Will the next Mac mini include an iPod Dock?
Leo Bodnar, the same intrepid soul who overclocked his
Mac mini, continued his sleuthwork and has uncovered an unused FireWire bus in the Ultra ATA-100 riser card that
connects the mini’s optical drive to the motherboard. What’s up with this vestigial FireWire connector? Leo thinks the
riser was designed to feed an iPod Dock connector built in to the top cover of the mini. Whether the feature was
originally built in and then dropped, or whether this foretells the advent of an iPod Dock-enabled Mac mini (or whether
this is all pure shinola, for that matter), is unknown. But considering that
not a single iPod now ships with a Dock as a standard
accessory, it sure would be mighty convenient if the next revision of the Mac mini arrives sporting an iPod Dock.
Next, imagine hooking your video iPod (since Steve
keeps adamantly poo-pooing it, it’s bound to happen) in to your Mac mini dock and sucking down the video content you’ve
just downloaded from the iMovies store. How cool
would that be?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
mrklaw said 5:13PM on 6-30-2005
Isn't the next ipod supposed to have a usb connector instead of firewire? Maybe they cancelled the dock because they are in the middle of changing connector formats.
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bryan said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
the current ipod doesnt have firewire, it has a dock connector which can be converted to firewire or USB 2. dont see any reason why apple would change that.
Reply
Small Paul said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
The controller chip on the iPod Shuffle has a FM tuner, apparently. That might be sweet. Can't see it happening, though - waaaaaay to much feature bloat for ol' Jobsy.
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