Well they did it. Yesterday Apple introduced the Mac Mini. Starting at $499. For that price you get a 1.2 Ghz G4, 40 Gig hard drive, and combo DVD player / CD burner. Slightly faster processor, bigger hard drive, and DVD burner are all options. As are keyboard and mouse which don't come with the machine (nor monitor, of course.)

It is absolutely tiny at 6.5'' x 6.5'' x 2''. Aluminum sides with a white plastic top which sort of splits the difference between their pro aluminum look (used on PowerMacs, PowerBooks, and the Cinema displays,) and the white plastic consumer look (iMacs, iBooks, iPods.) It's nice I think, and certainly the smallest PC on the market. Remember the Apple Cube? The Mini fits in the small air space underneath that machine! It's really pretty ridiculous.

Not including a monitor, keyboard, and mouse helps cut costs, and answers long time requests from potential customers who already have these items left over from their last machines (macs can use standard PC components.) The eMac, for instance, has been pretty cheap for a while (around $800,) but a lot of that cost is for the built in CRT monitor which is wasted on a lot of people who already have a decent monitor, but just want a new machine. The Mini Mac now gives people a chance to try out a Mac for a price that might cross into some people's impulse buy range.

The other not so obvious advantage to not including a keyboard is the small size this allows the packaging to be. Check out the box. Cute, no? Classic Apple. I'll bet they'll be stacked up next to the cash registers in the stores. Just grab one and go. About the same price as buying a Kate Spade bag.

Performance should be fine. It will lose in benchmarks to the latest PCs, but that is all theoretical. For email, web surfing, iTunes, a little photo editing, home video editing, etc., the Mini is more than powerful enough. It's not going to run the latest 3D video games that well, but that's not really what it is for. Everything else will be fine. I would bump the RAM to 512 megs for an extra $75, otherwise the base specs look good.

I think the only possible criticism is the use of 2.5 inch notebook hard drives. They obviously needed to do this to achieve the small form factor. But a lot of geeks will probably moan that they would rather have it be slightly bigger, and use faster 3.5 inch drives. I have to admit that I am in this camp, since with a 3.5 inch 7200 RPM drive the Mini looks like a very cheap OS X server. But again, that's not the market they are going for. For home use (or even business use) the smaller drives are fine.
- jim 1-12-2005 7:47 pm

I like that they are pitching it to programmers as well:

Perfect for Programmers

Set a space-saving Mac mini atop your workstation PC and add a KVM switch to share keyboard, monitor and mouse. Mac OS X includes free developer tools for Mac, UNIX and Java. Test out a Mac version of your latest creation, instantly. Pretty soon you’ll be using the Mac full-time, with that PC relegated to the testbed.

- jim 1-12-2005 7:49 pm


And by all means, rush out and buy one immediately. But something to keep in mind is that Tiger (OS X 10.4) will be out in the first half of this year. If you wait for Tiger it will come on the machine. If you buy it now with Panther it will cost (probably) $129 to upgrade to Tiger. On a $3000 machine $129 bucks doesn't seem like anything to worry about, but on a $499 machine it suddenly seems like a lot.

The other thing I didn't mention is the bundled software. This is something I take for granted as a Mac user, but just to be clear, the machine not only comes with OS X (and all the included geek goodies - perl, php, python, ruby, apache, mysql, sendmail, etc...) but also with the iLife bundle that includes iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand. This is some seriously good software, all included for free. Unless you need to do some specialty thing, the $499 machine really does come with everything you need.
- jim 1-12-2005 7:55 pm


Mac Mini is the iPod for HDTV?

- mark 1-23-2005 11:01 pm


Related to the Cringely: "is apple secretly working on a dvr / video download service."

As usual this is all speculative, and in my opinion Apple usually moves much slower than everyone expects. But there is no doubt they are putting some big bets on H.264. They talk about it way out of proportion in relation to any announced plans. Something must be coming. Just not necessarily any time soon.

For Apple, H.264 (inside Quicktime 7) will arrive with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in the "first half" of this year. Probably the World Wide Developers Conference in July is a good bet.
- jim 1-24-2005 5:48 pm


Of course I am curious to see some real sales numbers for the mini. But anecdotal evidence so far looks good for Apple (they are having trouble filling orders quickly, etc...)

Today Amazon shows the mini as number one in computer sales (plus number 6 in a different configuration.) That's far from definitive (is there some bias of Amazon customers towards Apple?) but it's another positive data point for sure.
- jim 2-09-2005 8:54 pm





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