It just seems nuts to me that you'd have what is arguably an almost perfect media center or home theater PC - the Mac mini - and you'd offer no software to enable that functionality.

The latter case can make a big difference if you're on a metered Internet service, as many of us are.Īnd if the mood strikes you to play games, you can't do that on a streaming media box, while it's trivial with a Mac (add Steam's 'Big Picture' feature and you're cruising). What's more, you're not streaming content over your Wi-Fi network or, if you're using iTunes in the Cloud, over the Internet. Meanwhile a Mac equipped as a media center allows you to access any streaming content from the Internet that will run on your Mac, rather than only the streaming content that is available through one of the apps that runs on the Apple TV. That limitation is gone with a Mac acting as a media center.

While you can stream Amazon Prime video content from an iOS device to an Apple TV using AirPlay, there's no native Amazon Prime app for the Apple TV. They're only as good as the apps they work with, or the apps that are built in.Īpple TV is a good case in point. As Steve Jobs once said, 'Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.' Apple TV isn't all thatĪpple TV, Roku and Chromecast all have their place at the home theater table, but none of them have quite the same flexibility as a Mac equipped with media center abilities. There's the open-source app XBMC, for example, or Plex, a commercial app that was once based on the XBMC core, and MediaCentral from Equinux.Īll of these have their place, but installation and setup isn't trivial. Since Front Row is no longer available, Mac owners interested in using their computer as a media center have a few third-party options. You also have to have a seamless and easy way of accessing the content on the Mac, and that's the domain of media center software. With the ready availability of Macs that can connect, and cheaper-than-ever HDTVs, it's a bit nuts for Apple to leave the Mac out of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) equation.īut setting up a Mac as a media center is more than just plugging it in to a TV. Not just Mac minis, but Retina MacBook Pros and even the mighty Mac Pro can manage HDTV connections natively iMacs and other MacBooks can hook up trivially using a Thunderbolt to HDMI adapter.

More Macs than ever before include HDMI cables to connect to flat-panel HDTVs.

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