Some of you may know that a little thing called the iPhone 3G is hitting stores at 8 AM on Friday. Like any good fanboy, I'm going to suck it up and camp out tomorrow night in front of an Apple store.

But it's for work - I swear! I'll be blogging, taking pictures and maybe some video live from the Stockton St. store in downtown San Francisco. More importantly, I'll also once again be leading a live VentureBeat FriendFeed room throughout the night (or until my batteries die).

So join me there or if you're around come say hello in person. And maybe bring me a spare battery.

The iPhone 3G is coming out on Friday. The 2.0 software and App Store will launch on the same day. There are a lot of cool apps out there, but one area is going largely overlooked: games.

The best looking one I've seen so far has to be Rolando. It reminds me a lot of the old classic, Lemmings, but it's all touch screen. If they get the controls right it's going to be awesome.

Rolando will hopefully be out in the App Store by August for $9.99.


Rolando for iPhone - Teaser trailer from handcircus on Vimeo.

A new Apple patent uncovered today indicates that Apple may be releasing a new kind of mouse to replace it's current Mighty Mouse - which, quite frankly, sucks. This one would use a touchpad in place of the scroll ball, which, in my opinion is absolutely the right thing to do.

A similar patent was uncovered last year, but this newer one seems much farther along.

This new mouse also sounds at least somewhat in line with prediction #9 for 2008:

9) Apple releases a new kind of mouse with multi-touch capabilities
We already know Apple is working on a ton of new products, many pertaining to mobile computing, but the desktop is still here to stay for a while, and the Mighty Mouse - in my opinion - still sucks. The new Apple desktop keyboards (which I just got) are very slick, they need a mouse to match it. 

While this patent doesn't seem to explicitly imply multi-touch, it does talk about touch, and everything Apple does these days with touch is multi-touch.

Interestingly enough there is also talk of the device having audio and haptic (tactile) feedback.

I still find it humorous that as fast as technology is moving in the 21st century, we're still using keyboards and mice to interact with computers. This is why I'm so excited for devices like Microsoft's Surface Computing and any Apple Touch Tablet/Mobile computing device that it's likely working on.

I know. Crazy, right? Before everyone collectively tells me at once "No!!!" Hear me out.

Lifehacker has a great how-to guide today for using a Windows Vista PC to stream Netflix Watch Now films to your Xbox 360. This is exactly something I want.

Regular readers may know my hatred of the multiple set top boxes I have in my living room. I want one, not a half dozen, but with me close to adding an Apple TV (or a Mac Mini) and a Netflix Roku box, I could be tangling myself in way more cables than I want.

This solution would replace the need for the Roku box because I already have the Xbox 360 and a computer capable of running Windows Vista (which supposedly is required for the task).

I currently have my Intel iMac dual booting Windows XP, but I haven't loaded it up in months. I scared to death that upgrading it to Vista will brick my system in someway (I'm not sure my copy of XP is exactly...legal), but it may be worth it to get this functionality.

I'm pretty sure I can get Windows Vista Home Premium (one of the 17 versions of Vista) for less than the price of the Roku box too.

Okay post your horror stories in the comments or on FriendFeed. Tell me why I should do it. It looks like even Intel won't upgrade to Vista. I'm scared, but this new idea intrigues me.

UPDATE: Some good info in the FriendFeed thread on this post here.

Since it first rolled out in late February I have loved the idea of iTunes doing a 99 cent Movie of the Week rental. I still don't love the regular rental store pricing ($2.99 - $3.99) for the time allowance (24-hours from when you start watching), but it's hard to argue with 99 cents.

Each Tuesday I open my iTunes software and wait with anticipation as the top banners in the movie section show what the Movie of the Week is. So you'll imagine my surprise when I opened it today to find that it was RoboCop -- a movie which was already the Movie of the Week, several weeks back. A re-run? Are you kidding me Apple?

I already rented RoboCop, I don't want to see it again. I understand that you don't have that many movies in your store, but you have more than enough so that you don't have to cycle through old ones after just a few weeks. What gives?

If you really want to evangelize RoboCop for some reason, you can do it, but offer a new alternative option as well for those loyal customers who have already seen it.

Think different Apple. As in, different movie.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting jazzed about the future of location aware services coming to our mobile devices. I know, I know, some have been out for a while, and it's old hat in some European and Asian countries, but here, this surge in activity seems to be completely driven by two upcoming products: the iPhone 3G and Google's Android platform.

