The big wildcard here is HDCP. It does seem that ATI does not have any cards shipping with HDCP support.

There has been a lot written about Blue Ray/HD DVD support for Vista and XP, and how HDCP is going to be required to play back these formats in full resolution. I suspect that even with a Laptop this will be the case.

As for Blue Ray/HD DVD support for OSX, who knows, but knowing that Steve wants to keep the media compainies happy, I doubt playback will be any less restrictive then in Windows

Ben, I know you are a hard core Mac Fan, but everything you list can be done better on a Windows duo core laptop. You CPU utilization is so high when playing back H.264 clips becuase OSX does not yet have the ATI GPU H.264 decoders, windows does.

This machine will not be that good as a Media Center PC because apple had to go the cheap route with Integrated Graphics. Being able to support a resolution is one thing, but what about video play back?

ATI and Nvida put a lot of work into thier video decoders, which is the single most important factor in video quality playback.

Good luck finding a decent H.264 decoder for the Intel card. ATI already has a decoder developer, and Nvidia's should be out soon. That means that the new mini mac with need a software decoder. No good.

ZylogZ80 - pretty much every manufacture in the world introduced new dual core laptop's at CES, most of which will be out the same time frame as the new Mac....check out the Dell 9400 for example.

I am stuned that Apple left out a right click button on the
mousepad....that one reason alone pretty much kills it as a XP
machine. Damn shame too, otherwise the new Powerbook would have
jumped to the head of my list