Okay, I've been googling for a few minutes now trying to find out how OpenCL is supposedly better than DirectX Compute. All I can find are claims by those involved with OpenCL claiming their product is better and that Microsoft's is "more complicated" and its "part of the graphics pipeline" while Microsoft claims the opposite.

Also, CUDA is supported by all GeForce 8 GPUs and above. The GeForce 9400M in current Macs running Windows can take full advantage of CUDA, and thanks to recent driver updates, the 9400M and GPUs with less than 32 stream processors can now be used for video encoding along with everything else CUDA they were previously capable of. CUDA is also used in all sorts of applications. Everything from video encoding to advanced DVD upscaling.

How has Direct3D beat OpenGL? Well, do I need to explain? Market share for computer operating systems that support OpenGL only combine to make up roughly over 10% in the face of Microsoft's near 90% global market share. The Xbox360 is the most played console of all currently available consoles. Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices all run DirectX. According to nvidia and other sources, more gaming capable PCs are sold every year than all gaming console sales combined. DirectX 9 and PS 3.0 are behind the UI of the second most popular and most used OS currently available (Vista). All OpenGL portable devices (phones, media players, etc) combine to make up only single digit market share in overall cellphone sales every year. Of the two major OpenGL game consoles, one is in a very distant third place globally and in the largest most important gaming market with no hope of catching up, and the other one, despite being the top seller, is the least played.

Things like this article make me ashamed to be a Mac owner. Especially the comment about getting rid of Vista. Things like that show nothing but ignorance and are playing right into the hands of the fanboys.

In the end, Vista is a great OS. Its still doing things that OS X can't, like full bitstream decoding of video.

In all honesty, Snow Leopard is a service pack. OpenCL? CUDA has been available for all platforms for years now and has some pretty decent support. Plus Windows 7 will have DirectX Compute. A little over 10 years ago OpenGL went up against DirectX. Remember which one won? Yeah, same thing will happen this time around too.

Grand Central? Windows had proper support for dual core processors years ago. Let's not forget that Windows actually had SMP support before Mac OS did back in the 90s.

"Hardware accelerated video playback"? Yeah, welcome to the 90s Apple. Windows offers full bitstream decoding for any video codec supported by your GPU. OS X, on the other hand, has HWMC and iDCT support for MPEG-2 and H.264 only. Everything else, including de-interlacing of DVD video, is done in software. On top of that, Apple is limiting this support to newer generation hardware even though plenty of older GPUs, like the 8600M GT, support it.

Let's not forget that Apple is intentionally limiting 64-bit kernel support as well. Which is incredibly ironic. Why? Well, my unibody MacBook came with drivers for 64-bit Windows. I can boot up and fully run, with no problems, 64-bit Windows (which has a fully 64-bit kernel and 64-bit drivers), yet it's basically been confirmed that the same MacBook won't boot with a 64-bit kernel. I'd also like to know why Apple limited the first round of 9400M systems (as well as the current plastic MacBook and Mac mini) to 4GB of RAM when the 9400M chipset supports 8GB.

It amazes me that Apple can get away with being so anti-consumer, and yet blogs like this praise Apple for their actions. Even Microsoft isn't as bad as Apple when it comes to control and being anti-consumer and forcing upgrades and coming up with BS reasons as to why older hardware that is perfectly capable of supporting new features won't get those new features and all of their competitors are adding those new features free of charge via software updates, yet Apple claims they have to charge for new updates! Yeah, run on sentence, I know.

The vast majority of receivers are audio and video receivers. You'd be hard pressed to find a receiver made within the last 3 years or so that didn't have multiple HDMI 1.3 inputs. Only low quality receivers wouldn't have had any.

In a proper setup, you'll run the HDMI cable from your HTPC, blu-ray player, game console, satellite receiver, etc. into the receiver. Then you'll run another HDMI cable from the receiver to the TV. The receiver grabs the audio and does its thing while sending the video untouched to the display. It's all digital, all the HDCP nonsense remains.

If you have 3 HDMI sources, you run those three into your receiver and still only need the one cable running out of the receiver because it works as a source switcher.

