Mac Notebooks: New Video Features?

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 11

Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider reports a tip from saying claiming to know saying as follows: “”I happen to know that the product transition referred to in Apple’s recent conference call was referring to Quicktime encoding/decoding chips built into their products.”

Hmm. Well now, there has been a good deal of speculation about what the next “new product transition” CFO Peter Oppenheimer referred to will be all about. The wide-ranging consensus is that it’s more likely to involved notebooks, than the iPhone, while the iPod may get a rather serious upgrade of its own at about the same time.

Some ideas that have been floated for aggressive new features include integrated TV tuners, touch screen displays, touch-screen touch-pads,a and the always rumored tablet Mac.

Adding dedicated video chips would add some serious capabilities to the MacBook and MacBook pro. Frommer suggests HD-iChat as a possible feature that would take advantage of it. Add in a TV-tuner, which is quickly becoming a popular feature on high-end notebooks in the Windows world, and you’d really have something. My guess is that we’ll see the new product, whatever it is, within a month or so. The days I’m looking at for a possible big launch event are Sept. 9 and Sept. 16, the first and second Tuesdays after Labor Day.

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