Well, we're getting closer to another Stevenote and the Apple rumor mill is at full tilt, so take this one with a huge grain of salt, but the team over at AppleInsider says they "sincerely believe" that the Mac Mini is about to be discontinued. Citing sources for whom they have the "utmost respect," AI says that Apple management was only bending to shareholder demands for a sub-$800 Mac when it developed the Mini, and that the recent release of the Apple TV all but spells the end of significant updates to the lil' bugger. We can see what they're getting at, we suppose: the Mini has never gotten a lot of attention, but the similarly-discontinued products AI compares it to -- the Cube, the PowerBook 2400, and the 12-inch PowerBook G4 -- were all higher-end machines, while the Mini sits at the very bottom of Apple's product line. On top of that, the description of the Apple TV as the "next-generation Mac Mini" strikes us as a little odd, since the Mini was never sold as a media extender (even though you can use it that way) and the Apple TV was never sold as a general-purpose computer (even though you can use it that way). AI does seem pretty confident in the case it's laid out -- but as with all things Apple, only time will tell.

At least that's the word from columnist Robert X. Cringely, who says he's heard a rumor on the subject, that he believes to be "a fact," that has simply yet to be confirmed. Supposedly, Apple will not only be including hardware-based H.264 video decoding across its entire line of Macs, but hardware encoding as well, which would significantly reduce the load on the computers' processors while still churning out high quality video. The H.264 video encoding would also have the added benefit of greatly reducing the file size of the captured videos, making them ready made for spreading across the Internet. According to Cringely, the cost of the across the board upgrade would set Apple back upwards of $500 million, but he seems quite confident that Apple's ready to take that gamble sometime this year. That would seem to jive with at least one other Apple rumor we've heard, which touted updates of an unspecified sort to all Mac lines by June -- although, as with all of these, we likely won't know for sure until we get the word from the man himself.