Yes, HDMI will still stream audio if the display is off. But if you're running a modern Windows based HTPC, why turn the display off? If you have a newer GPU, fire up Milkdrop 2 in Winamp ;)

Like I said, HDMI offers a lot more than just audio and video in one cable. Your TOSLink (optical) cable only supports 2 channel uncompressed LPCM and low quality lossy DTS and Dolby Digital. HDMI supports 8 channel uncompressed LPCM as well as lossless codecs like Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master HD. It also supports SACD and DVD-Audio. So theres a huge advantage audio wise. Like I said in another posting, don't forget that movie theaters mostly use Dolby Digital at 384Kbps, with a handful supporting DTS at 1.5Mbps. The vast majority of blu-ray discs sport either lossless audio or uncompressed audio. So with HDMI and blu-ray you're getting better audio than you would in a movie theater.

As for DisplayPort versus HDMI, DisplayPort only supports up to 2560x1600 60Hz 30bpp. HDMI 1.3 supports that resolution at 75Hz at 24bpp or 60Hz at 30bpp. HDMI 1.4 supports up to 4096x2169 at 24Hz, 36bpp. That would be the same as those theaters with digital projectors ;)

As balls pointed out, HDMI carries audio and video over one cable.

And its not just audio like your optical audio cable. Your optical cable (the SPDIF standard in general) is limited to 2 channel LPCM, as well as full-rate DTS and Dolby Digital.

HDMI is not only capable of carrying 2560x1600 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Definition_Multimedia_Interface#Version_Comparison (HDMI 1.3, finalized more than 3 years ago), but its also capable of carrying 8 channel uncompressed LPCM as well as the lossless codecs Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master HD.

As I stated before, the vast majority of movie theaters (theaters with digital projectors are the exception) use Dolby Digital at 384Kbps and some use DTS at 1.5Mbps. The vast majority of blu-ray discs offer considerably better audio than you get in your local movie theater, seeing as how they're packing a lossless audio track or completely uncompressed audio.

You obviously have no experience with using Windows Media Center on a HTPC either, bringing up the "it just works and won't crash" nonsense. But thats another argument for another day.

The fact of the matter is that Apple is the only company that refuses to adopt HDMI as a standard. Everyone else has been shipping it for years now. If Apple would switch to HDMI we could have a single cable that is still about the same size as mini DisplayPort that could drive the 30" Cinema Display without the need for a $100 adapter that doesn't work most of the time, and it could push full 8 channel uncompressed LPCM over the same cable. But instead, Apple chooses to use a standard that forces us to buy expensive, bulky, and overall inadequate adapters rendering our expensive computers less capable than systems costing much less money.

Until Apple adopts standards, brings OS X into the modern age and supports full bitstream decoding of video in hardware, and makes some software that looks and works as good as Media Center, Macs will fail miserably as HTPCs.

I'm sorry, but the Mac mini fails terribly as a HTPC. Why? No HDMI output. Without HDMI you have to have a mess of cables and adapters to connect it to a home theater system, and the old fashioned SPDIF audio standard can't bitstream anything better than full-rate DTS audio. Plus the mini-DisplayPort standard has severe handshaking issues with HDMI, so that can create all kinds of havok depending on the display you have.

Plus the lack of HDMI kills off the possibility of adding blu-ray. Sure, you can install Windows and get a blu-ray reader. But then you only get half the upgrade. You get the video quality but you don't get the audio quality. The vast majority of blu-ray discs have either a lossless format (Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master HD) or uncompressed PCM. Either one of those formats is better than whats used in theaters (which is typically the lower 384kbps Dolby Digital). And let's face it, iTunes "HD" rentals are terrible. You get that low quality 384kbps Dolby Digital audio (which is lower bitrate than the vast majority of DVDs even) and the video? Ugh. Most of the HD video on iTunes/Apple TV doesn't even look half as good as a properly upscaled DVD. The compression artifacting is out of this world. It's worse than cable HD.

If the Mac mini had HDMI you could at least install Windows and get blu-ray, as well as Media Center (sorry, but all versions of Media Center look better than Front Row and are far more capable), and access to all of the neat TV tuners on Windows that can take 1080i signals in over component cables, so you can still have DirecTV or FiOS and save on monthly DVR fees. And yes, Media Center can take full control of a DirecTV or FiOS (or cable if you like to torture yourself) box. I know because I have it set up that way right now.

