A Pilgrim’s Digression

Incredibly, it’s about as big as a matchbook and holds 1 gigabyte of music. The iPod Nano also got an update today, but the update is more retro than forward-looking. The addition of color to the iPod Nano line is reminiscent of the dearly departed iPod Mini of yesteryear.

In addition to the new iPods, Apple also announced a forthcoming product, called iTV, which would make it possible to play movies and TV shows downloaded from iTunes on your home entertainment system. Apple almost never previews a not-yet-available hardware product, so the iTV is probably going to command most of the attention from bloggers and Mac rumor sites.

MacDailyNews has photos of the iTV. It looks like a sleek DVR box, but from the description it is apparently not a DVR. No hard drive. No TV tuner. The box acts as an intermediary between your Mac and your TV and other home entertainment components, and as such seems kind of redundant.
The question becomes, are future Macs going to offer built in TV tuning and recording capabilities, such as are available from current models of DVR? Will the Mac effectively become the DVR?

I have to admit it seems a bit clunky to have two devices, an iTV and a Mac, performing the same functions as one device currently, a Tivo or DVR. Maybe when the product is finally released, we will find that the iTV is closer to the Apple-brand DVR or media center than it now appears to be.