Apple planning H.264 hardware in all Macs?

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.