Slashdot Mirror
Mac mini to PC Hack
DiZASTiX writes "Kevin Rose, the ever so popular host of G4/TechTV's The Screen Savers, has managed to fit a PC inside the Mac mini. 'I've seen a ton of articles around the web lately comparing the Mac mini to the near full size desktop PC. What they fail to compare is the amount of computing power per square inch you get with the Mini. So, I decided to take it upon myself to create the fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the Mini's small form factor.' The article covers most everything he did and includes pictures."
Well, fun would be in hiding a McIntosh motherboard inside an nonymous PC case. Now, *that* would puzzle the standard user. "Hey, how may I lower-right-side-button double-click with this mouse?" ;-)
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
Can we get tomshardware to do a review on this thing?
The deatils are so little, we don't really know about its weight, performance, heat issues and total cost. The only obvious thing is it doesn't have a CDROM.
And even if it is possible to build a PC the size of a Mini Mac with exactly the same specs (performance, weight, cost, color and whatnot), I bet not many people are going to rush out and get one soon.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
http://mirrordot.org/stories/6404fabef80b3d41d5894 e6b0d250d83/index.html
The server is already pretty slow.
What I first saw...
Apparently they fit Half-Life 2 inside the Mac Mini also. Is there anything hackers can't do?
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Seems like Slashdot has the Mac mini-news-o-matic up and running at full speed. Not that I blame them, it's so hip it can barely see over it's pelvis...
Not that I don't think that's a cool or challenging thing to do, but how exactly is that a hack?
There are some people in this world who should be removed in order to spare us their crushing banality.
After all, he can always ship the original motherboard over here, I'm sure that somebody would take very good care of it. ;-)
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
power per square inch you get with the mini
That's what I keep trying to tell her. But it's all about size, size, size...
No way is a 1 GHz Via Nehemiah going to be faster than a 1.25 GHz G4. The mini is already one of the fastest PCs (personal computer, this includes macs by the way) that has been fit into such a small space.
I have an Epia system; to me it feels pretty anemic for its clock speed in comparison to say a PII or better.
From the article: "Additional thoughts: Due to size restrictions, fitting a CD-ROM drive in the mini enclosure would be impossible with this motherboard. Luckily, this motherboard supports pretty much every external bootable device, including bootable CD-ROM and USB thumb drives."
You should not only fit a CD-ROM, but actually a DVD-RW combo. In other words, you have failed to fit a PC in Mac Mini, so comparing its speed or price is quite pointless. I hate to say it as a PC user, but the result of this experiment is clear: Mac: 1, PC: 0.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
And then there are people who login to Slashdot merely to complain about how boring other Slashdotters are.
It hardly even has rubber feet you insensitive clod!
...but seriously, I agree. It does seem a bit prompt to have Mac Mini news just >= 1 week after release.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
So he takes everything inside the case that makes a Mac a Mac, guts it, and puts in everything that Apple hopes people are leaving behind for the Mac.
I have to admit, it has a kind of black symmetry to it.
The coolest voice ever.
The http://www.cappuccinopc.com/ has been out long before the Mac Mini, and the original was even a smaller form-factor, with modern P4 variants just slightly larger.
Anyway, this whole article is missing the point. Cheap OS X is good for everybody! I wouldn't buy a PC that small even though there's the option...
I guess Apple decided to give all those nerds that insist on "upgrading" their Macs with a PC mobo a challenge. :) /greger
The first worthwhile thing G4 has done since Leo left.
Call me Rip Van Winkle, because I must have taken a nap for too long and missed out on the beginning of perhaps the most annoying, selfish comments to hit blogdom. It's like the freakin' Avon of the Internet on that page with everyone trying to get referrals for their own mini Mac.
Give the man props for his work on his site, don't be a smarmy pissant and use the popularity of his work to increase your chances at winning a Mac mini. If it's so precious and you have to have it, sell your current machine, get a part time job, and actually make the $500 it takes to buy the thing.
I am curious as to how many blog sites have a commenting community with so much self-zeal. I feel sorry for the frequent site visitors, who must find it necessary to wash themselves vigorously with soap and scalding hot water.
"We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream."
Schmendrick the Magician
Is still on the air? Before the Comcast merger, I did tivo the Screensavers. I have never seen a product or company turn to such complete and utter crap, so quickly almost instantly, after a merger.
Look everyone! I've figured out how to put my Ford engine, stereo, and electrical system into my Porche! Read all the details at www.whywouldiwanttodothis.com
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
I thought this was cool, until the "can't fit a CD-ROM" part.
All this proves is you can fit a lower-powered nano-ITX mobo in the same case as a Mac Mini, and power it up. But it's not the same, nor even complete...
It was a cool experiment, but not a sucessful one... Hat's off to the Mac design team for shoving that much stuff into such a small box.
Due to size restrictions, fitting a CD-ROM drive in the mini enclosure would be impossible with this motherboard.
I'd say his project failed. The whole idea of such a device is to not have all sorts of other bricks (like external media) plugged in. Esp if it is to sit next to the nice 36" LCD TV (of course using DVI connector) and act as a media box.
3. Insert even less useful "PC crap"
How was this modded insightful?
I've been anxiously waiting for the Nano-ITX motherboard (http://www.viaembedded.com/product/epia_N_spec.js p?motherboardId=221).
No, it doesn't have firewire but it supports up to 6 USB 2.0 ports.
No, his version doesn't have WiFi or Bluetooth but there is a Mini-PCI slot to add those things yourself (for far less than Apple would charge).
Also, there are some configurations of the board that are fanless. It's a shame that Kevin hadto use a board with such a huge fan/heatsink because that consumed most of the space inside the case and adds noise. If he used a fanless version he could have had plenty of room for a Slimline slot-loading optical drive.
I'm not trying to discount the Mac Mini (I'd love to have one) but I also think people should understand the potential of the Nano-ITX motherboard. It's soon going to be showing up in a lot of cars, entertainment centers, etc...
Not anymore.
What they also fail to compare is the amount of bugs, security vulnerabilities, viruses, and spyware per square inch you get with a windows based PC.
Because everything running on x86 is Windows®.
But, yes, you're right - the point of the mini is to get a nice reasonably powerful box that takes up no space, costs very little and runs OS X.
Its big selling point is not its size, or even price, but that it works out of the box, with decent (relative to others at least) tech support. I'd like to see it compared to XBox2 instead of a PC, in fact I hope it catches on as a kind of TVpod- a dedicated media player for HDTV
Good lord, every other entry in the discussions below that linked story were "click me for free mac mini". Idiots and their pyramid schemes...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Tell me when you get a 3.4 ghz P4 and a Radeon x850 for $500.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Um, the computer takes up a 3 dimensional volume, so the proper measure is power per cubic inch. You could make the power per square inch anything you want just by changing the height and footprint, it's arbitrary. So that's a meaningless measure.
You need power per cubic inch.
I think it's cool, but there are significant caveats acknowledged in the linked story not mentioned in the article above.
The Nano-ITX motherboard used is not commercially avalible - and it will not be avalible for general sale for some months yet. The author points outs that even using this yet-to-be released motherboard, there was no room for a CD/DVD drive. It also does not feature a built in modem or a 'Firewire' port (but I don't think that's a big deal). It doesn't appear to feature WiFi or Bluetooth either, but there certainly seems room to fit them easily.
It features a 1 Ghz Via C3 CPU (and either a Via or S3 graphics card), so performance could be a problem if you wish to use this as a 'home entertainment' device (or well, pretty much anything other than a low traffic headless sever or simple web browsing/email device IMO, YMMV).
On the plus side it appears to have S-Video, Composite and VGA output (no DVI, but a lot more useful to most people I'd think), additional input and output audio interfaces and two SODIMM slots (which I think is better than than the single DIMM on the Mac Mini, but again YMMV).
5.82"(W) x 10.0"(D) x 2.79"(H)
that is a nano itx board, it hasnt even came out yet, ALL mini-itx boards are WAY to big for a mac mini.
keanmarine.com
Wow. Now all he has to do is cram a SPARC inside the PC inside the Mac Mini and he'll have Electronic Turducken.
--
Free iPod Photo: http://FreeiPodPhotos.com/index.php?referral=2546
Free Mac Mini: http://www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=13941255
- Rob Wilco
The specs you link to show that it has a max processor speed of 500Mhz. The Mac mini goes up to 1.4Ghz. They say that a celeron can go higher, but not 900Mhz higher.
And for sake of argument, even if the the celeron could get itself up 1.4ghz, it would not offer the same actual performance of a G4. This is the age-old argument about the architectures being so different that the clock speeds don't matter, but it cannot be stressed enough. The CISC-based Intel/AMD processors are not as efficient at getting work done as the RISC-based PowerPC processors.
