[jyl]

I just finished a frustrating 1/2 hour figuring out how to record a program from my TiVo to my DVD-Recorder. It wasn't working.

In the back of my DVD-R there were three sets of inputs marked DVDR1 DVDR2 DVDR3, on my A/V receiver also three sets of input/output pairs marked VCR1 VCR2 and VCR3, and I couldn't figure out which jacks to connect to what to route the signal from the TiVo through the receiver to the DVD-R. I could hardly read the tiny labels, or even see them with all the cables and plug ends in the way. My back started to hurt and my eyes to water. Finally I bypassed the receiver and connected the TiVo's Output2 directly to the DVD-R, still having to try the different input sets until one worked. Used up a perfectly good DVD-R disc in the process.

Admittedly, I've long since lost the owners' manuals for all this audio/video gear. But, dammit, I shouldn't NEED an owners' manual. Hasn't anyone heard of intuitive controls and onscreen help?

No, they haven't. Not in the halls of Sony, Pioneer, Kenwood, Toshiba, and other Japanese consumer electronics ("CE") giants. They still think we're supposed to know our way around 30 or 40 jacks in the rear and 50 buttons on the remote, with crytic little labels in barely readable gray-on-silver.

I think we're in the computer age now, and we're used to SOFTWARE, not tiny fiddly buttons. Drop-down menus, Wizards, mouse-over help ballons, contextual controls, and all the aids. Any software company worth its salt has hundreds more people working on user interface than Pioneer had when it developed my DVD-R, I'm sure of it.

If Apple made my home A/V gear, it would be one simple box with a handful of buttons and a minimum of cables. To record from my TiVo would be a matter of one or two mouse clicks, whether I'd done it before or not.

The PC industry needs new worlds to conquer, now that global PC units are growing only 10-12% and gross margins on most PCs are in the teens %s. We balk at spending over $1,000 on a computer, but almost all of us are willing to spend 5X or 10X that on our TV, DVD player/recorder, VCR, PVR/DVR, receiver, amplifier, speakers, etc etc. What a tempting market.

Conveniently, our media is moving from physical discs and tapes, that the CE guys know how to handle, to computer files, that the PC industry knows well.

And the increasing power of PC components means that they will soon be able to handle multiple HD video streams, audio streams, user interface and everything else, without a bobble. INTC's quad core CPU is coming out later this year, an 8-core is around the corner, and the current GPUs from NVDA are very powerful indeed.

Please, will the PC industry hurry up and take over our living rooms? If MSFT can't figure it out (Windows Media Center being a big flopsy) then come on AAPL. My back and eyes aren't getting any younger.

Just ranting.