Kaleidoscope
We may not have the Xbox 360's awesome home media center capabilities, but we may not even need them, if Apple rumor site Think Secret's speculation is correct. They're claiming that Apple will announce a new Mac mini-based home media center at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco this January. The new unit will be one of the first Intel-based Macs to be released, they say, and will be in a form factor similar to the existing mini but adding a built-in dock for the iPod. On the software side, it will include Apple's FrontRow software that's currently bundled with the iMac G5, and some as-yet-unseen digital video recording software that their "sources" call a "TiVo-killer."

The release of such a machine would make perfect sense for Apple, as just about everything they've done over the past year has led up to this — new iPod models, the Mac mini itself, positioning the new iMac as a media center, setting up iTunes to deliver video content. And end users have been making homebrew media centers out of the Mac mini ever since it was first released. As far as we can tell, the only reason Apple wouldn't announce a mini-based DVR is because it makes too much sense.

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After the Jump: killing TiVo and shooting hookers