I like the analogy of a person physically moving 1,000 boxes from one side of the house to the other. The CISC person might be able to get from one side to other (and back) in 2 seconds, but each time he does he can only carry a single box with him, so it would take 2,000 seconds to move all boxes. Whereas the RISC person might take 5 seconds to make the same round-trip distance, but each time he can carry 20 boxes, so it takes a total of 250 seconds (5 seconds * 1000 boxes / 20 boxes-per-trip). The numbers I used are not meant to exactly correlate to a Celeron vs. G4, but they convey the right idea - efficiency and speed are not equivalent.
You could even set up darWine or some other sort of emulator on it and tell people its a prototype for the XBox 2. Nah..., that's just too evil!
the result of this experiment is clear: Mac: 1, PC: 0.
Nonsense. Give Dell or HP a little time and motivation, and I'm sure they could pull it off. Hell, maybe IBM has a patent rotting in a drawer somewhere to help this kind of thing.
The result of this experiment is more like:
Lame tinkerers with way too much time: 0
Everyone else: 1
The coolest voice ever.
I'm sorry, but that thing you link to is four inches deeper, and almost a whole inch taller than the Mac mini. Who would want a beast like that?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Logic - 5.82"(W) x 10.0"(D) x 2.79"(H)
Mini - 6.5" (W) x 6.5"(D) x 2.0" (H)
Been there, done that, spent less? Don't think so...
The mini is smaller.
The mini is more than likely less noisy.
The mini comes standard with certain things you might need in a computer, such as:
- hard drive
- cd rom
- processor
- memory
- operating system
The base price of the Sumicom PC is cheaper, but I doubt you'd actually build that PC for less than the price of the mini (especially if you actually paid for Windows *gasp*; Linux excluded).
Not to mention the Logic device is just plain fugly.
While I agree that a Cheap-o OSX box is awesome in-and-of itself, I disagree that Kevin misses the point. Many people have accused the the Mac Mini of being a poor value because it matches the price of an entry-level Dell pc but doesn't include a keyboard or display.
The point of Kevin's article (or at least, what I took away from it) was that it's damn hard to match the value of the mini when you consider it's size. Even with the Mocha PC it starts at $495, and that is without RAM, a hard drive, CPU, or even a CD-Drive!.
You know, the last time somebody gutted a Mac and put a PC motherboard in it, and had the gall to post it to Slashdot... I believe that person was lynched, if I'm not mistaken.
In fact, any sourcecode stored on the same system as GPL softwares must be released under the GPL. This is a big issue at my firm and is forcing us to return to Macos 9.
It's cool that he did this, and of course Nano-ITX is the only way to do it with off-the-shelf parts. It would be nice to compare the Mac Mini to a Nanode, which is at least in the same league style-wise (IMHO).
:-). I don't know if anyone does a nano-ITX mobo that would take a Pentium-M but one might hope...
But if you want to really compare platforms you need to take the processor into account, and for that it would be more realistic to put the Pentium-M up against the G4. And maybe also run BSD on it
As an aside, I think it's funny how the kids spammed up his comments section with FreeMiniMac MLM schemes.
Still think I'm going to buy one though... maybe when Tiger ships and someone has a sufficiently cool iKVM.
This Like That - fun with words!
I would like a Mac mini myself, but my plans are pretty much to buy one when budgets allow I cannot believe how many people are suckered into this weird pyrami scheme and then flail around wildly seeking other victims to torment.
I would say that time would be better spent hawking things you really do not need on eBay in order to raise funds.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I assume they mean "computing power per cubic inch".
Otherwise what area are they talking about? Footprint? In that case my 1.5 metre tower case would have more computing density than your desktop G4.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
What did it cost him to put a PC into the space Apple engineers er...engineered so precisely for their own hardware?
- Wireless
- Bluetooth
- Optical drive
- Probable heating issues later
- SODIMM slots = more expensive RAM
- OS X, iLife, etc.
Also, Rose doesn't mention the cost of his parts, but I'd guess that, for the specs of the baseline mini even without the optical drive it would likely come to WELL over $500. That mobo in particular looks to be fairly pricey.
I'm not asking "What's the point?" but rather, saying "There is no point." This is just a geek's homebrew project, and a waste of a perfectly good Mac mini.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Interestingly to make a *mostly* comparible Cappuccino, costs over $1,000. That's for a similar MHZ clock speed, but I don't know what the deal is with Video Ram, so it might cost more...
I didn't see it mentioned in the article but the mini has a small form factor and a small price tag.
Yes, unfortunately they're all bigger than the mac mini and incomplete. When you add all the other bits you'll need (a hard drive for example) they're way more expensive.
It should be per cubic inch. :)
This has about as much charm and practicality as the home lobotomy kit: yeah, I could do it, but WHY?
Less RW than a floppy. No wireless. Lame.
This is...
O
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R
A
G
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S
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...that (as of this posting) 28 of the 42 comments - 66% - to the blog post referenced in the summary are people spamming their "free Mac mini" referral links, some totally brazenly?
Since these schemes are classically mathematically pyramidal by nature, how long before this bullshit overtakes blogs and forums just as the "MAKE MONEY FAST" shit on USENET did?
For an even more useful comparison, how about computing power per unit density, all restricted to a $499 budget.
Paul Grosfield - the quicker picker upper.
he should stick one of these on it: http://ohlssonvox.8k.com/fdd_raid.htm
Go get a surplus laptop machine. Junk the display, remove the entire case, separate the machine from the keyboard. Remove the battery. Take what's left and drop it in a cheap plastic box with cutouts for the power supply, the CDROM, PCCards and whatever ports you have. Hopefully you'll have a USB port. Plug in your power supply, monitor, USB keyboard.
Voila a 'desktop' PC no bigger 12x3x0.75 inches
Uh, the mocha 5043 is smaller than the mini. 5.75" x 6.18" x 2.28" is smaller than 6.5x6.5x2 . And a 40GB hard drive is not that expensive; adding one still makes the mocha price competitive with the Mini.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
None of the pictures on the page show the PC mobo going into the case. The picture called fit.jpg shows the mobo sticking out at the bottom left. The last couple of shots show no indication that the case has anything in it other than a normal Mac Mini.
I'm not saying that these guys haven't done what they said they've done but it would have been good to have some pictures of the back of the machine with the ports or perhaps some re-assembly shows so we could see just how tight the fit is.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
We Todd Ed
Kevin's first slashdotting... Sara must be so proud!
Face it people, apple makes cheap and affordable computers in the middle range, and have done for a while. I've been looking especially for a small laptop, around 12". And which one is the cheapest I can find? Thats right, apple ibook. All the other manufactures sell their small laptops as "ultra portable" and takes out a higher price then for their 15". But with apple the 12" laptop is there smalles and thereby cheapest laptop.
I'm not an Apple zealot. The only thing that has brought me into thinking of buying an ibook is the price. But if you have a better deal, please prove me wrong. I really need an affordable small laptop.
Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?
People who hate Windows, don't want to get caught up in the learning curve or zealotry of Linux, and have been waiting for an inexpensive Mac to become available.
Ever since I got my Powerbook, I've had several friends ask to look at it and use it, and said they'd really like to switch to OS X if only the hardware was affordable. Now it is.
Notebook computers are fast too; they have fast Macintosh notebooks and fast x86 Notebooks; you can get Athlon 64 notebooks now.
And nevermind the hogwash about "more surface area to cool" like someone else mentioned; a notebook has a lot less height for all the components, and instead of putting the CD-Rom on top of the guts, they put them on the side. I don't see how the cd-rom and battery compartments are going to help cool the unit.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Lame.
Seriously it's a fair point -- who the hell would actually want to use this thing? I understand that it's cool to do something new or unexpected with a piece of technology, but why go out of your way to make something so much worse than it is? Hell, this would be a lot cooler if he put an aquarium into the mini.
Seriously, the nanode is almost exactly the mac-mini. If only via had been able to produce the board on-time, it would have been first to market. Now it's going to be a couple of months behind.
Except that you still have to add the slot loading DVD/CD-RW drive and the operating system.
Do you think this will void his Apple warranty?
So, if I gut my Mac Mini and shove a nanoITX preproduction board in the case and cut a big hole on the back of it to accomodate for the different port layout, does that void my warranty? I want an official Apple spokesman's word on this, not some third-party Mac enthusiast rumor site. Come on, someone's got to know.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
bust the screen off and then it's probably close. So yes, the mini is basically an iBook stacked up vertically. But it's still cool :-)
The Matrix is going down for reboot now! Stopping reality: OK. The system is halted.
I don't know if all you mac-heads remembered, but this guy used OFF THE SHELF components. The Mac Mini motherboard is custom made for the case. You could build a motherboard for a 2.2 GHz Pentium M, 8X DVD Burner, and 128 MB Radeon 9700 Mobile in the same case, if you were an all powerful Taiwanese MB manufaturer and you thought there was a market for Mac Mini to PC Mini converstion parts. With the stuff that is off the shelf, it is in no way shaped to fit in that little wierd case, so you have a lot of wasted space. The Mac Mini is basically an iBook without the battery, LCD, and keyboard. No one is claiming that the iBook is the most powerful 4 lb laptop.
"Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?"
