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Intel Flaunts Mac mini Knock-off
Rollie Hawk writes "Remember how the Mac mini was designed by Apple to steal PC customers? Now Intel wants to steal them back. Adopting a shockingly similar lunch box shape and light-weight design, Intel's upcoming Mini PC features all the sleekness and portability (physical, that is) of the Mac mini with none of the Mac benefits. Well, at least it will probably have a faster processor. Now if only someone would make a Cobalt Qube knock-off for me."
Intel can make whatever shaped/sized box they want, but it's still going to ship with Windows for Joe Consumer. A box that can get easily 0wned is what people are growing weary of. Mac Mini targets those folks as well as iPod users (not necessarily separate groups there). This knock-off once again misses the point.
What makes this interesting is how well it runs Linux. Otherwise.... pfffft!
If Intel is truly the industrial leader (true)and innovator (questionable), then they should come up with a radically different concept PC to compete with Mac mini, and yet can target the same audience. Having a carbon-copy of Mac mini is the same as saying :
their design is superior, the only thing special about ours....we use a x86 cpu!!
Reminds me of Creative Zen looking awfully similar to the iPod mini, but much uglier colors.
Sounds like what you'll find a lot of at a CES. Seriously, there was something called The Brick ages ago, so this still isn't anything new. And what about all this Mini ITX stuff which has been around for years? Next...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That case looks JUST like a Mac Mini. Almost identical. It reminds me of the iMac knockoffs (I'm talking about the original iMacs which came in one colour (Bondi blue) and looked vaguely like a gumdrop) that came out shortly after the launch of that product.
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
Why is it so hard to make a decent-looking case that doesn't look like someone riced it up with stupid lights or clear plastic? I just ordered the parts to build a PC, and the hardest part was finding a case that didn't look like crap. I wasn't successful.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
The whole poing of the Mac Mini is that it's a small affordable system that comes preinstalled with; an OS, a Photo Editor, Movie Editor, Music Player, DVD/VCD designer, and Music Composition software. Additionally most Macs comes pre-installed with Apple Works and World Book Encyclopedia.
Not to mention the splendor of no Adware or a major risk of viruses.
This is really interesting. Since I've seen (and eventually bought
Same with desktops. Why can't somebody come up with a decent design? And why are the Apple guys able to just get it right? And not just once, but most of their stuff looks really amazing. It's not like there aren't any designers out there
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Mention that the next time someone talks about how outrageously expensive Macs are. Design costs money. Designers cost money.
is that the maketing position for the Mac Mini is to convert Windows iPod users who are sold on the Apple brand but think even the iMacs are too expensive.
Who, exactly, is the target market for the x86 Mini? PC's are already dirt cheap, and we know that shrinking down the form factor like that will only raise the price over existing desktop PC's. They aren't going to convert Mac users, because Mac users a) don't buy on price alone, and b) already have a Mac option in that category, so they will buy the Mac Mini.
Logically, for Intel to compete against the Mac Mini, they need to develop an iPod killer, not another desktop system.
What the hell is happening to the PC industry? It used to be all about making better faster machines with more features and now the trend is to make smaller machines with less features?????
What happened was that people got fed up with big ugly boxes that used a lot of power to make a lot of noise and heat. Especially since few people apart from gamers need the processing power of new machines. Being small, unobtrusive, less energy hungry, cool and quiet are also features you know, stuff that a lot of people are obviously willing to pay for. Hardly marketing spin.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Maybe it's shifting towards adequetly powered machines with features that actually work all of the time.
computer is a tool, not a toy, when did we see a shift from functionality to marketing spin?
As soon as Joe Consumer wanted one in the living room instead of just the home office. Why is this a bad thing? Miniaturization will just increase the pervasiveness of computer hardware in general. There *needs* to be a paradigm shift in the PC industry. These things need to go from tempremental monsters that need more attention than my two year old, to appliances on par with my Tivo. To an extent, Mac is successfully in this transition state already. (no - I'm no fanboy, don't even own one, but I think they're well made)
Because the Mac mini shipped. It's why Doom 3 shipping is news, while the milestone of Duke Nukem Forever is not.
Mini ITX boards have been around for years; Mac minis are 1/3 the volume and 1/2 the size. Nano ITX has been announced many months before the Mac mini, but hasn't shipped yet, while the mini has. Even still, when someone took a prototype nano-itx board and tried to fit it into a Mac mini, it was discovered it didn't fit; they hat to saw down the heatsink AND they had to remove the optical drive, so the Mac mini is STILL smaller than nano-itx.