Brightkite, Loopt, Whrrl, FireEagle - these all excite me. I had to do some research on another one Plazes, which Nokia bought today, and again, exciting stuff. If you haven't yet, watch the little demo video with the cutesy characters on their main page.

The service, still in closed beta, asks users to create and spread word on their activities throughout the day. Other people around them can then see these activities and can decide to be social -- as in the real kind, not the online social networking kind.

This seems to work exactly like Twitter, except that it has the location element built in to it. It's a pain in the ass to update your current location so your friends will know. I do it occasionally on the current non-GPS Brightkite iPhone app right now - it's tedious. If instead it automatically knew where I was and piped that data in (when I wanted it to of course), that would be brilliant.

Think about it for a local review service like Yelp as well. Imagine you're in a new town, or a new area of your town and don't know where to go, what to do - for food, entertainment, whatever. You could look it up right now on your phone, but what if your phone just automatically knew where you were, down to the street corner, and gave you places all around you with high ratings? Again, brilliant.

I know quite a few people are in the opposite boat. They worry about people knowing where they are at all times, but naturally these services are going to be opt-in only. If anyone ever found out that one was tracking you without your knowledge. The shit would hit the fan in a way we have perhaps never seen in so-called "web 2.0."

Maybe I'm naive, but the excitement of such possibilities overwhelms any fear I have. Bring on LBS.

It seems like more people that I talk to are finally getting the same feeling that I've had for a while: Amazon's MP3 store is kicking iTunes' ass. iTunes is of course still by far and away the industry leader, but I haven't bought a piece of music there in quite sometime and I can't see myself doing it until it is at least comparable to Amazon's service.

The iTunes store offers more convenience as it's contained within the iTunes music library software, but that's it. Amazon offers you entirely DRM free music that is high quality and cheaper to boot.

You want the new Coldplay album? It's a dollar cheaper on Amazon. How about the new Madonna single? 10 cents cheaper on Amazon. These things add up to real savings over the long haul.

Amazon has great promotional deals too. On Fridays it offers $5 albums and for the new Coldplay release, it gave away the bands previous albums for $2 on different days throughout the week.

iTunes is playing a dangerous game right now. It's coasting on its previous successes rather than being an industry leader. It hurts to be complacent. Rivals can sneak up on you no matter your market share. Just ask Microsoft, which had the browser wars on lock down just 4 years ago and now Firefox is zooming past a 20% share.

I'm sitting here staring at my home entertainment set up. What a mess. Cables and wires are everywhere. Heat and noise are pouring out of multiple boxes. It's digital hell.

I've got about five separate set-top boxes because they all do different things. Can't I just get one box that does them all?

Right now I have the following sitting in on my home entertainment center: An Xbox 360, a Wii, a cable box, a cable modem, an Apple Time Capsule -- and I still don't have everything I need. I have no DVR and no way to get my iTunes-bought movies to my TV. It looks like I'm going to have to add another two boxes. I shudder at the thought.

Yes, I'm leaning towards getting a Mac Mini with an Eye TV device to turn it into a DVR, but that is somewhat complicated. Certainly more complicated than getting an Apple TV and hooking it up via a single HDMI cable -- the Mac Mini has no HDMI output and of course, isn't supposed to be a DVR. This set up is also more complicated than getting a TiVo, which is built specifically as a DVR.

Apple is missing a real opportunity with its Apple TV. It could be the one box for the living room, but it lacks crucial components like DVR, gaming and a optical disc player. Patents suggest they realize this and are working on solutions, but who knows if those will ever come. If nothing else, I'm sure Hollywood will put pressure on them not to add DVR to a box that is playing their movies.

What we have now are several companies with boxes that do one or two things well but cannot cross over into other areas. The Xbox 360 is close as it plays games and allows you to rent movies - but the movie selection is limited and the box still has no DVR functionality. It also, naturally, won't play movies I've bought on iTunes.

My cable box does DVR if I want it to and gives access to some movies, but it's UI and overall experience is god awful. I also refuse to use the DVR functionality on it because I refuse to pay the cable company any more money. I already ranted about my $150 cable bill ($110 of which was for TV), well I've managed to get that down to $33 after bitching and threatening to cancel everything - but I still eventually want to leave them entirely if they don't shape up.

The Apple Time Capsule is cool because it's an external hard drive and a Wi-Fi router, but can't this just be built in to the Apple TV or Mac Mini? I don't care if the box is a little bigger. It's not a portable device, it's sitting in my living room.