Good question, and thanks to a disaster with my PowerBook Saturday, I have my own input. Had you asked that earlier, I would have said the target audience was rather vague...perhaps people that wanted to test out the Mac, the Mac cultists, and a handfull of switchers. It's the price point that erases all the "well the Mac is too expensive" excuse that many people have.
After a nasty power issue with the laptop, I've had to take it in for repairs. Aw criminy...what to do? Can't really afford a new G5 or anything...ayeee! But wait...only $499 for the Mac Mini? That's a perfect solution. I can just use that temporarily, it's got a decent processor, is small...yeah...that's the ticket. And then I can use it as a database server when I get my PowerBook. Totally beats buying a G5 (even though I want one) or something used off of eBay.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
Linux is free. And for the Mac mini to compete, you've got to add an irda adapter, a serial convertor, and a parallel convertor. It's price comparable. I was saying that they were similar products that existed at similar price points. The mac has a slight price advantage now due to the fact that this is segment of the market that hasn't really been tapped before, but the advantage will be short-lived. Finally, I personally prefer tray-loading, as the mechanism is more reliable and I can play damn near anything on it.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
You're missing the point, like most people on this forum, seemingly. Fact is, outside of the tiny minority of humans that constitute the "geeky" market segment, the vast majority of people who buy computers really honestly couldn't give a crap about either "raw horsepower" or "small form factor". They just want a computer that is NICE TO USE and is not overly expensive. Read that part in caps again ... PCs just do not fit the bill (certainly neither Windows nor Linux), Mac Mini does.
You can do whatever you like to a PC, make it fast, small, whatever, doesn't matter, because no matter what you do it will still be "just a PC". Until someone makes a decent, usable operating system for the PC platform, I'll stick with the Mac, because I'd actually like to be able to use a computer for more than a few hours straight without wanting to put a brick through the screen.
I'm sorry for you if you think that only a "Mac cultist" would think Mac's have a vastly better designed operating system that is also more aesthetically pleasing .. obviously you haven't even used a Mac. Windows sucks no matter how much "raw horsepower" you give it, and Linux is not ready for Joe Public.
This article reminds me of a previously defiled G5 found at
http://www.overclockers.com/tips1133/.
Obscene. (something about failing to learn from history and repeating it).
If Kevin could start with specs for a PC motherboard and have one built to the proper dimensions, with the proper heat sink and/or fan and clearance for the proper optical drive, would this have been more fair?
In other words, Apple started out by spec'ing a mobo size (just slightly smaller than mini-itx, as someone already pointed out), and they went from there. If they had to use off-the-shelf G4 PowerPC mobos, would they have come as close as Kevin did?
At the end of the day, a broad range of formfactors and features is just better for us. If someone comes out with a suitable motherboard for mini-mac-like designs based around x86[-64], we win again.
You seem to be missing the point - along with a loty of Mini apologists around here. This was not done to replace the Mini. There's such a thing called the Do It Yourself culture that Apple users will never understand. It's about the satisfaction of doing something with your own hands, the harder the better. Just because from your chair you don't see a point does not mean there's none.
Yeah, and about the part with it costing more - OF COURSE it costed more. First, he BOUGHT THE MINI. Second, it's ridiculous to compare production costs of a corporation with homebrew assemblies of non-commodity parts (no, I don't think n-ITX will qualify as commodity; for the matter, laptop drives almost don't, either) Apple will buy bulk and get better prices even if you used the same freaking parts, were all of them available.
Whatever happened to 'news for nerds' - you actually get a story that would qualify and most of the the comments might as well have been 'he should have given me the Mini instead of commiting this sacrilege' Get over yourself, the world is bigger than your computer screen.
This thing seems more comparable to a Mac Mini in terms of price/performance. While the intel video chipset may suck a lot more, it's not like you'd be playing many 3D games on a Mac anyways. You'd probably have to file off the ugly ass contouring as well to make the IWill look decent.
I don't work for any of these companies, I was just browsing for something else and thought this was sort of cool.
Now if Mr. Rose could just get a PC to run OSX, he'd be all set...
I suggest you take your own advice and re-read the GPL, carefully this time, you couldn't be more wrong.
BTW most useful OpenSource code is LGPL, which allows you to link to the compiled libraries without releasing any of your source code at all.
To make an even crappier Mini? Less powerful CPU. Less powerful graphics system. No DVD drive. Yep, great job there Kevin!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
"The CISC-based Intel/AMD processors are not as efficient at getting work done as the RISC-based PowerPC processors."
You're so far off the mark, its hard to know where to start.
Okay, lets start with this...
There is no such thing as CISC and RISC processors these days. Even the intel compatible chips are RISC based and they emulate the x86 instruction set.
What you're saying was true, oh around the time the mac had the PPC 603e CPU.
Second. AMD chips run much slower than Intel chips. Yet they're wicked fast. The AMD Opteron is simply king of the hill right now. They have all the architectural advantages of the G5 (even 64 bit), but they're 40% faster. So AMD is simply king.
And I have a new G5, but for basic stuff like running PAR's and uncompressing large files, my Dell 3.2ghz P4 simply runs rings around my iMac G5 1.8ghz.
There is a mhz (or ghz) myth, yes. But with all that said, state of art AMD chips simply are faster than anything the PPC line has right now. Check the benchmarks.
Maybe in height, don't know how high a mini-itx board is, but 6.5x6.5 inches for a mac mini vs 6.7x6.7 for mini-itx, I wouldn't exactly call that "WAY too big"... Of course, there's also the issue of the rounded corners on a mac mini mainboard vs straight corners on mini-itx, but overall both mainboard types are comparable in size.
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?
I've owned a pIII-1000MHz Cappuccino since 2001 (I now have a second one) and most noticeable difference to the Mac Mini is the fan noise. There is a very small fan that cools a copper heatsink over the desktop processor mounted inside the Cappuccino. Due to the size constraints of the case, they move the required volume of air to cool the desktop CPU by having a fan with high rpms. High rpms of the fan make it sound like a hairdryer going off on your desk.
The sound really gets to you after a while, it's a very high-pitched whine that carries and is hard to drown out. I ended up hiding the unit behind a couch and making a sound baffle for it because it was so loud. Eventually I got a laptop that is way quieter. I'm still glad I got the Cappuccino because it was perfect for what I needed it for: using with my monitor at home, chucking in my courier bag for my bike ride to work, and then using with my monitor there. Also, at the time it was way faster than any laptop available and had the added bonus of being cheaper.
I just wish they'd included the earplugs.
no they are not, the motherboard in the mac mini is 5x5" so its ALOT smaller than the mini-itx boards
keanmarine.com
I wouldn't want the crappy keyboard dell gives you anyways. Those just end up in the trash in about 2 days around here. Apple has saved me the effort of throwing away a junky stock keyboard.
A super low-end LCD for "free" is kinda neat though. Not that I'd use it on the system, it might be fun to plug into the router or playstation.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Remember, the Dell crams a a few things into that space that the Mac Mini doesn't. Like a screen and a keyboard.
What the hell .. he tried to ruin a $500 piece of art by inserting a $200 piece of crap. Why would anyone ever do such a thing? I smoked my last cigarette on Dec 31, 2004 and I used my last Windows based PC on Jan 15, 2005. I'm not sure which one makes me feel better. The Mac Mini has put the fun back into computing. Almost like the first time I played with a palm. Well worth the $500.
Zoid.com
The mini comes with an S-Video/composite adapter, a TV-out adapter for a little extra, just like their laptops.
when will people learn that the whole point of having an index page (index.php) is that you DO NOT need to show it on the URL. Since it is the default page, it is implied and you do not need to show it
b ecomes: http://www.kevinrose.com/?option=value
ex: http://www.kevinrose.com/index.php
becomes: ex: http://www.kevinrose.com/
or with parameters...
ex: http://www.kevinrose.com/index.php?option=value
I dont mean to pick on Kevin because I see this on most major websites around the net.
That's why I bought my iBook, and because of the iBook I bought a MDD G4. Hell, I figured OSX was just a curiosity, and I ran OpenBSD on the iBook for a while, but then... I had to try OSX... and got hooked. If you start right out with OSX you'll be amazed, like I was when IPhoto recognized my camera without configuring -anything-. That's what did it for me.
I was on eBay the other day to see how much new Mac mini's were going for - and found onl one Mac mini for sale, but seemingly thirty or fourty offers for "inof on free Mac minis"!!
Worse than that is that some of the item descriptions are really deceptive and lead you to think you're bidding on a real Mac mini. eBay buyers are pretty much staying away in droves though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
http://gotvision.org/ROCK/images/contortionist.jpg
:)
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
"This is like listening to the Beatles sing an Oasis song."
Because I think this quote is very appropriate right now.
Having a small computer has always been a goal for a lot of people. For me I've always had a laptop (because I value the compact size and ability to move) and was just about to buy a mini ITx box as I wanted a decent HTPC.
Then the Mac mini came out. It offers a desktop that people can really move around the house or take other places easily, kind of the poor-mans laptop that you can only carry where you get video. The overall sales of laptops indicates that a lot of other people value small and perhaps the mini is a desktop some people would consider that would otherwise be getting a laptop.
