in order. When I have the movies I can transfer them to my iPhone or store them in some other portable format so I can take them with me on the road and watch on my laptop. I watch them, re-watch them, whatever, until I want to "return" the movie, at which point the computer deletes the movie and downloads another one. And I pay $20/month for this. No more optical media! Millions of dollars saved in postage. Why don't we live in this world?

There really needs to be a digital video format that can store a full DVD/Blu Ray as a single file that can be loaded and optionally DRM encoded to make the Hollywood idiots happy.

Apple could make this device, and all of my other devices (iPhone, MacBook Pro) could connect to this device as the central oracle of my media life.