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Mac mini All About Movies?
bikerguy99 writes "Robert X. Cringely, who had a good nose for the Mac mini from the very beginning, has published another bit of his thoughts on PBS. This time he speculates that Mac mini is all about movies - his thoughts on the subject are quite logical and provide intriguing insights into Apple's interest in producing a cheap headless Mac in the first place."
It must be nice to be cringely. Just make a different totally random prediction every week, and you'll be hailed as a visionary because just by the law of averages at least some of your predictions will turn out to be true, sort of, eventually.
But one of the problems is a lack of HDTV tuner. You could get Elgato's EyeTV 500 to make your Mini Mac into an HD PVR but you're still lacking 5.1 digital audio. I don't know what you could do about that. If you're spending the $$$ to get an HDTV then you probably already have, or would want to get a nice 5.1 or 7.1 sound system. You wouldn't want to be stuck with stereo from you Mini Mac.
I'm not sure Cringely's HD movie service would catch on either. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure it would be very successful. One thing is certain though, a lot of people are going to have a lot of fun and do some cool stuff with their Mini Macs.
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I suspect a lot of peoople who are recommending PC alternatives aren't paying for the OS or the S/W, if you DIY a system you pay way over the odds for these compared to what a reseller adds to a bundled price (eg Dell).
Then there is support, do you want to do this or would you like help with it.
Ease of use. If you want a Nix then the Mac is something you can use and the wife. Can't say that of many.
Then there is size. It seems pretty hard to beat on the size front.
The Dell for instance will be large and noisy in comparison.
Now I'm as guilty as the rest, but has anyone stopped to consider that the mini is just a low-cost, small-footprint Mac aimed at potential switchers?
I suspect that deep down, we know that's all the mini is, but we're just trying to find some kind of rationalization for buying one. (I'll admit it: I've been wanting to get one to act as a dedicated server for my iTunes Library, a function I think it'd perform quite well.)
So what you're saying is that your internet pipe is faster than your hard drive? Tell you what I'll go buy you a nice 15k scsi disk, you buy me a new internet connection, k?
On the other hand, if you assume Cringely is right and that it's for downloads AND that those downloads will be faster than going to the rental store, you're left with only a couple obvious things:
1) Streaming. You'd be buffering for the 15 minutes of going-to-store then play and rely on the buffer.
2) You'll need a big pipe. The rate of 3-10Mbps for a dvd video (dunno about HD video) isn't likely to go down too much more with other compression. On the other hand, with cable companies talking about upping their service to 4Mbps or 6Mbps, and baby bells trialing FTTP that's approaching feasibility.
I'd mark it as more a 2k6 thing than 2k5 but who knows maybe it'll take off as a driving force behind FTTP. I'm sure I could figure something to use my bandwidth there for since I'm not a huge movie watcher.
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If the MPAA gets its way, you'll be renting these movies, not buying them.
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
And the fact that you're part of yet another one of these sales schemes doesn't make a difference.
Uh huh. Sure thing dewd.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
if by "crush" you mean it would have run anti-spy-ad-thing-a-jig daily as opposed to the mini. then yes. it would "crush" the mini.
Strange, I just ran a spyware checker on my sole XP machine for the first time in 3 months and didn't find anything but a few cookies.
Perhaps it is because I use decent browsers ?
The unofficial
When will people stop referring to Apple computer company as "MAC"?
Not only does MAC not make the Mac Mini (Apple does), MAC is an acronym, not to be confused with Mac(intosh).
I don't know *why* this bothers me so much, but it does.
*** For a better tommorow, change your life today ***
I'm also amused by the "what is it for" crowd.
I think it is aimed at exactly the sort of people who claim to know what it is for. It's a computer, so of course there are a bunch of things it could be used for, and the small form-factor gives you the all of the usual non-desktop options that SFF systems are used in. All of these people who are saying "it's for $foo" are really just projecting their own ideas, and will likely go out and buy one and use it for $foo. Those who are saying "oh wait, it can't actually be used for $foo, because it lacks $bar" will probably go out and buy one anyway, and buy the add-on required for $bar.
The "it's for $foo" people must be working out great for Apple, as free advertising. All of the pundits out there (including Cringely) are collectively declaring more uses for the Mac Mini than Apple's marketing department could ever dream up, and spreading the word more widely than Apple's advertising budget could ever afford.
Your rock of choice is this thing you mentioned called "AMD64." (No idea what that is. Never heard of it. I'm taking your word for it that it's a real thing.)
Never heard of AMD64? He's talking about the AMD chips (Athlon and Opteron) that are 100% compatible with x86 (think "Pentium") but are faster in just about every regard, no more expensive (sometimes cheaper), and also happen to run 64-bit code if you have any (think: more than 4 GB of RAM).
I'm sorry, but being excited about AMD64 is not a leet fanboy thing. They really are awesome processors, and they're beating the socks off of anything from Intel these days for the vast majority of high-end computing users.
But why? I really don't understand the draw of the mac as a server. The things people claim macs are good about have to do with intuitive gui, clean gui, conducive to productivity. These are not really important for servers.
What makes you say so? Imagine a small home network. It's quite obvious that in a home network, a silent machine running 24/7 might come handy - to share the printer among all home users, to share the internet connection via Airport/WiFi, to share the common iTunes Music Library for all the home users, to serve as a firewall for home network, to serve Apache to the outside world etc. Why do we rarely see setup like this in non-geeky households? Because it requires geeky skills on both Windows and Linux. That's why you think that servers don't need to be easy to setup and configure - because non-geeks don't even TRY. But if you use Mac Mini, you can setup all the services described above with a few clicks on intuitive icons ("Enable Web Sharing", "Enable Firewall", "Share iTunes Music Library", "Share Printer" etc). Plus - it's silent, so you don't need "server room" in your household, Mac Mini can provide all these services, like, anywhere you want. And just connect a keyboard/monitor whenever you want to change some services or configurations.
> Of course, but the other half of my reason is that PPC is inferior in terms of price/performance and hardware compatibility.
What fucking hardware compatibility? Everything is USB or Firewire these days and you know what: You can put the same PCI and PCMCIA cards into PCs and Macs.
You might miss a software driver, but guess what: Linux isn't there, yet, either.
By the way: This comes from a former Linux user who had Debian installed exclusively on my iBook 2.2 (arguably best Linux-supported PPC laptop) for more than 18 month until finally I gave up and dumped Linux for Mac OS X. Never looked back.
Free Manning, jail Obama.