I'm sorry you are unimpressed with OS X, I suggest you give it a little time, or sell it on eBay for a handsome profit. What exactly do you find "stupid" about it?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I probably have some friends I could stand to trade in, but as of yet my self-respect is still worth more than $500. :-)
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hmmm, lets see. With OS X we already have a workable model available for purchase. With Windows, we have to rely on a guy 'working in his lab with spare parts.' Sounds like Apple 1, PC 0 to me... for now.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
If you never posted this I would've never seen Looking Glass. I can imagine that hotness running smoothly on a Mac Mini too...after I drool over the OS X GUIs.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Bugs are nice, as are Macs, but they're no Porsches.
Well, in a way Bugs *are* Porsches. They were designed by Ferdinand Porsche before he left VW and founded the company that's named after him. Take a look at the really old Porsche Speedsters from the '50s - they share a *lot* of design elements with Bugs.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
Sure a lot of Apple fans will buy one (though I've not ordered one). But that was most of the sales the first few days.
Since then the wait for a new order is still quite long, so many people do seem to be ordering them.
So who would buy a Mac MINI?
People wanting new computers and tried of PC's. People wanting new computers that already have bits (like monitors) but don't want to spend a lot. People with laptops that would like a backup computer. People who want a computer in the entertainment center.
There are a lot of people that can see a reason to buy a Mac mini. And it's cheap enough that a lot of people figure "why not?".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They also rip audio CDs to MP3s at nearly the same rate.
I/O bound! I/O bound! No Compact Disc Digital Audio ripper will go much past 48x max (really about 36x over the entire surface of the disc) because a drive that spins the CD much faster than that will break it.
The only negative is the total GHz for PPC CPUs available is lower.
Which can translate to lower current drain and thus a lower electric bill.
The CISC/RISC divide stopped being such a big deal with the release of the original Pentiums because they decoded CISC instructions into RISC-like internal instructions, allowing them most of the same advantages.
Not exactly. About half the non-cache die area of a modern Pentium or Athlon CPU is spent on the various stages of decoding and scheduling i386 bytecode, and the smaller set of general-purpose registers of i386 (8) vs. ARM (15) or PPC (31) introduces more loads and thus more data hazards for instructions after a load. A simpler instruction set could make the decoder smaller, thus decreasing total die size and making the CPU cheaper to build (higher yield) and cheaper to run (less current drain), or allowing more space for L2 cache.
He could install osX in PearPC and request repair for it "running slow".
Seriously though, if you tend to burst from your personal bias and yet you want to appear at least somewhat objective, then my suggestion would be to try to put at least some effort into doing so. Otherwise you'll just end-up sounding stupid.
Cheers!
The heat sink was too large for the case...
I'll bet that thing sounded like a wind tunnel when you turned it on.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Lame tinkerers with way too much time
I'll bet someone once characterized a young Leonardo daVinci in that manner...
BMW's aren't the fastest cars on the road, but they're still plenty fast. Anyone with some mechanical skill can turbocharge a Dodge Neon or something and end up with more bang-for-the-buck, but it's just not the same.
...now that that analogy is wearing thin, let me address a couple points...
I'd be surprised if we don't see a PC variant with better specs within a few months. -- Me too! Apple always has a bunch of companies rushing to implement a knock-off of it's current design. (I'm not saying that Apple never takes other peoples ideas, I'm simply saying that when they announce something big/cool, other companies copy it in droves. There are too many examples to list, but here's a few: System7, iPod, Titanium PowerBook, etc.)
Other than the SFF community who are they targeting? Are most Mac/PC users going to give up significant amounts of horsepower to save a couple inches of space? -- I don't think the Mac mini is meant to be the fastest, most upgradable machine they have. In fact, I would speculate that most people buying a Mac mini are buying it as a second computer. I think it has 2 target markets, one of which is more important than the others:
You are quite right about this. I have built a few different prototype systems using VIA ~1GHz CPU's (I work at an embedded system development company) and usually they achieve about the same average speed (VIA processors are better at some things and poorer at others) as a PIII 600 or a new Celeron of similar clock speed. Having a special feature for encryption is of course nice _if_ you really need it but useless most of the time. Overall ultra low voltage Celerons and Pentium M's have more performance/Watt, which is what really counts when there must not be any moving parts in the system and heatsinking must therefore be structural.
Also, as other people have stated before me putting a nanoITX into the Mac Mini case is really stupid feature-wise. Apple has probably spent quite a lot of R&D money to produce such a compact and powerful unit, it is really in an altogether different class than some hobbyist hacks.
Add irda and parallel? Why not add an 8 inch floppy drive and a punchcard reader? Apple already dropped parallel in 1984, and last shipped a Mac with irda in 2001. Why would they add such outdated crap back on? And what do you really need a serial port for?
Let me start off by saying I own a powerbook, 4 iMac's (one of them a G5), and I'm going to buy another PB when Apple gets its act in gear and puts a G5 in it. I recommend people get Macintoshes, particularly people who don't like "playing", they just want to do some work with their computer.
Mac fanatics will always say "There is a myth of megahertz" when challenged on the relative speed of PC's versus Macs. Which sounds like a fine argument, but when you point out something that is real and verifiable (i.e. Photoshop on a PC is faster than Photoshop on a Mac), then they fall back on the "Well, speed isn't everything, we just want to get stuff down, and Windows sucks".
Pick your argument.
I personally tell most clueless users that "Consumer Reports recommends a Mac, and here's a copy of the article".
That's enough.
If someone says to me "Well, PC's are better, cheaper, faster", I say "You're right. Go buy a PC".
Honestly, as soon as some geek fanboi says "...the megahertz myth...", I already put them in the "f*cking clueless" box where you pay no more attention to that person.
So I went to the Apply web site and first off, you click on the $599 version, because who doesn't want a faster CPU and more hard disk.
Then I click on a few other essentials, like bluetooth, wireless lan, a keyboard and a mouse, a modest memory upgrade, then... gee this is $1000!
And it still doesn't have a monitor.
For me, that moved it from the toy-to-play-with category to the who-cares category right away.
But I am rambling.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
No, you are confused. While it's true that it will do more with each instruction, those instructions will take multiple cycles. In RISC architecture each instruction takes one cycle (with a few exceptions). In CISC, some instructions take up to 5 cycles to complete. Basically, one instruction != one clock cycle.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
I'm not even sure many people would agree on what would qualify as a "Porsche of computing" anyway?
The Mac Mini is Apple's experiment in departing from their usual ways and offering an inexpensive "starter OS X" system. So comparing the *Mini* to a VW Beetle might be fine. But saying all Macs are like that seems a bit "off" to me.
When I think of a Porsche, I think of a fast, costly car, that isn't necessarily all that practical - but isn't really supposed to be either. It's fairly elegant, carries significant "status" by virtue of the brand name, and caters to a niche market with specific tastes in automobiles.
How is that too far off from most Mac systems, as a rule? A system like a PowerMac G5 tower is certainly "fast". (Heck, it's a 64-bit, typically dual-processor system, so right away - you know we're not talking some "average, commodity" PC.) It's certainly expensive too, at around $3,000 for the 2.5Ghz model. Most people consider it as having very distinctive styling, and above average engineering all around. (Multiple thermal zones with many quiet cooling fans, rather than 2 or 3 loud, fast running fans.... ability to take up to 8GB of system RAM, PCI-X card support, solid aluminum enclosure with both an outer and transparent plastic inner door, etc. etc.)
So what else are you waiting for before you call a PC maker the "Porsche" of computing, anyway?
Let's also not forget the PSUs they supply with those PCs (at least the UK specced ones) are a complete waste of time, and fail fairly rapidly, and consitantly.
Anyone whose taken apart their mini to upgrade has already seen how remarkably simple and elegant (the classic Mac elitist term, but it applies) the innards are. It's a tight fit, and yet the mini compares performance-wise with any other iBook G4 released last year. I use the 1.42Ghz model with 512MB of RAM, and it is speedier than my somewhat equivalent giant PC tower (the look of which suddenly became obsolete the very day the Mac mini was revealed...it's sad to see the tiny white Mac mini sitting on top of a giant, ugly gray tower from Gateway). I actually use the mini to do multitrack recording at 24-bit/96kHz through Logic Express, and it handles it fine. It's also a blast to program with, even for making UNIX apps if you want to.
You start to wrap your head around it more easily when you start realizing it's really an iBook without the keyboard and LCD, but the fact it's even smaller than a laptop blows your mind. Trying to put a PC in such a size failed--he couldn't even include the CD drive. The mini really is an entire home computer in a tiny box, but the real trick is that it actually doesn't suck. That's what seperates it from the rest--it's a real, usable computer that takes up less space than my laptop yet doesn't suck.
Old Computer: $300
Linux: ~$.10 (cd and internet)
Throwing out your computer because Linux drives you insane: -$300.10
Some people can use Linux, for everyone else there's Macintosh.