What's even worse is that none of these boxes talk to one another. They are all just little entertainment islands in my living room.

I want one device that does it all: DVR, plays movies (both digital and discs), plays games, etc. One box with one single HDMI cable. That is my dream. Can anyone make it happen? Probably not.

Even while writing this, I just remembered that I kind of also want to get that new Netflix Roku box. I could be looking at double-digit boxes on my entertainment center. The thought just makes we want to throw them all away.

At least until wireless electricity and wireless HDMI become a reality.

It's nice to see that VentureBeat is moving up the Pundit Watch leaderboard. Pundit Watch is a service by hubdub.com that tracks predictions made on various things and gives them a stock-like value which cashes out when the prediction is right or wrong.

I wrote up some of its strengths and weaknesses previously here.

VenutreBeat is now #2 on the list thanks in large part of many correct predictions about the Apple announcements recently. We finally passed that pesky Perez Hilton.

Now if only I got bonus points for my ParisLemon predictions... #2 is looking particularly good at the moment:

2) Microsoft and Google's next big battle will be over who gets the rights to purchase at least part of Yahoo
While many are still waiting for Yahoo to turn around, it seems to be increasingly questionable as to if they can. I don't think they'd want to sell completely but perhaps take an investment injection such as Apple did from Microsoft many years ago and Facebook did recently from Microsoft. If Google were to win this, look for Microsoft to push for more anti-trust hearings. If Microsoft wins, look for Google to buy a half-dozen other companies Microsoft wants but won't sell to MS.

#15 is looking pretty good now as well:

15) GPS will be all the rage in consumer goods
Cars, cellphones, cameras. Parents tracking kids. Boyfriends tracking girlfriends. Someone tracking all of us - but we'll call it something more friendly - 'geotagging'. Of course the iPhone will gain GPS as well.

[Update]: VentureBeat is now #1!

WWDC was the first Apple event I've gone to and it was a bit like going to a concert. When Steve Jobs was on the stage the crowd ate up everything he was selling. When he wasn't on the stage (which was actually quite often), the crowd got antsy. Maybe that's just because they waited well over an hour into the event before unveiling what everyone was waiting for: iPhone 3G.

And boom: $199.

I barely got a chance to sit back and watch any of it since I was writing nearly every second that it was going on, but if you ever have the chance, it's definitely something worth going to.

Covering it on FriendFeed went great. Find the page with the rest of our VentureBeat coverage here.

As for my predictions yesterday...

3G iPhone - Mostly right. It has GPS and better battery life, but no video streaming (though that could change in the future with software) and the camera is the same. I nailed the black and white colors, but was off on the storage (it's still 8 and 16 gigs). My prognostication on the pricing was much better on VentureBeat than it was here -- it is in fact $199, something which I am very happy about. I predicted last June, instead it will be early July, close enough.

iPhone Nano - Wrong on this front. I thought this would be something Apple would release for $199, but instead the iPhone 3G is that price. Still, in the future, I would expect to see Apple make a smaller version of the phone.

iPhone 2.0 Software - Showed off extensively, but doesn't seem to explicitly be called OS X iPhone, even though the banners proclaim that. It won't be available until July either.

iTunes 8/iTunes App Store - The App Store was announced as is coming in July. As for iTunes 8, no word but there will undoubtedly need to be a new version for the App store.

Mac Fusion - This, apparently, was fake. Unless Apple announces it later in the week, which I doubt.

Me/MobileMe - Again, mostly right, but I was wrong on the price. I thought it would be free, instead Apple kept it at $99 for a year, which I still think is too high. Portable devices are a key part and it is in fact called MobileMe - but found at me.com.

OS X Snow Leopard - This is in fact the name of OS X 10.6 and though Apple didn't say too much about it, they did show it off to developers later in the day.

All in all not too bad. A few bloggers have expressed disappointment in the event, but I'm still in disbelief that Apple actually made the iPhone 3G $199 - that is going to be huge. I plan on getting the 16 GB white one for $299 -- only because I'm an elitist snob.