The Mac mini would be near perfect as a HTPC if Apple would just stop screwing us over with their video standards and adopt real standards. HDMI 1.3 was approved in 2006 and not only can it push a 30" Cinema Display, but it has a mini-HDMI connector that is about the same size as the current mini-DisplayPort connector. Yes I'm a little bitter. I hate the fact that it only takes 1 cable to connect my PC to my TV but if I hook my unibody MacBook up, it takes 2 cables plus 2 adapters and I have to mess with the settings on my receiver to get it to take audio in from a different connector than the HDMI jack.

A couple of things bother me about this update. The first being the "in-app purchasing". As Gizmodo pointed out, this will bring out the worst in developers. They'll be inclined to release only half or even one quarter of an app and charge for the rest after purchase. Buy the first third of a game at $4.99, but to complete it you have to buy two more updates costing $4.99 each.

The second major thing, and most importantly, is the MMS support for the original iPhone. There is no technical reason the original iPhone cannot have MMS support. MMS is NOT part of the 3G spec. It was around well before 3G, and I can't even begin to count the number of people I know on T-Mobile and AT&T that have EDGE only phones that are MMS capable. I had phones years ago that were EDGE or GPRS that were MMS capable. This is clearly a move on Apple's part to get us to upgrade our perfectly functioning and perfectly capable hardware. In fact, the only thing the original iPhone can't do that the current iPhone 3G can is GPS, for obvious reasons. The Bluetooth chipset and "cellular antennae" in the original iPhone are perfectly capable of the new functionality. It's just a matter of Apple wanting people to buy new hardware.

Now if it wasn't for AT&T's awful coverage and the $30 a month mandatory data plan + $5 minimum for texting, maybe I would upgrade my original iPhone. But after a year and a half of being with AT&T and experiencing how their ads for "more bars in more places" borders on blatant false advertisement, I can't wait for my contract to end so I can be free.

Chris M, what you're describing sounds more like my experience with Tiger and Leopard over the last year and a half.

OS X likes to randomly crash every so often. Recently I went a full month without a crash! I was amazed! Then within the course of about 2 weeks I had 4 crashes. Sometimes it crashs at shutdown, sometimes it will crash at random times during random tasks.

All the while I have Vista running in its own partition thanks to Boot Camp and it has been running rock solid with absolutely no issues this entire year and a half. I also have a dedicated Vista PC and I have not had one single issue with it. Vista SP1 with driver updates runs faster than XP did on the same hardware.

So please don't spread your FUD. You make Apple owners look bad.

iTunes rentals? Why?

You know how much of a hassle it is for me to hook my MacBook up to my HDTV? First I have to get out my optical cable plus the mini-TOSlink adapter, get out the mini-DVI to VGA adapter, VGA cable, connect all the cables and adapters, and then if I don't want my MacBook's display to remain on, I have to close the lid, connect an external keyboard and mouse, wake it up, etc. Thats after downloading the movie (which only takes a few minutes, but still).

Netflix gives me DVDs. A DVD upscaled to 1080i with Dolby Digital sound beats the snot out of iTunes rentals. Plus Netflix gives a boatload of streaming movies and TV shows that look as good (or bad) as iTunes rentals. I can connect my PC to my HDTV with an HDMI cable and open up Media Center and stream all of those TV shows and movies from Media Center controlled by my Harmony remote.

Plus the cable company is giving me HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, all in HD, all of their SD channels, and all of their stuff on On Demand for $5 per month for the next year, as well as HD on Demand (1080i, 20Mbps, Dolby Digital 5.1 on all movies) for the same price as iTunes rentals.

No reason for me to buy an Apple TV when I have On Demand, $5 premiums, and a PC I can connect with an HDMI cable and no additional setup or cables needed.

Meant cheap phone* before anyone jumps on me for the typo.

Sticking with my current 4GB refurb iPhone that I got for $249 thanks to the original price drop.

Not upgrading and paying an extra $10 a month for 3G coverage I might or might not get.

After my contract is up I'll most likely switch to MetroPCS and a cheap for. $40 a month for unlimited talking and reasonable text messaging? Yes please. iPod touch if I still want/need the features the iPhone has.