You missed the point. He was trying to demonstrate the value of the iMac Mini, by showing what a comparably sized PC would be like (eg: not good). So he perfectly achieved his point.
I meant definition 3. Granted that Kevin Rose didn't just change software but a whole board and architecture (and granted again that it was toward Windows from Mac and x86 from PPC/whatever Apple use now), but it's sad that hacker has such a negative stigma now; I'd love to be called one. (Definition 3 anyway.)
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
What kit cars do is take a cheap car (Fiero/VW Bug/ect) and make it look like something cool, for way less than it would cost to get the real thing.
What this guy did was took what some would argue is a superior machine, and made it into a less-functional PC with no DVD burner and no ability to run OSX.
It's especially painful for those of us who are still waiting for ours on backorder (mine from Amazon is slated to ship late march).
I have blog like everyone else
Most subnotebooks occupy fewer cubic inches than the mini, including a display and battery.. The size of the thing really isn't all that big a deal.
Following that link gives me this advice from Google:
Did you mean: link: www.freemenpics.com
Hmm...
Porsche 914 with a Chevy V8.
It's more like this mini conversion than you might imagine.
the correlation you speak of has no basis in reality. what you describe is closer to a description of pipelining than anything else.
-mkb
Personally, I'd rather have seen a proper review of the Nano ITX board. Forget the 'sticking it in a different case' bit.
http://www.sydney-webcam.com
Apple has some nice LCD monitors with the features you describe: they are 17- and 20-inch, they have wifi antennas, sound input and output, USB, FireWire and Ethernet ports, DVD burners... OK, let's just face it: PCs suck.
Or it can not even exist... Seriously, I think I'm going to buy one of those babies.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Kevin Rose should never be considered on of the great ones. He can't find his c:\ from a hole in the ground.
Depends on what kind of hacker you are talkin about. Sk3etard-l33t or just some dude who likes technology and has fun messing around with it. Maybe I just relate to Kevin cause I like to drink 40's when I am "hacking"...
gr33n men@(e
Agreed, if he doesn't at least have the functional equivalent of a Mini in there, he hasn't created a PC equivalent of the Mini. I was ready to post the same comment, but you beat me to the punch.
Also, a 1 GHz Pentium-compatible CPU isn't really comparable to a 1.25 GHz G4. Neither is a VIA or S3 video card equivalent to a Radeon 9200...
I sold my Mini ITX (1Ghz Nehemiah) setup on eBay so that I could purchase my Mini Mac without losing any money. After having used both, I can state this difinitively: In no way does the Nehemiah come close to coming close to being as fast as the G4.
:)
Never mind the media encoding/decoding capabilities of the G4. It doesn't even come close in regular desktop use. Not even with Linux installed. To even do half what the G4 can do encoding/decoding wise, you'd have to add a PVR card (which won't fit in that case).
If the guy is doing this to build the "fastest PC possible with the size constraints of the Mini's small form factor," he should have left the G4 in there (unless PC=Intel/AMD in this case).
I'm all for hardware hacking, but I hate to see a perfectly good machine go to waste. I hope at least that he retrofitted in a non-destructive way so that he can put the original machine back together again. Some people just have too much money...
BTW, If I was a VIA executive, there's no way that I would loan out a Nehemiah for review so that it could be pitted against the G4. Nothin' but bad news there. Somebody outta get fired over that one!
665: The mark on the forehead of Satan's slightly less evil brother, Stan.
Even though it's been mentioned that Mocha costs more, I'd like to point out that it is not only bigger and louder, it costs MUCH more for a similarly spec'ed out machine. Try it yourself from one of my sibling poster's links here.
... when it comes to small machines: Is having a '500Mhz' more juice worth: Having a bigger enclosure, having a louder enclosure, using more power, and paying twice as much for it. If you upgraded that Mocha all the way out, you'd pay way more than twice as much and not have twice the horsepower, plus you'd still have crappier video :) BUT... you would have an eighth inch stereo-in, which is the one true advantage the Mocha has inbox. I guess you could save the $500-800 and just buy a USB iMic. Oh oh, or you could use that money to buy a sweet Firewire audio device and still break even.
The Mocha bare bones with 2.0GHz Celeron (I won't start a war over whether that's 'better or worse' 1.4GHz G4), 256MB ram, upgrade 40GB 5400rpm (smallest the Mac comes with), upgrade slot load CD-RW/DVD-Rom (cheapest the Mac comes with), upgrade the OS to Win XP Home (cheapest GUI option, even though Pro would be fairer to OS X). This setup comes out to over $1000. The Mac mini, with the bigger drive, and the DVD burner is still under a thousand. You could squeeze in the wireless on the Mac Mini and STILL be under $1000.
So I guess ask yourself
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
USB does the same functions that serial and parallel do for the Cappuccino PC. Serial devices have become very rare on a consumer end. The only serial devices I have are some old mice, modems and an IR dongle, which the current model uses USB. Printers and scanners that used parallel connectors now use USB exclusively.
irda has been superceded by Bluetooth, which is availible for the Mac Mini as an optional extra.
The slot loading drive is smaller than a tray loading drive. Apple went to the slot loading drives in 1999, with the iMac, and that was later echoed in the Powerbook and iBooks. There are some weird CDs out there that will give you problems, I'll give you that, but not many for it to be a major issue.
SSdtIGFzIGJvcmVkIGFzIHlvdSBhcmUK
Wow, someone decides to have some fun and cobble some stuff together, so you decide to call him an ``arrogant, spoiled fuckhead'' and ``garbage''.
You're a horrible person.
You'll never amount to anything more than a nasty, bitter asshole. You make me sick.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Does anyone else think that the Mac mini looks like a plastic lunch box?
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
It has nothing to do with pipelining, and what he/she said is correct, I think you've missed his/her point; in CISC architectures the number of clock cycles per instruction varies depending on the complexity of the instruction, whereas in "traditional" RISC architectures you had 1 instruction per clock.
See here for examples: http://www.arl.wustl.edu/~lockwood/class/cs306/res ources/helppc/asm.txt.html. Pipelining only came in on the 586 (i.e. Pentium).
There's also disadvantages to RISC; binaries tend to be bigger (x86 has variable sized instructions) and that uses up some of the larger cache that RISC chips tend to have.
ARM code size is tighter than that of MIPS or some other RISC architectures because of its conditional execution and register shifting that in effect do three RISC instructions at the same time. For even smaller code size when your inner loop is close to filling the instruction cache, you might want to choose the smaller Thumb encoding that takes the most commonly used instructions and puts them in a 16-bit word, yet still much more orthogonal than Ecch86. The MIPS instruction set has a 16-bit encoding as well.
Except for a very few areas, one should choose a platform based on other criteria (you like MacOS better, you need to use Windows specific software, etc).
So in other words, availability of proprietary software determines the platform, right? How should disciples of the Church of Emacs choose a hardware platform? Price?
This proves that the Mac Mini is superior in size to performance compared to a Wintel box.Even the newest miniature PC parts still aren't small enough to duplicate the engineering.
To compare a not yet released motherboard with a slower processor to the Mac Mini. Well you've proven our point all along ;)
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
And so does the PowerBook and iBook. I think a mini is a bit harder to do, given how vertically compressed everything is
The first time I skimmed the summary, I thought it was the other way around--I thought he put a whole Mini into a PC, like those tiny PPC boxes that came out a few years ago that fit into a CD-ROM bay. That'd be cool, and actually handy. Maybe put a KVM inside too and run all the cables out the back. Bonus points if you could make the (15v?) Mac run off the PC's power supply.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
If it can't be infested with spyware, it's not a real PC.
---
Who misread "mac mini" as "ipod mini" and got really hot and bothered? I'm not sure in which way I was "hot and bothered", either.
A word of warning to those interested in playing with via:
Last month (2004-Dec), I bought a $330 'xmachine' system from Directron. It has difficulty booting into Suse Linux. Further research on google indicates that Via identifies itself as a 686-class CPU, but does not support the entire 686 instruction set. Instead of Suse, I had to install Fedora, and suffer a bit of a learning curve.
Also: the BIOS has does not work with USB keyboards. On the first day, the system froze while transferring a 2-Gig Samba file, I suspect the ethernet driver or controller.
Otherwise, it's amazingly small. It is much cheaper, and dog slow, compared to same speed Centrino.
It's amazing how many people say that you can't upgrade a Mac. People who say that are people that have really never used a Mac. With products from Sonnet you can update your old mac into something more current. Sonnet has accelerator cards that can bring your mac from a G3 to a G4, can upgrade your dual G4 by upto 400mhz faster, with out having to change out your motherboard, or buy new ram.
To upgrade my old Athlon 800 by 400mhz faster, I had to buy a new Mobo, and a new processor, making me look for a new buyer for my old processor. Which I hate to part with so I built another machine with it. With every upgrade there seems to be that I either sell, throw-away, or recycle old parts. With the mac, I just buy a new accelerator card and I get to keep everything else that was in it. So again what's the difference?