We're now just hours away from Apple's WWDC event. In case you missed the 20 other times I mentioned it, I'm going (yeah, I'm pretty excited). Naturally, I feel, like others out there, it's time to make some predictions for what we'll see. It would easy enough to go with the safe bets, but I'll go out on a limb for some of these, there really isn't too much set in stone beyond that we'll see some sort of 3G iPhone:

3G iPhone
Obviously. It will have GPS, video streaming capabilities, a better camera and better battery life. It will also be a little bit thicker, but not much. It will be available in 16 GB and 32 GB, for $299 and $399 respectively. Available in white or black. Coming in Late June.

iPhone Nano
This is the one that will be cheaper, around $199. It will also remain 2.5G and have no video capabilities. It won't be that much smaller so you can still type on the screen, but it will be thinner and weigh less. Coming in Late June.

iPhone 2.0 software
Fairly obvious. The 2.0 software will now be called "OS X iPhone" and it will have the ability to utilize 3rd party application. Available immediately.

iTunes 8/iTunes App Store
iTunes will obviously need an update for the new iPhone software/capabilities and the new App Store.

Mac Fusion
Just wrote about this over at VentureBeat tonight. This box looks to be for developers (this is a developer conference remember), and would be like a smaller, more powerful Mac Mini. It will run OS X as well as Windows and Linux thanks to Boot Camp.

Me/MobileMe
The revamped .Mac finally arrives. It will be FREE and emphasize syncing your data with your portable devices (iPhones and iPods). Premium version (beyond 10 GB) will be available as well for a fee. Wildcard: Partnership with Google on the cloud storage.

One more thing...

OS X Snow Leopard
OS X 10.6 will be shipping in January. It won't be a huge upgrade, but security and stability will be key -- as will the move to mobile computing utilzing multi-touch technology.

Coldplay closes the show
Who knows on this one, just keep seeing that new commercial...

What we won't see -- yet:
Mac Tablet/Newton - I'm guessing MacWorld 2009
Redesigned MacBook Pros - I'm thinking Fall
Apple TV update - I want a more powerful one, wait until the Fall.
Mac Mini update - They should, but never do.
New Mouse - Sometime this year, cause the Mighty Mouse sucks

I also wrote up some different potential curveballs a few weeks back on VentureBeat. I really hope I'm wrong and that Apple and AT&T do team up to subsidize the 3G iPhone down to $199. There are still rumors coming out that it is in fact happening, it just seems too good to be true.

I'm going to Apple's WWDC event tomorrow and had been thinking for the past several days about an approach to take for how to cover it for VentureBeat. Sure, live-blogging is obvious, but a lot of other sites do that, and probably do it a lot faster than me as they have more experience (this will be my first Apple keynote).

Dean and I were just going to do what we do best - write articles - but something else popped into my head while surfing around FriendFeed today. Actually, it's something that FriendFeed user and blogger Bwana McCall wrote about a few days ago: Why not use FriendFeed's Rooms feature to create a WWDC live update center? Genius.

Others have created rooms around the event, but as far as I know, no one else actually going to be there covering it live has one. So I made one, and I plan to pipe in all the updates that I can there. I think it will just be such a great tool for something like this. I can quickly put in updates from Steve Jobs himself, and then a whole community can have a bit conversation around each of these. This seems like something FriendFeed was built for.

There are already well over 100 members of the VentureBeat WWDC Livestream FriendFeed room, and I suspect there will be a lot more come tomorrow. This should be an interesting test to see how well FriendFeed will work as a live communication tool. I have a feeling it will work great and that we'll be seeing a lot of others use this same idea for future conferences of all types.

Also be sure to check out the comprehensive page Sean Percival made, piping in a whole slew of RSS updates from sites covering the event. Even if you can't go to the event tomorrow, you'll have plenty of ways to stay in the know.

Follow the updates:

VentureBeat WWDC Livestream FriendFeed Room

VentureBeat Stories

An Xbox 360 with a Blu-ray player would be very cool, especially given that Microsoft backed the wrong horse (HD DVD) for so long. But is Microsoft really dumb enough to try and announce it an hour before the WWDC event tomorrow?

That's the rumor that CrunchGear is hearing. 1 hour before one of the largest events in Apple's history, Microsoft will announce an Xbox 360 with a Blu-ray drive that will ship before Christmas and be cheaper than the current Xbox 360 Elite.

If true, why on Earth would Microsoft time it that way? They would clearly have to be thinking that such an announcement would dampen the buzz of the 3G iPhone - but it wouldn't, it would just get completely buried under it.

Save it for another day Microsoft. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight.

Two days til Apple's WWDC, it's sold out for the first time ever, going to be huge. We know the 3G iPhone is coming, but what else? I did a run down of some wildcard possibilities on VentureBeat a couple weeks ago.

Cult of Mac has put together a great timeline of Steve Jobs' "One more thing" announcements throughout the years. I've embedded it below. Taking into account this history, if there is one this year, I'm going to say that it will be the rumored OS X Snow Leopard - aka OS X 10.6.

