Well, I think there may be some debatable analytical value to discussing the merits of a product, with the caveat that many will purchase that product for reasons both practical and utterly impractical. Just now you’ve provided something perhaps a market analyst would be interested in, which is the geeks love the Mini. That’s not only good news (and speaks against my doubt), it provides some actual evidence that the Mini could indeed generate healthy sales. While I think the OP’s question is predicated on the baseless “Mac Near Death! Apple’s Doom Is Nigh!” meme, your info. may help put the lie to said meme.
One of the long-standing arguments for the Mac was the lack of a requirement for a fully-staffed IT department. I recall hearing horror stories when large scale companies and universities IT departments decided to switch everyone over to PCs, or be PC-only. There’s a cost in itself, if there’s already an installed base of Macs.
The real reasons were that the IT departments only knew how to repair PCs and were not Mac-certified, so they needed to justify their jobs. All the while their real purpose is to support the computer systems, not dictate the tool!
When I worked at TWA back in the early 90’s, I was the only Mac guy (graphic artist), but I knew the ins and outs of the Mac. The Getaway Vacations department was all Mac, but the rest of TWA was PC. I, the lowly graphics guy, was the de facto IT department for my group of 30 Macs.
Project much?
My OP is based on the question of whether or not Apple’s inexpensive PC will finally convince wintel users to try it, now that cost isn’t really a big excuse or is it too late to capture that market. I said as much in my OP.
yes?
I think this move is ingenious.
Really folks, there are a lot of things you all are missing here. When Apple came out with the iMac, they had nowhere near the “coolness” factor (as a company) that they do now with the general public. I’ll use myself as an example. I have always been a PC guy for the typical reasons. I always thought of Macs as something for very specific uses (like media stuff) and hardcore fans. I always knew they had good stuff, but I never knew the quality of their products. Then I got an ipod and now I use Itunes as my default player. I love all of the options and in a way, like a German luxury car, you can just sort of “feel” the difference. Everything is much more thought out. I am now interested in buying a mac.
Secondly, malware is really getting out of control. I am pretty good with computers, so I know how to keep my PC working, but a lot of folks have no clue at all. I have a friend who repairs computers and all he does all the time is remove spyware. The problem is seriously growning. People don’t want to run adaware, and they don’t wont to worry about any of that stuff. The majority use their computers for Internet, Music, and work (spreadsheets, etc.) Not too many people play intense computer games. Mac (because of market share and other reasons) has the advantage of beign the most hassle free computer at the moment. Hands down. People have bought the iPod for the coolness factor and now they know what the quality of a Mac is.
I’ll give you an example. How freaking nice is it that your Ipod charges on a USB cable? That’s the coolest thing in the world to me. The need for one less cord in my life really is worth a lot of money. Also, look at the new iPod shuffle. Sure it has its drawbacks, but it is cool too, and it will sell. How do you hook it up? It plugs directly into the USB port. How nice? And because it will sell like crazy there will be other peripherals that let you plug it into your stereo in your car or house, etc. Again, perfect. The Mac Mini will capitalize on all of these new people who love the functionality of the iPod and were impressed with Apple. I suppose the iPod was a little clever in how it enticed people to take a second look at macs. I think I may buy a Mac the next computer I get.
If they really wanted to have a chance at getting more market share, they would have to create a good counterpart to Microsoft Office. Maybe they have it? I don’t know, but if and office program with the power of MS office could be implemented with Mac Friendliness, then you would have something really special.
Also, they should go for a PVR type system too as mentioned before. Microsoft has one, but Microsoft never manages to pull it off right in terms of comfort. Apple could make a box like that, and double the storage capacity, add a DVD burner, and add a tv encoder + remote and you’d have a tivo that could export and digitally encode to any format to be sent over the net or however. That sounds damn nice. Oh, and you have all of the other functions of a Mac included? Very very good. Market it for those nice new HDTVs that you see.
The entire MS Office suite is available for the Mac. Works better on a Mac than it does on a PC, if ya ask me.
Agh - bundled software? I could start a pit thread! The world needs no more Encarta, Mavis Beacon Teaches More Junk, and Photo-whatever Deluxe LE/SE/Plus. I recommend taking those CDs from their jewel cases and give them to nice CDRs that needs a sturdy home.
Honestly, I know no one who actually uses bundled software - less Word - and most abandon it or unistall it first thing.
I’d also like to add that the software does not add a cent of value if it, or a counterpart, can be found for free.
Of course, this isn’t apple’s “last best chance” - they’ll keep trying as long as they have the money to do so, and they will be around for some time to come. But until they really open up and cut some prices, they’ll never really be in the race.
And, if you are an open-source kinda guy,
OpenOffice is also available.