Wait why do I ask? i'll just be tarred and feathered.
The link you post gives the $495 price for a barebones system. If you follow the "More Product Information" link, you will find out that
*The barebone system does not include CPU, memory, hard disk and CD drive, It includes the casing, motherboard, CPU heatsink and blower, AC/DC Power supply, driver disk and manual.
When you price out the cheapest complete system they offer (processor,RAM,CD-ROM, HD, No OS) the price becomes $778.
If you want to make it weakly comparable to the $499 Mac Mini (40GB HD, Combo Drive, but we'll still hold off on the OS, in case you want to run Linux on it), The price goes up to $873.
I can't equalize the processor speeds (Mac at 1.25GHz, Mocha at 2.0GHz) or the memory (Mac's is 333MHz, Mocha's is 266MHz), but neither of the Mocha PC's I've priced out will "spank" the $499 Mac Mini, and both cost considerably (over 50%) more.
Notice that this is still ceding you an awful lot for the sake of argument. The Mini comes fully loaded with a nice OS and great applications (in my opinion) for free. I'm also ignoring arguments about G4 vs. Celeron architectures, even though I believe that the G4 is better (Note also the faster RAM on the Mini.)
Perhaps this is one reason they recently raised the listing fee... I think no matter what they are still getting 20-30 cents per auction.
Still, if they want to keep the quality of the service up they should weed them out.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just who, other than Mac cultists and SFF geeks, is going to buy a Mac Mini?
Well, my dad, for one. He's a sysadmin for a state government, although most of his time these days is going to various departments to try to whip users and their systems into shape.
I visited at Christmas. I let him play with my PowerBook because he hadn't had the opportunity to use one before. Three hours later, he had drained my battery but had fallen in love with it. We looked at the iMac while I was visiting, and he liked the form factor and the interface but wasn't ready to spend that much.
I told him about the miniMac when it was announced, and told him to go poke at one when he could make it to an Apple store. He did, and called me on Friday to ask me to order one for him. So I did, and bought some RAM separately 'cause his birthday is coming up.
(Just to be clear, he only asked me to order one 'cause my company gets discounts on Apple hardware.)
/nm
Looks like a fun project but to me, a 400 mhz slower... inferior processor and no optical drive doesn't seem like a design win to me.
On another note, about building one of these with high end graphics.... People get so focused on off the shelf cards they forget about a whole nother breed of integrated chips.... for laptops..
While I highly doubt the mini-itx standard will suffice in powering an x86 counterpart to the mac mini, a custom designed board with perhaps a radeon mobility 9700 or 9800 chipset would run most of the games Lan partiers play at playable framerates.
To acheive this type of miniaturization with the level of performace as Apple has done, it will NEED a company willing to custom design a laptop board varient to fit a case, that supports such mobile chipsets. Perhaps even the ability to upgrade the mobile graphics card via a slot in the bottom of the unit.
A dothan and a high end mobility graphics card would prove to be a nice little LAN party animal. but then the issue of $$$ comes into play a PC system outperforming the mini for $499 or less??? I highly doubt it.
Apple Mini - 1
PC mini - 0 & Currently TKO'd
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
Me, for one. I've had Mac envy for quite some time, but couldn't justify the cost. I already have a nice wireless keyboard & mouse, and a display. So it's perfect for that. And you get great applications for free with it, which nobody seems to include in the Windows comparisons.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
What would be the point of mesuring power per square inch, discouting height? Volume is probably the more intresting mesure here. Building a supercomputer out of Mini-ITX boards would probably be cheaper then mini-macs.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So you piqued my interest, this Cappuccino sounds nice, physically it's a little smaller, and having a Mac mini and a mini pc might make for some good feng shui or something. But then I looked at pricing.
s tem.asp#
The Cappuccino a terrible deal compared to the Mac mini:
Mac mini basic @ $499.00:
1.25GHz PowerPC G4
256MB DDR333 SDRAM
ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB DDR video memory
40GB Ultra ATA hard drive
Combo drive
DVI or VGA video output
The Cappuccino EZ3 is $579 for a basic system (so we're already $80 more expensive).
Upgrading it to 256 megs of ram is an extra $55.
Upgrading to a 40gig HD is an extra $20
Upgrading to a CDRW/DVD ROM is an extra $60
This comes to a total of $714 (for that we can get the faster Mac mini with upgraded ram or wireless). That's also ignoring CPU upgrades to bring the Intel® Celeron® Processor @ 1.0GHz / 256K Cache Tualatin OEM up to say an Intel® Pentium® III Processor @ 1.26GHz / 512K Cache Server OEM which is ANOTHER $155.
And the graphics are an integrated Intel i180/815 meaning you don't actually have 256 megs of system ram, a chunk of it will be for the graphics. And there's no operating system (let's be charitable and throw Linux on for free, you can do the same with the Mac mini ).
So for $215 MORE you get a machine that is much less powerful. If you go with the CPU upgrade you get a machine comparable to the Mac mini for a mere $370 more then the mac mini (or about %74 more). This does not strike me as being a very good deal.
For pricing on the cappucino see http://www.cappuccinopc.com/checkout/customize-sy
Given that even the fastest C3 currently in existence is much slower than the G4...
Who wants to transform an Mac into an PC? For what reason?
At the risk of repeating myself, I thought that this was interesting enough to post as a thread of it's own.
There have been a great number of people belittling what this guy has done. There are two camps:
Here is what Apple thinks of this guy. Think Different.
Did everyone see the massive amounts of SPAM for "freeipod.com" and "freemacmini.com?"
Gratis should be cancelling the accounts (and referral credits) for ANYONE posting that shit like that in blogs/forums/Slashdot - anywhere. He has HUNDREDS of comments like that now!
His blog isn't the only one I've seen that has now been cluttered to hell with idiots posting that freemacmini.com crap.
Gratis are irresponsible fuckers if they continue to do nothing about it. I have yet to see anywhere where you can report spammers.
Now I _don't_ believe that the G4 is the super-computer that Apple's marketting makes it sound like. It's a good CPU, but that's about it.
But a 1 GHz _Via_ CPU? Gimme a break. Those things are a dog, performance wise. They're not just lower MHz, they're also lower IPC (instructions per cycle) even than a P4 Prescott.
The fact that they only have 64K L2 cache doesn't really help there either. And Via's being still stuck on a 133 MHz SDR bus also doesn't help.
Also it seems that the article just illustrates what's wrong with all these "I can build a better PC" attempts. E.g., in this case they couldn't also fit a CD drive too in that case, so you have to use an external USB one.
Which is just missing the whole bloody point. So at the end of it, when you count the PC Mini _and_ the external CD drive, you have twice the desk space needed and nearly twice the volume.
<sarcasm>Yeah, buddy. Way to go...<sarcasm>
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let me get this straight: it's a computer case with a motherboard inside? How is that a PC?
The Mac Mini does not seem like a powerful machine. It is quite good for the form factor but compared to a comparable PC of similar price, of any size, it doesn't seem that great. I can't really see a very large market segment of Mac-wannabe users deciding to switch to such a system. Either they really want to go Mac and they'll shell out for the really cool systems or they'll go cheap/geek and go Linux on normal PC hardware or they'll wuss out and just stick to Windows on fairly cheap hardware.
Some people will try the cheap Mac but I don't really believe there will be a sizable market there unless the cheap Mac is comparable in power to a similar priced PC. Even if you take into account that MacOS makes more effecient use of resources than Windows on comparable hardware it's still pretty wimpy specs for a desktop machine. It doesn't appear to really be targeted at that market.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
What can I tell you? It's a $500 computer. I wouldn't expect it to be terribly powerful. The machine is pretty comparably to a mid-level machine, and is more than capable of handling what an end-user wants, except for gaming -- and no one would buy a Mac to game on it anyway. As for Mac-wannabe users, I know of half a dozen in my circle of friends, either Windows or Linux users themselves, who want one.
What this means for the market at large, I don't know, but I do know that a lot of people for whom Apple's price point was the major obstacle are now seeing that change. I'm not really seeing any sort of contrary evidence from you beyond "well I just don't like it."
I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens.
That's cool. I never knew that. Did he have any hand in the new Bugs? I am actually quite impressed with the new Bugs. I'm tall (6'6) so finding a car with enough space that isn't a SUV is rather difficult. I took a Bug for a test drive and was rather impressed. I'd consider buying one if I was in the market. Luckily being as tall as I am I can drive a 'chick car' without people making to many comments. ;)
The PT Cruiser is pretty cool too. It also has something of it's own look and is pretty spacey inside. I'd be more likely to buy it I think just because it does seem a little more macho. It'd depend on which one got the better gas milage probably though.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Without a built-in CD/DVD drive? As underpowered as it is? I just can't see that as a mainstream desktop computer.
For the geeks who want one in the entertainment center I can see it and even for geeks who just want a Mac to experiment with I can see it. I just don't see Ma & Pa America buying it.
