Slashdot Mirror
PC Competition for the Mac mini?
Omega1045 asks: "When Apple announced their Mac mini last week for US$499, it caught my eye. Wanting to buy/build a small PC for my already cramped breakfast bar, I started pricing out similar PC hardware. The results startled me. It was very difficult to price a PC as small (6.5" x 6.5" x 2") as the Mac mini with comparable equipment cheaper than the Mac mini. Indeed, most of the configurations I found were more than the humble $499 of the Mac, often much more. To match price I often had to configure with a much bigger shuttle-style case. What computers are currently on the market to compete with this? When my wife asks for the 'cute little Mac', what PC can I buy instead that will take up as little space and do as much for the same price (or less)?" How long do you think it will take PC manufacturers to answer Apple's latest entry into the market?
Before all of the do-it-yourself system builders leap in, check out this post from Yesterday's discussion:
Leo McGarry said, and I can't think of a better summary,
"Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?
People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink."
Three Squirrels
I bought a fanless mini pc from CappuccinoPC. I don't see the exact model I purchased on their site, but it was close to this one:
http://www.cappuccinopc.com/slimpro-sp300-fanless
1.65"H x 5.75"W x 9.84"D
Slightly bigger than the mini-mac, and not as stylish.
They have a variety of other systems, some with fans, some without. Some of them come in a brushed silver color.
They have cases, barebones, and fully functional offerings. I bought a complete PC and it was under $600.
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
Yes, the Mac mini is a small form factor, and that's part of what makes it so appealing. However, the specs are all far from top-of-the-line: an older processor, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB HD, etc. etc. This all helps keeps the cost down. Trying to build something specifications-equivalent in a PC involves buying a low-end processor and a small motherboard to match (not to mention the other components), and I don't know if it can be done. The integration that Apple can pull together with its hardware enables low-end but tightly integrated computers such as the Mac mini to exist. The componentization of the PC world does not lend itself to a build-it-yourself Mac mini equivalent.
Firefox would include a speller checker
I use a great Firefox extension called Spellbound.
BBEdit, the preferred text editor of most Mac users who do dev work in text-based environments, is fairly cheap
One better: TextWranger -- basically BBEdit without a few things -- is now free.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.