There's nothing revolutionary about the mini, other than it's size AND price; the only similar PC is the Cappuccino PCs, which are slightly smaller, but nearly twice as expensive. Even Shuttle based boxes, which can hold almost 3 Mac minis inside them, cost more.
GPL Deconstructed
The mac mini qualifies as news less for its form factor and more for its price. An actual Apple computer for $500? Scandalous. It's certainly applicable to slashdot, where for years people have been talking about how they're fascinated by OSX, they respect the general quality of Apple's hardware, they just couldn't justify the high prices for a machine to play around on.
All of a sudden, an entry level Mac is now truly entry level on price. And a lot of people have said that price was the biggest thing that PC's had over Macs.
The empty box from intel is interesting just because it's so obviously inspired (copied) from Apple. It really looks like they just painted over the apple logo, put a couple lines across it, and glued a little digital clock to it. It's amusing for the same reason that the early imac knockoffs were. There's hundreds of ways to make an all-in-one machine, and using curvy, translucent, brightly colored plastic isn't the most obvious one. I'm all for sharing and the progression of knowledge, but there's a difference between building upon what came before, and just throwing out a me-too product.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I don't have one. I'm saying that people here and elsewhere complain a lot about how expensive Macs are but nobody seems to take into account that there were some pretty high up designers that made all this pretty machinery and someone has to pay THEM for their work.
I never said that *I* think Macs are too expensive. I think you get exactly what you pay for - a superior machine both in design and execution.
Yep, it was "announced", but it's still not available! have you seen one for sale? Anywhere? Not to mention that their performance sucks when compared to Mac Mini. And their price is more or less the same as the Mini. And you can't run OS X on one
The Mini is interesting and newsworthy because it does the same thing Mini-ITX and the like do, only better. And because it's the cheapest Mac there is.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Equivalent in what way? A PC is more than its processor speed.
...
I think you'd have to also consider usability, security, size, noise, longevity, style, included software, included hardware
Macs usually lose on the included hardware aspect, whilst winning on everything else. However most people seem to judge a computer solely by the included hardware, and those people are fucking retards because of it.
I hate to say it, but perhaps being the perfect geek isn't everybody's ultimate goal in life.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I start valueing good design and thought put into things. I also value the fact that my computers now are almost perfectly silent - I don't want to sit next to an open case with whirring harddisks and fans anymore. A silent and well-designed computer serves me much better than one that has 100 times the power - that I'm not using anyway.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Right - buy a Mac Mini for 500 bucks and you get XCode included for free. Buy a PC and you have to shell out a thousand more just for a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio. That makes a Mac FAR cheaper for me, as a C++ developer.
Has the PC industry really gotten that bad so that they don't do anything but copy Apple?
As any Apple-watcher will tell you, this has been SOP with the Wintel world for decades now.
The only thing dumber than the folks surprised at Intel's shameless copycat effort are the ones who mistake that empty plastic box for a fully-functional, shipping, ready-to-go-on-your-desk computer.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
"A computer is a tool, not a toy, when did we see a shift from functionality to marketing spin?"
Actually this is a shift to functionality. The Mac Mini comes with everything the average person needs. FireWire for dumping video and hooking up your iPod. Ethernet for networking. A good but not great video card. USB for hooking up mice, keyboards, scanners, memory drives and game controllers. You can add an airport to the Mini as an option. The only thing I see missing from the Mac Mini is a video in.
As a tool these new computers are complete and simple. They are more functional for most people.
You see I have been in computers a long time. I can remeber when you had many players in the market each one very different. Back in the 8 bit days you had Commodore. Atari, Tandy, Ti, Apple, and Sinclair. Each had it's own OS if you want to call it an OS. You had many different types of CPUs z80, 6502, 6809, and the TI chip. Even fast forward to the late 80s and you had Amiga, Atari ST, and Mac pushing to innovate. The PC you have now SUCKED compared to the Amiga, Atari ST, and Mac. The PC only won because of marketing spin. Look at a PC from 85 and look at the Amiga. The Amiga was cheaper, had better graphics, stereo sound, would multi task, could have a hard drive partition bigger then 33 megs and access more than 640k of ram with out doing all sorts of strangeness. A pc at the time was a 286 running at maybe 16 mhz and ran DOS 3.3, maybe windows 1 but no one really used that. The idea that PC industry has gone from technically driven to marketing drive just now is very very funny. It has been all marketing for the last 20+years.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Please spec out an AMD64 which does all that while running under 22db of noise off an 85W power supply. Make sure to include firewire, USB2, and a DVD/CDRW. It doesn't need to look good, but cram it into a mini-ITX case.