To Ma & Pa America, $500 is a sizable investment. They're not going to spend that much on a computer without some assurance that it'll do everything they need and I don't see how Apple can sell the Mac Mini as the do-it-all throw-in-the-kitchen-sink cheapy computer that Dell sells. I think Apple could produce such a computer, and hope they do, but I don't think the Mac Mini is it.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The one item that I did not seee in the comments by the other /.ers is the support that one gets from Apple, which rightly indicates that most, if not all /.ers do their own repairs. Most users out there have a hard time doing more than calling the help desk when something goes wrong. This is not meant as a slam to users as most of us frustrate dentists as the users tend to frustrate us, but to simply illustrate a point.
We could argue this all day, or longer, but in the end, the mac mini will cause the users to hate computers less.
There wasn't one. He showed how you stick this in together, and didn't even boot it... well if his hacksaw hack didn't kill it.
The net result: Mac had more power, the G4 at 1,25 will run apps equiv to at least a P4 at 1.5-2Ghz, and try fitting a P4 setup in the case they did!
The version he made had no CD - why have an exteral cd when you are going for size (and price!)
I see the mini-mac as a great hardware idea - price seems good, especially since you are paying for the shrinkage factor (it shrinks?).
So this wasn't a comparison, more of a 'look ma, I can use a hacksaw'. I searched for a 'next page' link, but none was found, an update would be nice. some benchmarks... run pear PC on the intelly version.
Who knows, not me, I never lost control.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Without a built-in CD/DVD drive? As underpowered as it is? I just can't see that as a mainstream desktop computer.
It comes with a CD-R burner by default, BTO option of a DVD writer! You are confusing the Mac mini with the frankenstein the article spoke of.
Furthermore when you speak of it being "underpowered" you do not know what you are talking about. I was doing DV editing and Photoshop work just fine on a 667MHz Powerbook. Furthermore, check out this performance comparison of various Macs, including both Mac minis - on default settings the Mac mini outpaces the new iMac G5 for some tasks! It's only constraint is really IO, having a slower laptop disc. The G5's get a lot of press but the G4 was a pretty good chip as well. And again it's going to be a bit faster but far more cheaper than any Mac laptop.
For most things people do everyday, the Mac mini is more than enough computer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dare I ask. If this thing sells for $500 then what is your discount price? Tell me it's $200 and half of Slashdot might be asking you to order them one too. ;)
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I took a Bug for a test drive and was rather impressed. I'd consider buying one if I was in the market. Luckily being as tall as I am I can drive a 'chick car' without people making to many comments. ;)
;-)
You should also ask yourself this: which car would a chick rather be in: a "chick car" or a "stud car"? Make your purchase accordingly.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I didn't say that I didn't like it. I'm just not your typical consumer. I'm the type of person who would use a 24 hour computer store to go buy CPUs at 3am. Most of my friends are at least partly as geeky as I am. I can see most of us buying a Mac Mini.
That doesn't make up a large market though. The computer-stupid people who are my clients, and who make up the majority of the market, I can't see buying a Mac Mini though. The Mac Mini seems like a machine who's market will be a fringe of the existing Mac market which is itself fringe. It might get a few new buyers from the geeks and Mac-wannabes but probably that isn't a huge number of people.
For example, the iPod is a product that has wide mass appeal. Almost everyone listens to music and understands the concept of a portable music device. The iPod is the Porsche of portable audio devices. Do you really see anywhere near as large a market for the Mac Mini?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The PT seems to have more back seat space. That settles it for me. It's impossible to 'park' here in Las Vegas. Everywhere you go they have security guards in the empty parking lots making sure nobody misbehaves. A large backseat with dark windows could help.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Bleh - did some googling, and it seems I had my timeline mixed up. :-( Dr. Porsche the elder was big on the racing circuit around the turn of the century, and had an engineering/consulting firm with his name. His firm was hired by the German government in the late '30s to design the VW - the name of the model at the time, not the name of a company. There was no company, actually - the factory and everything else was owned by the government.
After the war, the factory was privatized and the name of the only model was adopted as the name of the new company. Porsche's son, also named Ferdinand, was heavily involved with starting and managing the new company. Porsche's firm was hired in '49 by VW as design consultants, and received a royalty on every car VW built.
The two companies are still closely related. The VW-Porsche 914 was a collaboration in the late '60s, and the 924 in the '70s. The present-day Cayenne and VW Touareg share a lot of engineering. Until he retired in 2003, Ferdinand Piech, grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, was both the principal shareholder of Porsche and CEO of VW.
Dr. Porsche only saw the bare beginning of the original Beetle's rise in popularity - he last visited the Stuttgart factory in '50, and died in '52. His son died in '98. He probably saw the new Beetle, but I doubt he had a hand in designing it - he was 88 when he died, so he would have been 80 or so when the idea was first proposed.
Links:
http://www.autohistory.org/feature_6.html
http://www.grandprix.com/gpe/cref-piefer.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!
While he didn't have a custom mobo made to order, he did get Via to send him a prototype mobo, in a form factor not yet released. Sorry, I'm not sure how that counts as "off the shelf components", seein' as you can't actually find it on the shelf of _any_ shop.
Also, as was said before, I'm not sure that thing even actually runs. Seems more like _only_ an exercise in cramming that parts together in that space. (In which case, it's as much a computer as the cardboard box in which I keep my old boards and such.)
For example I see _no_ mention of a power supply. Yes, I know, the Mac Mini has an external one too, but it also has the circuitry to get the juice from that to, say, the hard drive. Does his nano-ITX have the circuitry to (A) be powered from an external power jack, and (B) supply that to a standard 4 pin power connector that his 40-to-44 connector for the HDD expects. Because without it, that thing won't even boot.
Or what's he gonna do? Cut another hole in the side of the thing and run a thick bunch of cables from an ATX PSU through it? (Bearing in mind that a PC PSU alone is bigger than a Mac Mini and its PSU put together, I'd say that alone makes the whole experiment fail to meet its goal.)
Also let's look at what he's achieved:
- 1 GHz worth of a slow, low IPC VIA CPU (as opposed to 1.42 GHz PowerPC)
- 266 MHz RAM (as opposed to 333 MHz RAM in the Mac Mini)
- integrated crappy Via/S3 graphics (as opposed to a 9200 in the Mac Mini)
So he's achieved... what? Managed to make a PC far slower than the Mac Mini, and it's actually more expensive than the Mac Mini? A 1 GHz VIA chip and mobo is around 230$ on the site he linked to. Add a HDD, RAM, PSU and a Windows license... oops, our crap machine is actually more expensive than the Mac Mini.
You know what? I'm not even a Mac fan. Been poking fun at the odd elitist Mac fanboys before, and got modded down for it. But this time I must say the PC side is where the fanboyism is at.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't see anything wrong as such with doing a price/something comparison, I just wish people did the _full_ comparison. And not just pick the pieces which fit, and quietly hope everyone doesn't notice the missing half.
The thing is, the Mac Mini niche has _four_ things going for it:
1. Speed
2. Price
3. Size
4. Noise
(A die-hard Apple fan will probably also add "5. Usability". But I'm not trying to get into that flame war. Let's assume that both are exactly as usable. Bear with me.)
No, the Mac Mini is _not_ the absolute winner in either of the 4 categories (well, maybe except size). But the combination of the four is where it's really at. The fact is, there are _four_ pieces to that puzzle, not two, not three.
That's what all these "but my PC is better" posts miss. They have some contender that is better in one aspect, maybe even two, but then don't come even close in the other two.
E.g.:
- yes, one can get a cheaper mid-tower PC, and it may even be _slightly_ faster. (But not by much if it's still cheaper after you factor in the Windows license too.) But it misses the other two criteria by a mile.
- yes, one can get a smaller PC, for example the OQO. Except it's slower and it costs 2000$ with less RAM and less HDD. Oops, it missed the speed and cost points, didn't it?
- yes, one can get a more silent PC, and a faster one at that. E.g., a Hush PC (I think they reviewed them on Tom's Hardware). Perfectly silent, since it uses the case itself as a passive heatsink. Except it's bigger _and_ again, costs over 2000$.
Etc.
So I'm all for doing such comparisons, if they actually considered _all_ the four factors. It would have saved us all from the deluge of "but my big tower is faster" posts that miss the whole point.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I peed in my fridge! And you know what? It worked!
The fridge is still cold, and I felt totally relieved.
Next up, the TV. I'll post pictures!
If I read the part about "Cheap OS X" being good for everybody out loud, my neighbour in the next cubicle would wonder where I'm surfing lately...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Why yes. Thanks for asking. ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Way, way more expensive.
-- I speak only for myself
It doesn't run OS X or iLife.
Nope. The SPARC 1 had pipelinging as early as 1992. The main problem with it was it did no branch prediction and had no way to flush the pipeline if it went the wrong way. So binaries got much bigger as compilers had to add extra empty instructions after jumps to make sure the chip didn't excecute code on the wrong side of the branch.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
If you order your MacMini from MacMall.com, you get a free keyboard, mouse, and Epson printer, albeit by rebate. You even get free shipping.
jfs
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
The Cappuccino also sounds like a wind tunnel.
