PBS -- Bob Cringely thinks the Mac Mini looks good in sitting rooms next to televisions and if his musings are correct, that's exactly the location deigned by Apple and Sony. After all, the Mini is a basic media PC, making it the logical next step for Apple by extending iTunes to selling and distributing movies. It has no analog adapter but Apple offers one. You can also plug in an Apple DVD burner. The Mini's DVI connector can plug into HDTVs from Sony. What I need to do this summer is plumb broadband directly into the phone jack behind the television so we're configured for the arrival of iFlix.
Bob Cringely points to some other clues that suggest the Mac Mini is part of a digital video distribution platform.
- "My computer stopped playing Apple movie trailers. The only way to watch QuickTime movie trailers (the closest I get to a movie since we have little kids) was suddenly through iTunes 4.7, which takes you straight through the iTunes Music Store. The regular QuickTime player wouldn't work."
- Steve Jobs called 2005 the "Year of HD" and that means high definition televisions in Apple shops.
- The Mini can play video encoded in AVC H.264, which will be supported first in OS X 10.4. This tnrascends the two competing standards for High Definition DVDs -- Blu-Ray and HD-DVD -- because H.264 is a constant on both systems.
But is the Mac Mini a maxi value? Jorge Lopez doesn't think so.
Don’t get me wrong, I am an admirer of Apple’s iPod and I applaud the company for doing things right when it does. I am glad to see that they have found a way to cut corners where they can to bring the price of their computers out of the stratosphere and somewhat closer to the price of a Windows PC. By leaving out a USB keyboard and monitor, two things you may already have if you have an old Mac, Apple can shave some money off the price of its system components and the size and weight of its packaging. By using cheap Asian child labor to assemble the units, costs have been reduced even further. I would like to see them continue this trend, possibly strike a deal with China to use inmates to assemble the Mini for even less, like Lenovo does. Think about it, a Mac mini for $299. Now that would be an easier price to swallow given the system’s limitations. $499 sounds like a decent price at first, but consumers need to be aware that once they add on the basics like a keyboard, monitor and mouse, plus shell out for some antivirus software, the Mac mini price is scraping the ceiling of $1600, hardly a “computer for the rest of us.”So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware--none of which are available for the Mac platform--it doesn't make sense for me to "switch" to a Mac at this time. But will Apple's famous marketing team be able to sell the the emperor an invisible computer anyway and turn the mini into a maxi hit? That’s the question that remains to be answered.
Robert Cringely -- "The new Mac Mini is all about movies"
Euan Semple: "What if we Mac users collected info on all the dead PC users in the world and converted them to Mac users posthumously?"
Jorge Lopez -- "Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer"
Bonus Link: Russ Beattie's Mac Mini autopsy with pictures
Tag: MacMini x_ref26121
