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Apple's very own Media Center

Apple's very own Media Center

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
  • Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Dan Ackerman
While everyone's yakking about the new video iPod and those superthin iMacs, I thought one of the more interesting things to come out of Apple's big press conference today was its stab at Media Center-style functionality. There's a small iPod-looking remote, which controls a front-end interface called Front Row, which manages your media collection with big easy-to-read icons, perfect for couch-based viewing. It's very similar in spirit to Windows Media Center, but I'm deliberately avoiding the chicken-and-egg debate over who borrowed what from whom.

On another note, since every other NYC-based tech blogger seems to be talking about it, I'll mention that I checked out the Xbox 360 media event held here yesterday and got some serious hands-on time with the new console. The Media Center extender functionality looks very slick, but from what we saw, the games are a bit of a mixed bag. Call of Duty, Need for Speed, and Condemned were among the better-looking titles, with graphics that seemed to be on a par with top-of-the-line PC gaming rigs. Several other titles fell a bit short, including the much-hyped Oblivion, which suffered from jerky animation and wonky controls. Just today, that game was pushed back to December, giving the developers more time to tweak it.