I'm not a Mac person, but lately their hardware and prices have gotten appealing. I'm still scarred from my youth when I had a Mac+ and it wouldn't run all the games my friends could run.

The new Mac Minis came out Tuesday and they are a huge improvement over the previous versions. 1.5GHz dual-core for $600, it's a good price. The thing that I really want out of a Mac Mini, and that I expected to be released on Tuesday, is a Tivo/DVR/PVR like functionality. The new minis have FrontRow which is great for playing video, music and pictures.

But I need something that can pause live tv, rewind, record shows, etc. This software is fairly trivial and the mac mini is now strong enough to support live encoding/decoding of video streams. It even has that cool remote. But I think the reason they didn't include this software is because Apple will buy TiVo for its software and bundle it with the newer mac minis that come out later.

This would be a pretty good match as they would have an even better delivery platform for iTunes video.

As soon as the Mac Mini comes out with PVR or DVR tech, I'm buying one (with or without TiVo). There's got to be a huge market for $500ish boxen with PVR capability and no monthly fee. If Apple bought TiVo, they could clean up their software, DRM nightmare that prevents you from doing anything other than watching tv on it.