Slashdot Mirror
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."
Mini computers, with nice looks existed for a long time. But at least from my point of view, the coolness factor of the MiniMac is exactly this: it is a Mac - a cheap Apple computer, similar enough with its bigger brothers that I am not so interested to buy. A normal Apple computer although is very nice, is not useful enough for me to buy it at its price. But a MiniMac toy seems interesting enough at a right price. On the other side.. I don't want a small PC. I want a big PC, with enough free slots for the cards that I want to use. A compact PC card (like all those 5.25" and 3.5" motherboards with mobile processors) is very nice to use with a flash card as hard disk in various appliances - but a shiny tiny pc sits just in the middle. It is not flexible enough - no space for addon cards. It is not rugged enough (still a pc, with hard disk, not a compact computer designed to work in extreme conditions). It is not even a cheap solution because the PC market is very cheap already and I guess this mini pc will not be 50$ to mantain the price proportions of the normal Apple versus MiniMac.