Those new rumored 3G iPhone pics are sure causing a stir. I want them to be real simply for the video chatting implications, but there do seem to be too many little oddities about the pictures. Where's the top button on the red one? Why is the "p" in Xp lowercase? What's up with the weird spacing of text blurbs?

But most importantly, if these are real, where are the cease and desist letters? Having received one myself in the past, I can tell you that those are the best indication that what you're looking at is real.

Fake or not, I do hope that these images basically capture the spirit of what the 3G iPhone will be. Did I mention that I'll be at the keynote on Monday? Yeah, I'm pretty excited.

Find the rest of the pictures here.

On the L33t Tech News podcast this past week we spoke briefly about cable companies and the problems they face with the movement of digital content into the living room through other means. It's simply getting a lot easier to live without cable television.

I'm pretty sure I'm about to venture off and try to experience that first hand after I got my cable bill today: $150.

Let me repeat. $150. Preposterous.

Granted, I have cable and Internet on the bill, but you subtract the Internet and it's still $115 dollars. A month. For what?

I watch maybe five channels regularly, yet I get a few hundred. Despite the ever forthcoming promises that a la carte programming, the cable companies still do not allow you to pick and chose what you want - which is ridiculous. Do I want Spike and the Weather channel? No. But I need to take them if I also want ESPN and the History Channel.

I was thinking about it today, what do I really need cable for? I like sports, so that is basically all I watch live. Everything else I record on a DVR (which I don't currently have), but I do that more out of convenience than anything else. Pretty much all the shows I want to see are now online in one form or another. And a lot are free on sites such as Hulu.

With HBO now finally putting its content on iTunes, I think I'm done. For the $150 a month I pay the cable company I could buy an Apple TV and a ton of content for it in just two months. In six months, with the money I'd be saving by not having cable, I could add the Netflix Roku box and buy everything I could ever want on Apple TV and Xbox Live's marketplace as well.

In a year's time I would be saving so much money. I'd miss some things, but there is plenty of stuff to occupy my free time already. I hardly watch television as it is.

I might not even mind getting ripped off that much if cable actually made the presentation halfway decent. Instead I have an awful cable box that is not only incredibly slow, but has a horrible UI to boot.

Last year I wondered if 2008 would be the year that companies like Apple, Sony and Microsoft moving into the living room would force the cable companies to get their acts together and start caring about the product they are putting out there - kind of like how Apple's iPhone and just the fear of Google has transformed the mobile phone industry in this country in a very short amount of time. All of a sudden we have talk of "open" networks and cool phones and unlimited data plans for cheaper than regular plans used to be. For cable television, that transformation hasn't happened yet.

It's pathetic. And expensive. I'd much rather pay for quality and programs I know I want to watch.

The public at large is still far away from jumping ship, but the cable companies would be foolish if they think that will never happen with the way things are going. Apple has already made the Apple TV pretty compelling, a few more features such as a DVR and we may see more people take the cable-less path.

I remember when my cable bill was $60 for cable and Internet in college. Now it's $150 for the exact same service. I was in college in 2004, not 1954, that rate of inflation is ridiculous.

For too long I've been saying, "I wish I knew how to quit you, cable." I'm just scared. I've lived so long with it. But enough is enough.

So the blogosphere doesn't seem all that impressed with the Windows 7 preview at the All Things D conference, to which I would say: of course not, it's basically shaping up to be "Vista 2." However, that doesn't mean I'm not impressed with certain general directions Microsoft appears to be heading more towards. That namely being its work with actual new technology.

Since I gushed about Surface computing almost exactly a year ago, I really haven't seen or heard anything from Microsoft that excites me. That's a year, that's a long time. Sure, Scoble cried about the Worldwide Telescope, and that seems pretty cool, but come on Microsoft, you spend billions of dollars every year on R&D - wow me.

Today's example of Windows 7 utilizing Multi-touch does excite me. It was a bit clunky, a bit gimmicky, and as Paul Buchheit pointed out in a FriendFeed comment, my arms probably would get tired trying to use that on a regular laptop, but still, it's something pretty new. It's not Microsoft chasing someone else (though I guess you could stretch it to say the iPhone), as Tim O'Reilly perfectly pointed out in a question to Bill Gates today.

As I said, Microsoft spends billions of dollars a year on R&D, so where has all the cool stuff been? Microsoft is still making a ton of money, but it's losing stature and gaining detractors daily as Vista continues to stumble along and Google continues to eat their lunch on just about everything on the Internet.

