Very interesting...

http://9to5mac.com/apple-home-server

Rumors are starting to swirl that Apple is working on a competitor to the MediaSmart. It is said to have some pretty sweet power saving features, a shared iTunes database with music and video and slick integration into the Apple ecosystem.

Since my reason for purchasing the MediaSmart was largely to back up and scale my iTunes video library, and since I'm heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem already (iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple TV, Airport Express, iTunes media), then the idea of this server represents a pretty interesting prospect indeed.

Thoughts?

Will this potentially clip Encore's wings?

My humble thoughts...

An Apple offering *may* clip the wings of Encore for Apple users who are heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem such as yourself. That would make sense.

IMO, there's a lot more PC users out there though where the HP Mediasmart may be a better fit. I'm not sure a centralized itunes DB is a defining and deciding factor for choosing one home server over the other.

Or perhaps it is. But I thought centralized backups and NAS would be the core reason for having a home server in the first place with everything else being nice extras.

_________________
Richard

My gadget blog: http://www.gadgetinsane.com

It's still just a rumor, but I'd be surprised if the Apple Server didn't have backups and solid NAS capabilities.

That said, Apple isn't famous for interoperability and HP set the bar pretty high with the MediaSmart. MSS works better than any home NAS in a Windows environment, the scalable drive bays are great and the file system which allows for redundancy without reserving the entire disk make the MediaSmart and Windows Home Server in general a force to be reckoned with.

I do think it's interesting, however, that more people are entertaining the idea of a "home server", even the Apple crowd!

Apparently the rumor is making its way to mainstream news outlets now:

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/daves-downl ... erver.html

...and tech news:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10129652-2.html
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastruct ... ac-and-PC/
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.a ... ver-device

Man, what a boring uneventful Macworld it turned out to be. DRM-free iTunes (cool) and a 17" Macbook Pro (yawn), but no Apple media server just yet.

It looks like the MediaSmart is the option for scalable media storage at present.

Hmmm... I see very little appeal in this whatsoever for Windows users...

Given the quality of iTunes (which I feel is pretty poor... buggy and slow), I wouldn't have any faith in the Windows client software. If they won't fix up iTunes with it's gazillions of Windows users, why on Earth would their Home Server technology perform well on Windows?