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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?
My suspicion is that we will not see a "mini-killer" from the PC world for about six months to a year, if at all.
Apple thinks they are discovering a new market with the mini. If it turns out they are right, the Windows world will certainly rush to come up with something that reaches that market. Let's see what they could do:
The mini looks very similar to the eMac mobo, or possibly more like the G4 mobo with a single DIMM slot replacing the two SO-DIMM slots. The idea is, it's a laptop-class system in an ultra-small desktop box.
Now, Intel has been trying to find a way to compete with the lower heat and longer battery life of the iBook/Powerbook line for a long time, with very limited success, but they've recently gained a lot of traction with the new "Centrino" line of mobile processors.
Now suppose TI or Intel or some other company who has the capacity to do motherboard design comes out with a 5" x 5" Centrino mobo which uses standard-size memory.
They will probably use integrated video to save a few bucks, rather than patching on an ATI Mobility card the way Apple does, but nobody will care... this isn't a 1337 game system, it's an attempt at a mini killer. Integrated sound would also be likely.
It would probably support USB2 and VGA, and even hang on to PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, but scrap the parallel port and all but one serial port. Since they preserved the PS/2 Bus, it would cost almost nothing to bundle a keyboard and two-button mouse with it.
It would probably work with a standard Targus laptop power supply, and probably ship with a generic version of the same thing.
Instead of the laptop drive, make it a half-inch taller and put in a full-sized ATA HD.
Total cost to buy one of these units from HP, eMachines, or some other low-end company would be $349 and include a default installation of Windows XP Home Edition.
The problem is, hard-core PC users will have spent the better part of a year convincing themselves that such a design is strictly for those gay-ass Mac-heads, and spend their money on a conventional tower system.
The lack of DVI would make it less suitable for the entertainment system (most of your better projectors and HDTV systems now support DVI inputs), and the lack of Firewire or 802.11g/Bluetooth antennas makes it actually harder to expand than the mini, which (let's face it) is not a particularly flexible machine by PC user standards.
If they are really smart, they will spend the extra money to preserve that other staple of PC laptops: The PCMCIA slot. This will present the opportunity to add Firewire, wireless networking, and a few other things which mini users will already be taking for granted.
But like I said, nothing like this is likely to happen until after the industry witnesses the Mac mini selling like hotcakes, and then they will need a couple months of R&D to react.
There's actually a chance that the mini will turn out to be the "Mac cube" of 2005, in which case nobody will bother to copy it, and after it's discontinued used minis will sell for above the original retail price on eBay, just because it will become such a curious novelty of days gone by.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Not much to learn, really. Replance CTRL for Command (Apple key) for most functions, and then you know what to do if coming from a Windows world. CMD+C = copy, CMD+V = paste, etc.
I got my first Mac in March of '04, and within a few hours of just fooling around, I was moving just as quickly as I do on Windows. Now, after using it lmost exclusively for the past 9 months, I do things much fater on it than I could on my Windows box.
It's seriously easy as hell to learn, and plug in a USB multi-button mouse and work like you do on Windows for most things (only thing I miss is clicking the scroll wheel and moving up or down to quickly scroll through documents and such). Other than that, the OS is a snap to use.