Crikey. Apple is going after the full multimedia market, 'twould seem. Gonna become your music/video/computing/whatsit box all in one package. That's almost worthy of Microsoft.
What do you expect, both are run by avid trekies who want nothing than to make computer/multimedia/entertainment equipment to look like TNG.
Good call if they do this. Specialization is key. Keep this in mind as a point to why specialize hardware always beats general purpose hardware + software solutions: The 1997 version of IBM's chess playing computer, Deep Blue, could calculate chess moves 25 times faster than todays fastest Quad-Core desktop. That's tech from 10 years ago.
Apple used to have hardware DVD decoding, but got rid of it with the 400MHz (Sawtooth) G4 and the 450MHz G3 (iMac DV). It just doesn't take that much horsepower... at least on a Mac. Still, I always thought it was a pity about that, seeing as how the hardware decoder machines were capable of playing a DVD as your desktop picture while you did whatever else. Now they can't do that, but for software reasons*, rather than CPU horsepower. *and THAT is why the PICT file format rocked so hard. A series of drawing commands, if the source was an MPEG-2 stream, then you draw an MPEG-2 stream on the Desktop, and fill it in with whatever fills the stream.
