November 6th, 2003
No Media Center Macs
Many people are surprised by this, but I have to agree with Jobs, there’s little market for media-center PCs, outside of dorm rooms and cramped manhattan apartments — both of which are awash in activities far more immersive than watching taped sitcoms on a 17″ LCD.
The truth, for Apple at least, is not so much whether an iMediaPC would be cool, it’s whether it would make $$. Consider the Gateway with the streaming media functions — it’s $200, people. Apple can’t beat that.
The point being that it is extremely easy to design new circuit boards and pop chips on them. And upgrading functionality through firm/software (read: Linux) is easy too.
It’s becoming clear that the PC, though still necessary as a central management/storage device, is actually too complicated for most media applications. An entertainment center is ruled by the remote — if you can’t fit your interface on it, forget it.