Yeah, I knew that Office works on Mac, or at least it did, but I meant a version that Apple created from scratch to fill the void in the same way it has with Safari, etc. We all know that Microsoft really lags on the innovation. I mean, it wasn’t apparent to me until Firefox came out to make IE look so bad. I kinda figured that Apple could do something to put office to shame. If they made it as friendly as their other stuff, I would probably convert in a heartbeat. Plus those little boxes are so cool
Oops. My apologies. I guess I took “or is it too little to late” to indicate something more dire than perhaps you intended. I guess you were saying, is it too little too late for Apple to increase it’s market share? In my defence, market share, or lack thereof, is the biggest preoccupation of those infected by the Mac Is Dead meme. It is almost univerally recognized, it seems, that the Death of Apple follows naturally from its niche position.
Well, they are getting a start with their new iWorks “suite” (two programs don’t make a suite, IMO). Keynote is already a proven winner, and Pages looks pretty impressive, at least according to the PR material.
On the other hand, I don’t think Apple plans to go head-to-head with Microsoft just yet – having a Mac version of MS Office makes it easier to sell the computers to corporate customers, after all, and Bill Gates is not known for his restraint in trying to destroy competitors. That’s why Pages is only nibbling at the home user/small business side of the word-processing field for now. But the iWorks programs can get more and more features added later to improve their functionality, and Apple could slip in a database and/or a spreadsheet in the next revision…
Which is a silly notion, as the long-often-trotted-out car analogy demonstrates. Nobody looks at BMW’s share of the auto market and call them “beleagured,” for instance.
And considering that Apple just announced their highest quarterly revenue and net income ever, the notion that the company is in any sort of dire straits is outright laughable. 
Indeed.
Well, I really do hope for the best out of this product, as I simply love Macs (and fully concede it can be an irrational thing), and anything that’s good for Apple is good for me, I’m betting. I’ve my doubts about the Mini, but I’ll be pleased-as-punch if I’m 100% wrong. There’s been clamoring for a “headless iMac” for some time, and this is sorta it.
My advice, though? Wait a bit, if you can. The form-factor opens up some interesting possibilities. It is no exaggeration to say that the MacOS really shines brightest on multiprocessor machines. And for MP-aware apps., like Photoshop (which I rely on very heavily for processing, sometimes, hudreds of image files at a time), the impact of having that other processor can be jaw-dropping.
Fast-forward to the end of this year: Freescale has predicted they will be ramping up from sampling their 90nm dual-core system-on-a-chip (SOC), the MPC8641D, which is basically two G4 processors on one slice of silicon, including all the memory and bus controllers as well, and sporting an FSB that scales up to 667MHz. It will start at around 1.6-1.8GHz, drawing about 15W at that speed. Because all the controllers are on-chip, it can actually be a cost-saver in terms of price/performance, not to mention a space-saver. And that low power means it runs about as cool as the G4s in the Mini presently.
Now how effin’ cool would that be, to see a Mini or some other headless brick, driven by one of those things and a decent GPU? Is Apple just going to ignore this product? I hope not. At the very least, the MPC 7448, which will get up to at least 2GHz, use even lower power, and sport a FSB that scales up to 200MHz (and hence the system can make true use of DDR memory) is expected to be available in bulk by the end of the 1st half of this year. It’s 100% pin-compatible with the 7447 and 7447a, so if one wants, it’s a simple drop-in. I don’t know how Apple could resist using that. The Mini could probably be fanless, at lower speeds, like the Cube :D. Here’s hoping Apple moves fast on these things. I’m predicting the Mini will grow, and maybe grow very fast.
I am unloading an old G4 that wasn’t getting enough use anyway, and getting a Mini. I am so there.
I called both ClubMac and MacMall and asked about free RAM upgrades (I want to get at least 512 megs). They said that they are almost positive that they will offer some sort of deal but until they actually see the Mini (which is coming out the 22nd), they aren’t making any offers official. It is going to take a lot of intestinal fortitude for me to sit on my hands and wait that long to order. I want one so bad! (By the way, the MacMall and ClubMac people I talked to admitted that they’d been getting a lot of calls about the Mini. I seriously do not think that it will have trouble selling.)
I also checked out my favorite Mac message boards and most of them feel the same way I do. Many are going to buy one right off, or are going to “pick a few up” for family members or as “extras.” If/when MacMall/ClubMac offers their free RAM upgrade, the price is right.
I’ve got an external DVD burner so all I really need is the RAM upgrade. (I’m going to get the $600 model so I can have the larger hard drive.) I’ll use it on my LCD monitor and share it with my PC via a KVM switch. It should work out fine for me.
Since I’ve been using a 533 MHz G4 with a 16 MB video card for the last several years, the Mini will be a major step up—a major upgrade for me. I wish I could have more RAM, but I’ve run OS X, and apps like Photoshop, and Garageband (which I love) on an even slower G4 with 512 megs, and it did okay.
I watched Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech last night (Quicktime movie—you can see it on Apple’s site) and it was pretty cool—the crowd was waiting to hear about the Mini, and they were excited about it. Also, a preview of Tiger (OS 10.4), due to come out the first half of this year, looks great. There are some good improvements to iLife '05, too (iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, Garageband). Since I’ll be getting that bundled with the Mini, I’m all set there.
That’s a big “if”. IIRC, the majority opinion on Slashdot was that the iPod would fail miserably, and look how accurate that prediction turned out to be.
beagledave and I both thought the iPod was a bunch of hooey when it first came out. We were both wrong. I’m still amazed by its success. (Pleased, but amazed.) And we’re Mac people.