Get back to us when you can do that for under $500.
A plastic box the size of the Mini to inspire partners. Heck it is not even a prototype, just a plastic mock up.
Intel would be a lot more inspirational if they showed up with a circuit board prototype for a small form factor that comes in with a reasonable dollar cost and heat envelope.
A hunk of plastic when intel doesn't really offer a solution that fits in the plastic seems kind of pointless. Does intel offer any explanation of What processor/chipset would power their partners? A prescot would melt anything that size unless that was the heatsink.
Only really leaves Dothan solutions, which intel doesn't really sanction or price for desktop usage.
The only PC form factors close to this are micro-itx (non intel but shipping/working) and nano-itx (also non intel and maybe non shipping).
Maybe Intel is inspiring it's partners to think about using Via Epia solutions.
How much does design cost? Pulling a few numbers out of my ass, let's say that this took a team of 20 people to design, test, fabricate, etc. this design. Let's say it took them a year, at $100k. (Engineers make more, secretaries make less). That's two million bucks.
According to some news sources, Apple plans to sell around a million of the things. The cost of the design comes out to two bucks a unit.
Supposing I'm off by an order of magnitude, we're still talking about $20 per unit paid to the designers. So I really don't think that it's the design driving the price of the units.
I think that the price of Apple computers is generally driven by basic economics: how much are people willing to pay for them? If that number is greater than the cost to manufacture (including the $2 to $20 for the fancy design), then they do it; otherwise, they don't. The manufacturing cost only sets a lower limit on the price, but it doesn't set it.
People are willing to pay more for Apples, because they like the design and reliability. Some of that comes from spending more on designers; some comes from more expensive components (Apple for years insisted on using pricey SCSI before finally joining the rest of the world in IDE, for example).
A lot of it comes from the price of alternatives; Apple almost certainly looks at the price of a Dell marketed to the same audience and adds 20% or so. People are willing to pay a premium because they're getting a better piece of equipment. Apple has a tendency to tell people that they want a better computer than the one Dell is marketing to them.
Dell will happily sell you the cheapest machine they think you'll buy; Apple would rather sell you a computer that would make you happy. That gives them only a portion of the market, but it's a very cheerful market segment.
Design is the reason they can charge more, but it's not to pay the designers. Designers are cheap compared to the rest of the process. There might be some room for a competitor to Dell to arise with the same philosophy in the Wintel platform, but they'll be stuck with the same small market share Apple gets from seeking the high end, and they'll still be stuck with Windows as the OS, which will limit how much users like the product no matter how spiffy the physical design.
I just bought a Mini, its not about the innovation of the computer, I already have an AMD based small form factor computer. I bought the Mac Mini cause it was OSX affordable. No other reason.
I dont want XP anymore for my home/family computer.
Linux isn't ready yet when compared to OSX.
Intel just doesn't get it. I'm not surprised...
Intel, its Microsoft that is going to kill you!
I'm too stupid to figure out how to use a Mac, therefore I don't think anyone else should switch.
Translation:
I'm a dick who insults the intelligence of anyone who "thinks different" than I do.
I use linux, but I have seriously been considering buying a Mac for a while. At least, I was considering it until I actually tried using one. I used it for a whole summer, and learned to hate it. Nothing worked like I expected.
I have no problems with Macs in general. I still might buy a MiniMac as a "family room" computer. But there is no way that I could use one as my personal computer. They are designed for a different type of computer user than me.
So why do you insist that someone is a idiot because they don't like the OSX interface? Do you seriously believe that every intelligent person has the exact same view you do about it?
They spent THREE HOURS trying to figure out how to do a useradd
Are you kidding? Your Linux/Windows gurus must be dumb as bricks. I don't use OS X much (basically just as a jukebox at work) and have never added a user before, but just did it now in about 15 seconds.
System Preferences (its in the dock by default) - Accounts - Hit the + icon. DONE.
I suggest you fire these "gurus" you speak of.
If Microsoft installed a full version of Win2K on the X-box and installed several standard USB ports and a VGA plug, and sold them at cost($300?), they could flood the market. As long as it still played X-box games just think of the multimedia possibilities.
