In science, we have a phrase for what your column: "overinterpreting the data".

But it's a nice story, and I hope it's true.

Your analysis is sound and factually based, but ...

In the nicest way possible, would this really be a significant enough 'product transition' to merit a comment from the CFO out of the blue on an earnings call?

1080p is the (short term) future of video, so eventually it will turn up in Apple products and bargain basement PC's. It's not a really a game changer or competitive advantage along the lines of the iPod.

If I had to guess, the answer will be a product transition from the hard drive based iPod classic/nanos to all flash based iTouch iPods.

No more Classic, no more Nano. iTouch iPods and iPhones only.

I for one would really like to be able to encode and burn a DVD of the movie I edited in minutes instead of the the 3-5 hours it takes me now on a 2Ghz PPC iMac. That would be somewhat compelling.

If true the people (like myself) who got all excited about making movies of their kids (in my case) kind of had the wind knocked out of their sails when you realize it takes several hours to render the fancy DVD menus let alone the video you just spent days editing. I now have stacks of DV tapes waiting to be edited and then DVDs created...

I think Apple would have to do it for a "bigger" reason. Something every one could imagine themselves doing. Like you say HD video iChat or streaming movie rentals....???

Tech pundits have to remind themselves, with Apple, 90% of the time it will be less groundbreaking than you imagine....

I can't really imagine a hardware codec presenting any long term advantage in the market for computers given that 99.9% of laptop buyer won't care.

On that note, I'll speculate that Apple will announce a subscription service for iTunes. Maybe it will cost more in initial lost music purchases but they project it will sell many more iPods as they steal all of Rhapsody and Napster's customers. I know I would buy an iPod if I could get a subscription service for it.

quote:
"...it makes good sense for Apple to put this H.264 hardware capability into... Mac Pro... MacBook Pros... MacBook, iMac, or Mac Mini,... " We'll see."

Why you didn't mention TV? It is "a hobby" but the one that will be the difference in video viewing.

I'm not sure how much of an edge this would bring to Apple. As companies like Hauppauge have been bringing realtime video encoding at the MPEG2 level to the PC for quite sometime. Media Center PCs of today require it and the abundance of Windows Media Center PCs prove that its sought after market. Bringing tighter compression wouldn't be trivial for the PC.

Hauppauge, or companies like it could easily bring the more advanced encoders/decoders to the PC (even through a USB dongle like they currently do with some models). This is only needed for the encoding portion as most PCs can already do the decoding (a less intensive CPU hog then encoding). And how many people will need the encoding? I'd like it for PVR/Video conferencing sure, but the real impact is the delivery method and thats where iTunes comes into play.

So this transition maybe more software then hardware. But if it is hardware, I'm not sure if it really is this $50 chip. Time will tell!

Couldn't it also have something to do with the full size ipod touch video phone?

Maybe the early adopters will jump on board, but after having paid money for a new digital television, I don't see where the mass market will be able to support this for a couple of years. Unless people are so darned sure that they want 1080p over the net and are willing to pay through the nose to get it, this move might be more than a little bit ahead of it's time.

Perhaps the product transition is simply Steve Jobes stepping down for health reasons.

Why not just put a high(er) end GPGPU into all Mac? Most if not all GPGPU can decode H.264 already. I'm sure with a bit of software it can do a pretty good job encoding too. With OpneCL coming next year, a hundred GPU can be really useful for a lot of thing. OTOH, a hardware encode/decoder can only do 2 things...

pH7

Ping...

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/10/does-the-new-ma.html