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Intel Preps Mac mini Look-Alike
boarder8925 writes "From Wired: 'A new Wintel prototype that openly apes Apple Computer's popular Mac mini is due out this week, giving Intel a showcase to prove its chips are a match for anyone when it comes to tiny PC designs. Working prototypes of the Mac mini look-alike running Microsoft Windows and based on Intel's Pentium M CPU have already been built by Taiwan PC maker AOpen at Intel's request, according to two sources in Taiwan's PC manufacturing industry who have seen them.' This isn't the non-working box Slashdot covered earlier."
Silent PC Review has a couple photos.
The thing is; loads of people harp on about the mini being "seriously underpowered for any sort of PVR work", "For a computer that seems to be designed to fit near your TV".
The thing is; look at the rear of a mac mini; no digital audio out, no TV-friendly output.
Why do people not take the hint? The mini is NOT designed to work with a TV, it is lacking ALL of the elements you would want. That doesn't make it designed for the TV, but lacking: it make it what it is; a cheap, no integrated display, desktop computer that runs OS X. Nothing more.
And for that job, its pretty good; it seriously dropped the minimum price of entry for OS X. Job done, design complete.
They didn't even take advantage of the Mac Mini's one missing feature - S-Video out.
Mac mini: $500 (give or take)
DVI to SVIDEO adapter for Mac mini: $19
Posting this for the 30000th time: Priceless
...and that's all there is to it.
As was noted in Anandtech's review of the Mac Mini, they're seriously underpowered for any sort of PVR work, and the software DVD decoder sucks.
As somebody who is using his Mac mini as a high def PVR and media center on a 199" screen, I can say without hesitation that Anandtech's review is full of shit.
Using the El Gato EyeTV, it works like a champ for both recording and playback of either 720p or 1080i signals.
Also, the DVD player in 10.3 works very well, and the new DVD player for Tiger is even better.
The only complaint I have (and it's a nitpick) is that the deinterlace software is not that great, which is a problem when watching cheaply-made interlaced DVD's (such as some anime TV show disks.) That's easy enough to get around, thanks to VLC.
(The new Tiger DVD Player does have some deinterlace control, but so far nothing that works nearly as well as the better filter options on VLC.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
apple didn't innovate with the mac mini. they just copied what pc vendors have been doing for years with x86 PCs. (cappucino pc for example). there are even more powerful x86 PCs that are even smaller than the mini.
so its not intel that's playing knock-off -- it's apple.
I own both of them. And the Asus Pundit makes a heck of lot more noise, and more in the irritating spectrum (probably in human speech range).