I am going by my own reaction, and the reaction on the Mac communities I’ve seen. I think that things are different now, because of the iPod. The iPod has brought “brand recognition” to Apple in a very good way. This puts the Mini is a good light.
It’s possible, however, that the Mini may sell well at first, and then taper off. But from where I’m standing, it looks good, at least for the short term. I suspect that the busy MacMall and ClubMac people think so too.
Small hijack: how does MacVector work for you? We are a Sequencher lab but it is sooo expensive (I think it is about $2000 for a license). I use consed/phrap/phred for large scale assemblies (another benefit of using a BSD-based system is that all of that stuff works immediately on OS X) but for the day-to-day small-scale cloning confirmation, contig assemblies, primer design, etc. I use Sequencher. With a 15 person lab and two licenses, it is usually adequate. But sometimes I wish I had an alternative…
As with yosemite, I am typing this on a G4 500 MHz with 512 MB RAM that I inherited after I went to a dual 1.8 GHz G5 at work (convinced my boss I needed it to run processor-intensive genomic searches). I am running 10.3.7 on the G4, burning DVDs (with a $50 writer), using GarageBand and iMovie with no real slowdown, and using Photoshop with confocal TIFFs of around 150 MB without serious stress to the computer. $500 for a Mac Mini would also be a real step up for me, but I think I’m instead going to buy myself a Powerbook when/if I graduate in March. We use essentially the same machines at work (G4 iMacs with 512 MB RAM) and they are pretty quick.
The more I think about it, I do think that this could work symbiotically with the iPod. What would be an excellent marketing move is to offer a package deal: $900 for a 40 GB iPod and a Mac Mini for use as a specific music managment server. Throw in wireless capability and one of those Airport Express Base Stations with AirTunes and sell it all for under $1000 as a home audio solution. That way, people can manage their iPods and listen to their stuff at home through any stereo in one quick sitting.
What I think would be the perfect solution is for Apple to port OS X to an Intel machine. That would be the absolute bomb. It would make my life so much simpler in so many ways – my wife and I have 3 desktop computers (Linux MP3 server, my primary Linux/XP dual boot, the old Mac) and they would all be effectively replaced if I could either afford a G5 for home or if they simply ported OS X to an PC compatible platform. But I suppose that would definitely tread on too many toes and Apple can’t afford to have Microsoft yank Office from them.
It’s awesome. I’d feel crippled without it. I know there are lots of alterhatives out there (many of them free), but they are a chore. We have a site licence, and the pisser is I can only use it at work, when I’m hooked to the network (due to the need for a KeyServer). I wish they would give us a USB dongle or something if we feel like doing some alignments or whatever at home, but no such luck. That’s why I’ve looked at the free alternatives. I couldn’t bring myself to use them. MacVector has totally spoiled me. It’s hard to talk about what it does, because what doesn’t it do? Well, I can’t design TaqMan oligos with it; otherwise, all my other molecular needs are met. Building vectors, cutting vectors, mapping vectors, working with chromatograms, the usual genomic search tools, ClustalW aligment, Pustell matrix, translations, generating consensus sequences, predicting reading frames, I’ve used it to generate mRNA sequence from a stretch of genomic DNA, and it appears to have worked perfectly, nucleotide and peptide sequence motifs, some structural predictors, generate phylogenies (don’t use that much, alas…haven’t cloned anything new in a while, what with everything being sequenced), some pretty decent primer and probe tools (if you don’t need fluorgenic PCR, like TaqMan or molecular beacons). I have so little experience with other commercial tools, I hesitiate to try to compare it. I used Sequencher long ago, but we’re talking many years ago now, before I joined the biotech Borg, so it’s probably evolved a lot since then. Both are pretty nice, and I think Sequencher may actually be better for the specific task of aligning sequences from a sequencing project, and handling all that info in an elegant way. But MacVector is servicible for those purposes.
Sure, but the difference is, this time the geeks are putting down their money for the mini.
(Now, if someone has a family-friendly way to turn the Mac mini into a home media server for my widescreen HDTV, I’ll be there…)
I decided not to wait for MacMall/ClubMac to decide what they were going to do with their free RAM deal. (Sometimes I see that they offer things for free–but it’s a mail-in rebate. I hate mail-in rebates. Plus, the “free” RAM comes with a $40 installation fee.) Don’t get me wrong, usually I love Club/Mall and I buy from them a lot, but I thought I’d get in the queue with the Apple Store now, since the cost probably won’t be that much different in the long run. Woo hoo! It’s the $500 model (1.25 GHz) with custom addition of 512 megs of RAM and the 80 GB HD. They predict 3-4 weeks to delivery.
I am definitely looking forward to it!
If you ever have the chance to read The 10 Immutable Laws of Marketing, niche marketing is THE way to make a company profitable - one of the laws clearly states that ALL marketing is niche marketing. So I’m not really sure why so many armchair marketing wizards believe it’s “universally recognized” that Apple is doomed.