Just forget what Google is doing Microsoft. Do something new that's cool.

As I said in my VentureBeat piece, the article in FastCompany about Microsoft's new advertising agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, actually gave me some hope for the company. They have a bad image problem. An edgy firm may help that a little, but at the end of the day it's going to be the products.

I don't want to see a ZunePhone, I don't a new social bookmarking tool. I want something new.

Also, please dump those lame bulbous avatar characters, get rid of that translucent color scheme. Your products are ugly. I'm just sayin.

More thoughts:

• Apple continues to kick ass, Microsoft content to take names
• We've Already Entered the "Age of Apple"
• Why Does Vista Get No Fanboys?
• Vista Usage Massively Higher Than Its Initial 0%...And Other Ridiculous Statements
• Microsoft's Answer to Vista Issues - Forget About Those, Here's Windows 7!
• Apple Kills Microsoft Going Forward (With An Assist From Google), An Opus
• The Best Article Yet About Why Windows 7 Will Be the Best Windows Yet
• Microsoft Is In Much More Trouble Than I Ever Imagined...
  

There's a report that Apple and its various partners have imported some 188 ocean containers into North America since March. All that is known about them is that some contained extremely blandly named "electric computers." Apple has never used this description to describe any of its products before -- so like Brad Pitt in Seven, I have to ask, "what's in the box?"

The report by ImportGenius makes a compelling case for a certain device that may be announced by Steve Jobs on June 9th at the WWDC. Are they here? Perhaps they are already even in San Francisco like me? The anticipation is killing me.

Morgan Freeman, take my gun.

"What's in the fucking box!"

I remember about a week after the Nintendo Wii launched and immediately sold out everywhere I heard a rumor that a Best Buy near me would be getting more in one morning. I decided to drive up there and see if anyone was actually in line - I thought this would be a good indication of whether the store was in fact getting Wiis or not.

There was a line of a few people so I decided to get in it.

About 10 minutes later a guy came up and just stared at all of us as if weighing whether or not to join the line. He did and we all continued waiting.

Later, the guy tapped me on the shoulder and asked me, "so what is everyone in line for?" He had been in the line for 20 minutes.

People are lemmings. Myself included. There were no Wiis at the store that day.

The 3G iPhone isn't being announced for at least another 2 1/2 weeks. Who knows when it will actually be out - it could be a month! Yet, there is a huge line at an Apple store in Manhattan.

I hope they are waiting for some earbud replacements.

I was thiiiissss close to buying an Apple TV - something tonight may have changed my mind. Netflix just unleashed a new box with Roku and here's all you need to know: $99, access to 10,000 titles that can play instantly on your TV - for free.

For more details check out my longer post on VentureBeat.

Apple did a pretty good job upgrading its Apple TV service in January with a slew of new features - namely movie rentals, but it still left a few things to be desired. The prices aren't great. There is no rent-to-own option. And the device still has no optical drive and no DVR functionality.

Still, I was more than willing to overlook those to get the device - especially since two of those would be upgradable via software if the options ever became available. Now I'm not sure I could justify buying an Apple TV because if nothing else, I think Apple is going to have to release a new version of the device to compete with Netflix, or cut the price once again.

Clouding my decision even farther is the fact that Netflix has more devices in the pipeline. We already know about one they are working on with LG, but the real kicker could be if they team up with the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 to bring this instant watch features to those devices.

If Netflix launches a device that also allows you to purchase new releases on top of viewing the instant watch films I see absolutely no reason to get anything else. I can't see why they wouldn't eventually do that.

So when that happens, Apple is going to need something more to differentiate their device. I think more than ever now they need to merge the Apple TV with the Mac Mini. Release a device around the $499 price point that will handle all the media center requirements, but is also a full-fledged computer to boot.

Some people may not think they want a true computer in their living room, but imagine being able to use a program like Google Earth on a big screen HD TV. How about browsing the web and chatting via IM? The current Apple TV doesn't allow for any of these things, but maybe it should. How about some games as well?

Basically what it comes down to is that I want one set-top box in my living room. If Apple would simply merge the Apple TV with the Mac Mini, that could certainly be it. Otherwise I'm probably going to buy the new Netflix box instead of an Apple TV. If I really need to watch a new movie for now I can either a) rent it from Netflix via mail b) Buy it on demand via cable c) download via some other means and stream it to my Xbox or d) buy it via Xbox Live.