translation: games
(There aren’t that many Mac owners who keep a PC around so they can run Lotus WordPro or QuattroPro.)
It also includes iOpal.
I just spent $15 for that.
Money well spent. Talent like that should be encouraged.
Oh, and “LOL”. 
I call into question that you need more than 256meg of RAM on one of these.
My wife has been using a G5 with 256meg for the last year, and she uses it to do graphics work that she brings home. More RAM would be nice, yeah. It would be nice if Apple would use el cheapo RAM, too. Need would be a bit strong of a word, IMHO. Swap works ok, you just need to wait a little longer sometimes. Speed is only really critical for real-time apps.
Well, you need it kind of like you need a car to get to work instead of your own two feet. Sure, both will get you there, but with the former it takes ten minutes, and with the latter it takes an hour. Virtual memory is not your friend. It’s like the loan shark who will lend you fifty bucks at 100% interest, and then beats the crap out of you when you run out of time. A G5 with 256Mb is like is like strapping a propeller on an SR-71 Blackbird and refusing to use the jet engine. Buy the RAM. Do deny yourself this advantage. It will, like, triple the speed of some of the tasks your wife does, at least. That’s not a joke. RAM is way, way faster than a hard disk, especially with the wicked-fast FSB in the G5. You’re just starving the processor and wasting cycles by the bushel to go any other way. There’s almost no point in having a processor that fast, if you’re not going to give it the memory it needs. As said above, OSX eats that 256Mb without even trying, and wants more. There’s practically nothing left for applications after that, so you’re swapping stuff off the HD fast-and-furious pretty much all the time, especially with imaging tasks.
ehhh, “Do not deny yourself this advantage” I mean.
Two hours and 13 minutes till the market closes and AAPL is up $5.82.
Woo Hoo! I’m rich! I’m rich!
Yep, as I said, it would be nice. Just like a supercharger would be nice on my vehicle. The need is about the same, though. I never said it wouldn’t be nice, I just said it isn’t necessary, especially when you are talking about an entry level machine. When the money is there, the RAM will appear in her machine shortly therafter. Until that happens, she swaps.
While I agree MacOS X runs okay on 256MB (heck, I’ve only got 384MB myself), it’s certainly not the kind of first impression I’d like to give for a new Mac user.
About Niche Marketing…
You gotta admit, though, with Apple and PC its a little different because there’s this niche market which apple caters to, and then theres’s this gigantic abusive behemoth that actually picks on small companies for sport. But the monopolistic tendencies of Microsoft seems to be biting it in the arse right now, if you ask me. They seem to be pushing in directions that nobody really cares about. The media center PC? Sure, its cool if it could replace TiVo, but is it really that special? What the hell is the deal with tablet PCs? I never understood that one.
But Apple could really do some damage to Microsoft by making a version of MacOS run on PCs. Then they could say… See how well it runs on a Mac? Dump your PCs! All you have to lose is your chains! Of course that would never happen because Microsoft would jerk Office out as soon as possible, and probably make it incompatible with older versions or something equally sadistic. But if I were Steve Jobs, I would continue to develop a Macintosh Office Suite like Office, but make it every bit as good and functional. I imagine that the Mac version would be better, because lets face it, any interface I’ve seen on a Mac has been better than on a PC. Simple. It all sounds like a diabolical plot to get back at bill gates for stealing his ideas with the original Mac.
1 Indroduce iMac to step of the coolness factor. There are tons of hipsters willing to sink down money for something with a brand name that is labeled as the new cool. These kinds of people don’t care whether or not Dell makes a similar one. Its gotta have that Apple on it.
2 Indroduce the iPod. This steps the cooless factor up another notch, plus all of the people get to use Mac software which is also very cool. Show them that not only does Apple represent cool and hip products, but a more evolved software design.
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Indroduce the Mac Mini. Now this is where you really get the payoff. All of these people that thought Macs were for nerds or fanatics now have a soft spot for Mac. Plus its cool, remember that. Only 500 dollars? you say? Well, hell, I gotta get me one! Its funny, but this was most certainly designed to entice PC users. Its the closest thing Jobs could come to unleashing a PC version of Mac OS. Instead of software, its a little box that could probably fit inside your PC. I mean, Windows XP costs 100 Dollars, and for 400 more you get an entire computer with lots of software. And you have to remember that this is Apple software included, not Mavis Beacon teachs typing. You get iLife, etc… Nice stuff.
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Introduce an Apple office suite. Tout the Mac Mini as the perfect computer for those who don’t want to think about spyware or security. It just works, and it does what you need it to. This is certainly true now. Maybe because of market share? i dont’ know, but its true at the moment, so it should be used as a selling point.