Science is the Real TRUTH!
Preferring one UI over the other has nothing to do with it. Assuming the different UI doesn't work because it's not identical to Windows shows that you're either unwilling or unable to learn anything new.
Someone who's able to switch between Windows, Linux, and a Mac and use them all is not an idiot, even if he or she strongly prefers one over the others.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I'm sure I'll regret voicing this, but I'm curious why there's such a strong reaction from such a pro-Linux community. Wouldn't this enable you to create a myriad of products, gadgets, etc. that ran Linux, looked more elegant, and carried a much lower price point than custom system builds? It seems like a boon to the Linux hacking community.
So in order to get an equivalent PC, you have to hunt down all the individual pieces yourself. This might be fine for a nerd, but not for a home user who doesn't know what the inside of a computer looks like. Apple does all the work for them.
Then you need to make sure they're all compatible, and that it all works with your OS. Apple does all this for you.
Then you need to install the OS, and all the drivers. Find if you're a nerd, but not for everyone else. Apple does all this for you.
Then if something goes wrong you need to work out which actual component is broken, send it back to the manufacturer at your own expense, then hope they actually send you back a replacement. This is if you know how to work out which part is broken, and how to remove it and replace it. Apple does all this for you.
Then factor in that the Mac is probably quieter, smaller and better looking.
The PC might have better individual parts, but the whole of the Mac is more than the sum of the parts.
And here's why normal people don't claim a win after the first basket:
You spec'd out XP Home, an intentionally limited "discount" and "lite" version of the OS. So, let's just replace that with the real version of the OS: XP Pro, $153.95 from New Egg. $60 more, and you've already lost, 'cause you're over $500 now.
But, I'll continue.
Good find on the CD-RW drive. Now, what do you do when you want to play a DVD?
Right, the Mac Mini comes with a combo drive. The cheapest one on New Egg (a Rosewill? Who the hell are they?) is $31, so add another 8 dollars.
Nice giant case, too. Look at the comments in the reviews on New Egg - they say it would be nice if it could be quieter... and that's with the 1 fan in the side. You really think that one fan, plus the one on the power supply, is gonna keep that AMD 64 cool? So, toss in $20 for some more fans, plus another $20-50 for sound dampeners, fan controllers, etc. to try to get it down to the 22 dBA of the Mac Mini. And then fail to do so.
So, now that you've got all that, what are you going to run on this system of yours? Notepad? Solitare?
So, add in a copy of Office to compete with Appleworks ($250), a copy of Acid to compete with Garageband ($100), a licensed copy of Acrobat Distiller so that you can create PDFs (it's built in on the Mac), a copy of Adobe Premiere Express to compete with iMovie ($200), a copy of something that can handle full-screen video conferencing (any ideas?), plus a copy of Quicken for your taxes ($30). Oh, and 'cause you're running a Windows box, don't forget the Anti-virus software ($20).
So, for over $1000, you've got a box that's 10 times larger, 10 times noisier, has discount components (that combo drive) with questionable lifespans, and yes, has a 64-bit processor in it.
Now you just have to wait for a 64-bit version of Windows.
-T
I'm a life-long Windows (since v. 1) user that switched to an iMac recently (Feb). I can tell you right now that I'm sold, and not going back to the PC!
To me, your rant sounds like you were looking for an imitation of Windows on the Mac.
The reason I like the Mac so much is because they did _not_ imitate Windows! Instead, they designed the OS from (almost) the ground and created something that was created with usability in mind, instead of creating something that need to be backwards compatible with MS-DOS.
For the past four weeks, I haven't booted in Windows once at home, and I now find Windows a pain to use at work.
My $0.02
The display model (hollow plastic box) they showed off was significantly shorter than the Mini. Looking at that, I don't see how you could possibly find room (vertically) to put a hard drive in the case. It clearly was meant to imply an optical drive with that slot in it, but at like 2.5" thick there is simply no room to stack a logic board (micro or otherwise) plus a 2.5" HD plus an optical drive (laptop variety) into that space.
As the article said, this was just to "spur creativity" in the community. "Spend a few years and a few million and you might come up with something that looks almost this good".
Also clearly apparent, the cooling in such a small case would simply not work for a useful speed of processor in the PC world. They'd have to put a "mobile" grade processor in the box which would really cramp the user's style.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.