That affects MP3 players with FM radios and computers with tuners.

Also, cable card isn’t an international standard. Now of course Apple could customise to local markets, but that just doesn’t seem very Apple (generally speaking they make products that work globally).

That’s not to say I think the whole idea is off the mark, just maybe we won’t see those two features out of the box.

Hacked Apple TVs suggest that they are reasonably capable computers and I can’t, honestly, see the need for a higher spec CPU and RAM specs in a HTPC than the ATV already has.

Getting to 1080p would probably be better done through hardware video acceleration than x86 CPU. Video also eats hard-disk space so far larger capacity would be nice, but nicer still would be streaming directly from remote storage (say a drive connected to an Airport base station hidden in a cupboard??) – which you can do now, so long as you have a computer in the middle to share it’s (remote) iTunes library.

What else would I look for – a 6 foot UI. If you’re going to allow iMovie style movie editing, it needs to be reworked so you can do it from the sofa. A version of Safari that works the same way (and preferably with a wireless keyboard) – it would be more like the iPhone version (full-screen, no ‘chrome’, maybe something Exposé-like to see all your open sites).

Every activity needs to be rethought ‘how would I do this from my sofa’.

That’s always been the problem with the HTPC concept – the way in which we use the two devices varies (excepting the fact that for people living in shared housing, like students, an iMac is a great personal media centre – I’m thinking of how computers and A/V equipment are used in family homes).