A gratuitous summary of what I've seen on rumor web sites:

- 23" iMac
- all iMacs upgraded with Core 2 Duo ("Merom") processors
- next-gen iPod Nano with colored aluminum skins (as in the earlier iPod Mini)
- bigger hard disks in 5G iPod Video
- some kind of video streaming variant on the AirPort Extreme

Notably missing from the rumors:

- Some kind of larger-screened video iPod, perhaps more suitable for movie watching
- Upgrades to the Mac Mini

That last point annoys me, because I've been planning to replace my aging G4 tower (dual 1GHz) with a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini. Hopefully, such a beast will be announced along with the upgraded iMac line. (I've already got a perfectly froody large LCD screen, so there's no point in spending the bucks for an iMac, plus the long-term plan is to press the Mac Mini into home theater duties.)

I have, and still use, a 2nd-generation iPod (20GB, purchased before the Rio portables were announced). I have to remember to charge it up before every time I might use it, since it suffers from the bad battery syndrome that resulted in a class action lawsuit against Apple and for which I got a $50 coupon toward the Apple store as part of the settlement. I expect the next-gen iPod Nano will make a fine replacement.

The video-streaming AirPort Extreme, if true, represents an interesting point in the design space. Maybe it will run a snazzified version of Apple's FrontRow. For bandwidth control, it will have to do the video decompression internally, but an interesting question is how it will deal with GUIs from the computer. I would guess they'd go for something simple and dumb like VNC. If they did that, it would have the potential to be very extensible, yet still quite cheap (not entirely unlike the design of the Slim Devices Squeezebox).

This leads to an interesting decision I'll need to make. I presently have an Infrant RAID box with 4x250GB of storage. I started ripping my DVD collection (uncompressed) and promptly filled it up, with many DVDs left to go. I could pursue a variety of different strategies going forward...
1) Buy 4x500GB or 4x750GB disks to replace the 4x250GB disks. Is there any resale value for Seagate 250GB SATA disks?
2) Sell the whole RAID box, disks and all, and buy a bigger RAID box.
3) Sell the whole RAID box and get a MacPro, loaded with big disks.

Options #1 and #2 work with the assumption of a Mac Mini as the home theater device, and NFS as the protocol for talking to the storage. Option #3 would be much faster, of course, but this depends on the alleged AirPort Extreme replacement being reasonable and sufficiently general. Can remotely display arbitrary Mac apps or can it only run some FrontRow variant?