At my last job we used to use a pair of them as a demo cluster. The idea was that you could fit two of them in a briefcase. Unless you're doing something rediculous like that, I couldn't bring myself to recommend one of those things to anybody.
Ever had to choose between two car models that were basically equivalent in terms of reliability, longevity and so on -- one of which included much better quality design in the interior? Go look at a Mitsubishi and a Volkswagen. In each class, they're both around average in reliability. VW has a huge edge in design, just everywhere on the car. The antenna, sitting up on the back of the cars right in the middle. You know? Even when the design isn't practical -- VW's glove boxes and storage spaces are sometimes a case of looks over function -- the German engineering thing trips the right synapses. VW can ask for a ton more for whatever they're selling right now.
People do care about this stuff. They care about the amount of noise their computer makes. They care whether the little knobs on the dashboard of their car give them a tiny measure of pleasure to use. Whether it's enough to make people try a brand of car that only runs on diesel -- that's about the level of question we're looking at, here.
(But Macs aren't like asking people to spend $6,000 more to drive a gas-guzzling, poor-handling tricked up truck just for image... Oh, people do that too. People can be pretty odd.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I would be interested to know how much power the Mac Mini and a VIA Nehemiah ITX consume (a) when active and (b) when idle.
If both machines suited my needs and are roughly the same price, this becomes an important distinction for me when building my MythTV front-end.
Actual numbers, not comments along the lines of "but the hard drive will consume more than the CPU" etc.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
This thread really has detered from the original article, so let's get back to the subject. Processor He stuffed a VIA Eden nanoITX board which only scales to 1GHZ. VIA's have traditionally been very_slow chips, even bowing to a lower clocked P3 celeron as far as most benchmarks go. While G4's are indeed slow, the eden is still slower. a 1.4ghz g4 compared to a 1ghz eden? no contest Now lets look at other things people were bitching about in this thread.... Expandability. Memory the nanoITX board has 2 memory slots..soDIMM, one underneath the board, and one on top. The Macmini has a single full sized ddr slot. Upgrading the macmini to 1gb would be cheaper than upgrading the eden (which uses laptop memory). PCI/AGP/Graphics Not too much here.....neither the nano ITX nor the mac mini has any type of expandability pci wise, agpwise, and graphics wise. OK next thing Ive been seeing is that since you cant upgrade the vid card in the mac mini, you should also know the dame is true for the via eden, lets compare what we are "stuck" with Mac Mini - Radeon 9200 Via Eden nanoITX - S3 Graphics UniChrome Pro I Dont think there is a contest here... So all in all, if we stick to the article, he downgraded his mac mini =\
I tend to think this is a problem with all HP equipment.
:)
I bought a 2.4 GHZ PC for my Daughter - and had problems with it powering down unexpectedly. I shipped it back to the company for them to wave a dead chicken at it - I got it back, and it did the same thing!!
I decided to do a little research, and on a hunch I spec'd out the power requirements of the system, and what was provided by the power supply.
To make a long story short, the power supply did not have enough wattage to power both the motherboard/cpu and all attached peripheral devices. I ripped out the anaemic power supply, and put an industrial strength model (all the wattage needed and then some) I had laying around. I have had no problems with that machine since.
Warranties aren't worth the paper they are written on - particularly when the cost is your time and money lost during the time it is in the shop. This experience lead me to build my next machine myself - which I did, to my own specs, and haven't had any problems with at all.
Right now I am trying to get my wife and daughter to agree to replace their Celerons with the Mac Mini; I have had no luck getting them to cross over to Linux - but I had them salivating over the Mini. This has two benefits: it will allow me to increase the size of my Beowulf cluster (canibalizing their old desktop machines), as well as lower the amount of administration I have to deal with (IE virus hell). After that financial disaster passes, I might get one for my own use (I want a machine to use as a multitrack recording studio)
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
How can they be compared in terms of power per *square* inch? Are they that flat?
where's all that Karma?
To clarify: Core Image / Core Video is a set of APIs for image processing/enhancement. It will work on all Macs that will run the OS regardless of what video hardware it has.
It will only be accelerated by a GPU that meets certain criteria however. Eventually if enough software vendors take advantage, it will likely give Macs a tremendous performance edge for photo and video work.
In this regard it is similar to Quartz / Quartz Extreme, which accelerates all on-screen drawing by giving that task to the video card. But on-screen drawing still happens when you don't have a supported card, albeit handled by the CPU.
So, the Mac Mini will continue to run Core Image/Core Video-enabled apps, just not with GPU-based acceleration. The machine is not intended for people who require super-fast image processing. It's not as though the Mini loses anything, it just doesn't gain any speed from these new OS technologies.
I suspect this is why Apple continues to insist on packaging the consumer products (iMac, eMac, Mini, iBook) with inferior video hardware that can't be upgraded. It prevents them from being able to hit the performance levels that Core Image / Core Video will make possible, so users who will benefit most from this technology will be forced to buy the more expensive Power Macs/PowerBooks.
I don't understand how this is considered a 'hack'. He took some PC parts, chopped up a case and stuffed 'em in. It's a mod.
Damnit people, you can abuse the English language all you want but once you start screwing with geek vernacular, that just pisses me off!
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I've got a question for you -- since a kilogram weighs more than a pound, does that mean that everything in Europe is heavier than in the United States?
"It puzzles me how people like you can stand there and actively defend mediocrity."
Actually, it shouldn't. After all, like likes like.
The reason mediocrity exists, (apart from normalization of curves so that the average IQ of a room full of Einsteins would still only be 100,) is that most people are, well, mediocre.
That's why 'down-side' zealots exist. Just look at the Iraqi insurgents. Why would anyone want what they want? That's why they have to send some out to blow themselves up in a crowd.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
... sorry, lame joke:
- This and all my posts are public domain. I am a Physicist. I am not your Physicist. This is not Physically advice
I wonder if he is done copying his 17meg file...
I do think youd be pretty happy with the speed, if it's at all possible you should wander over to an Apple store to try one.
They probably wont have dev tools set up on it, but you can see how most apps run and still play around in ther terminal a bit if you want to try some things there (Applications->Utilities->Terminal).
I think it would make a great second box to hook into a KVM. Apple seems to push the Belkin box but I've found the ioGear one works better, as far as USB keyboards across both Mac and PC's are concerned.
Good luck with the evaluation!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow... hey, I know, I must be stupid.
I must think that because something in Turkish lire (until recently) costs several millions, people there must be f*cking RICH!
I have a lot more to post here, but I'll try and not seem like an ignorant fool.
Mr. pclminion, why don't you explain to me how you calculate true cost of goods, and show me just how much of a mark-up Europeans *really* pay for a Mac Mini ?
If you're not willing... I simply ask readers this. Have are from the U.S. and have you been to Europe recently ? If so.. did you find that things, on average, here are more expensive, about as expensive, or less expensive than in the United States ?
I'll post the rest of my rant later, depending on your reply - or lack thereof.
I bought an 12" iBook (2nd hand off a friend who was buying the next size up) for an upcoming project, as yet I've not managed to get started on /that/ project, but I'm completely in love with the laptop! :) Stuff 'just works' wifi, bluetooth, isync (with MissingSync to synch my ipaq)
Well as much as one can be
*nix on the desktop is here, and it's called NeXT^W OSX
I specifically said ADD a hard drive, not change it. You added and SUBTRACTED a hard drive. Thus if you had one 120GB hard drive and wanted to get 240GB of space, you'd have to buy a new 240GB drive instead of just another 120GB drive.
"As for the laptops lacking separate page up/page down/home/end keys, I'm not sure what these page up/page down/home/end keys are doing on my "Mac laptop", hmmm, better tell them to go away, they mustn't belong there."
Again, I said SEPARATE page up/down/home/end keys; on the current models, those are shared with the arrow keys -- perhaps older models had them, but given the topic of the Mac Mini, I assumed we're talking about new machines.
I am a technical guy.. been doing support for 5 years. What is it with the petulant attitude of most Mac and many Linux users? Give the guy a break for having some fun with hardware... some of the criticism is like criticizing a model airplane builder for not flying a real 747. The point, more than anything, was to try out a neat PC based motherboard in the smallest Mac case. It was not to build a better Mac. If anyone really thinks AMD couldn't engineer an AMD64 onto a similar motherboard, keep deluding yourselves. Getting a 64 bit processor into that space isn't very special in the grand scheme,a nd anyone who has seen the inside of a laptop knows any manufacturer could do it. The bigger question for Apple is how practical is such a small computer whether it is Mac or PC, and will non-apple consumers (the target audience) embrace this machine beyond it's initial "cuteness" appeal? For myself, there is no way I would purchase something like that either PC or Mac. If I want something small, a laptop is way more practical (can travel with it), and for a desktop having a mini mac with snaking firewire or usb cords to external drives and devices doesn't fit my description of elegant. Give me a tower with drive bays any day.