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Put MacOS out for the PC. This is the final step in the ultimate battle against Microsoft. Sure, they’ll never kill Microsoft, but I imagine that they could manage to at least gain a good bit of market share and shake Redmond up to the point to where they start innovating like they say they are doing.
Agreed. And I strongly suspect that the Mac Mini is being positioned for this exact application. It has the right form-factor and price-point. It is a small jump to upgrade the DVD, add a remote, and PVR software. Apple might be looking to capture the PVR market in the same way they caught the MP3 player market.
And it’s missing:
- A large HD for storing videos
- A video encoder (video->digital)
- A video decoder (digital->video)
- A tuner or 2 (for HD/SD broadcast)
- Any connections for video (composite/s-video/component)
- A facility for obtaining a channel schedule
I think there may be a few pieces missing that you haven’t accounted for. Not that Apple (or someone) couldn’t do this, but the Mac Mini isn’t that close.
Personally I do wish I could get a small desktop with these features.
It may kill Apple, though. Let’s face it: u$oft actually has had the greater challenge getting Window to run on the enormous variety of hardware configurations that constitute the PC/Wintel platform. That it doesn’t always run very well due to conflicts caused by different components of PCs not playing well together is hardly a surprise. Mac OSX is, in no small part, the shining example of stability and usability we see now because Apple has kept tight control on the hardware, along with the software that runs on it. They can handle the permutations well because they’re so few. If OSX was ported to the PC platform, my prediction is it would wreck the Mac experience. I think the only sensible route for Apple, if they ported to Intel and AMD processors, would be to only allow the OS to run on a limited set of PC configurations, so as to avoid the conflicts that dog Windows. Probably these would Apple-branded Macs with an Intel or AMD processor, and maybe a few licensees. Expect to pay a premium. And then what have you got? Well, native PC compatibility, which is nice. But essential? As many in the thread have asserted, the Mac has all the software the average user needs. In the end, what is there to be gained by porting?
External firewire hard drive.
You mean like these?
No, I think CaveMike is close to the money.
I’m not really interested in TVR, myself, but I wouldn’t mind using a Mac Mini as a media server/viewer. In which case, I think all I’d really need is an IR remote and the WiFi option…
Rjung: So, I assume you agree that a iMac Mini isn’t very close to being a DVR without quite a bit of enhancement? I can’t see how my post disagrees very much with yours.
My interpretation of your earlier post was that the Mac Mini needed a number of not-yet-available components to be a TVR/HMPC, and I was simply showing that the stuff is already available on the market today.
In any event, I sorta like the “roll your own” approach that’s available; instead of a one-size-fits-all(-poorly), you can simply add whatever features you want, and not buy the stuff you don’t. 
Kind of like what PC users have always done, but a bit more expensive?
And with additional stability, and no spyware, viruses . . .
I’m just sayin’ . . . 
Ah, so it’s like what Linux users have always done, but a bit more expensive.
And then what haven’t you got — in case y’all haven’t figured this part out yet? native Macintosh compatibility! You’ve got an Intel-native version of MacOS X and nary a single application to run on it.
Well, OK, since “you’re Apple” in this scenario, you port Safari and iTunes and the other software that Apple owns, but you still end up with a PC that can run the MacOS but not Photoshop, Acrobat, or Illustrator; not Word, Excel, or PowerPoint; neither Outlook (or Entourage) nor Eudora; no Firefox, no OmniWeb, no Opera, and even for Safari no Flash, no RealMedia, and nothing else that runs by the grace of third-party plugins; and no drivers for your digital camera, printer, scanner, display card, or infrared laser pointer-clicker, not unless Apple writes them all and bundles them with the OS.
I’m not saying that if they built it no one would come, but this is how it would start off, and Microsoft would be leaning all over companies to discourage them from porting their PowerPC Mac apps to the Intel Mac platform, while at the same time leaning all over hardware PC manufacturers to include Windows with the box but force customers to buy the Intel MacOS from Apple separately. And Microsoft might yank Office Mac entirely.
Meanwhile, to whatever extent the Intel MacOS did catch on among people who might otherwise buy a regular (PowerPC) Mac, Apple loses hardware sales. I suppose Apple could start manufacturing Intel PCs with MacOS Intel preinstalled, but that still means going head to head with Dell and Toshiba and Sony and so forth (if you can get a Dell much cheaper than an Intel Macintosh, you’d buy the Dell and install MacOS Intel on it).
So are you really seeing this as the ultimate Apple strategy for sticking it to Microsoft??