Apple Announces Wonderful Toys

XMilkProject writes "Apple just released 5 new products, all of which should show up on the Apple Store within minutes. You can already see the most interesting new product, the iPod Hi-Fi, a supposed high fidelity boombox for your iPod. Other new products are an iPod Leather Case and three new media-center-style Intel Mac minis which will hit the Apple Store within the hour."

Comments

"The most interesting new product"?

[daveschroeder]

How about the new Mac mini, which has a 1.5GHz Intel Core Solo or 1.66GHz Core Duo, 512MB RAM (expandable to 2GB), a combo drive or DVD±R/RW SuperDrive, up to 120 GB drive, DVI/VGA/composite/S-Video out on Intel GMA950 graphics (up to 1920x1200), 802.11a/b/g, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, gigabit ethernet (!), four USB 2.0 ports, FireWire 400 (Yes, FireWire is here to stay, folks), analog and digital (S/PDIF) in/out, and an IR remote with Front Row media center software that supports sharing music, photos, and videos between libraries on any other machine on the local network, starting at $599 ($579 govt/education), all in the same tiny form factor as the old Mac mini (6.5"x6.5"x2")?

And a freaking set of speakers and a $99 leather case for the iPod are the "most interesting"? ;-)

I love how the submission is like "IPOD SPEAKERS", "LEATHER IPOD CASE", and then at the end, "oh yeah, and media center Intel-based Mac minis, too". ;-)

What I want to know is what Apple's going to do with its new 107,000 square foot Tier IV data center... iTunes Movie/Media Store, anyone?

Re:"The most interesting new product"?

[daveschroeder]

Yeah, I figured you jumped on the submission. It was just the way it was worded that made me smile...like a leather iPod case is bigger news than Intel-based Mac mini media centers. ;-)

Just giving you a hard time. And I got one of the minis too.

Re:"The most interesting new product"?

[ericdano]

Size. They are laptop drive. But if you are going to buy one, and want the faster drive, why not give the option of adding it inplace of the 5200RPM drive?

New Mac mini video chipset! Made for Home theater!

[Danathar]

In case anybody cares...the video chipset on this thing was MADE for home theater! It has hardware motion compensation, MPEG-2 hardware decoding, support for native HDTV resolutions and 16x9 aspect displays..among other nice stuff. It's NOT a big 3d gaming platform but definitely has the stuff for decoding video.

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/

Intel GMA950 graphics

[mzs]

Graphics and Video Support
Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory

Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. Minimum graphics memory usage is 80MB, resulting in 432MB of system memory available.

How capable is this Intel integrated graphics? How does it compare to that in the old ($100 cheaper) PPC mini or the new Duo iMac?

Two new Intel Mac Minis were announced today.

[Inoshiro]

Not three.

Standard features: Tiger + iLife '06, Apple Remote + Front Row, Airport Extreme + Bluetooth, DVI Video Out, USB, FireWire, Gigabit Ethernet. This is nice because you don't have to get an upgrade to get Airport Extreme and bluetooth.

"All Mac mini models also include an integrated Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of shared DDR2 SDRAM(1), 10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet, four external USB 2.0 ports, FireWire 400 port, optical digital and analog audio in/out, and built-in mono speaker."

Optical out is a nice thing to have standard now, although I'm not sure about the video processor. The GMA950 is not capable of running games (see this Extremetech review). It uses a minimum of 80mb of the memory in the Mac Mini, further reducing what you can use for applications. In short, it's a major step down from the old Mac Minis, and not useful for those who liked running WoW on their Minis.

Low-end model: 1.5Ghz Core Solo 667 mhz fsb, 512mb memory, integrated graphics, 60GB drive, combo drive - $599 US, 699$ CDN reg.

High-end model with Core Duo - 1.67Ghz, 80GB drive + SuperDrive 8x (dual-layer capable) - $799 US, 949$ CDN reg.

They've also updated the iTunes and Frontrow capabilities; now you can stream any movies or music from any computer running iTunes, and it interfaces with the Frontrow software that is included (with a nice little remote).

A bettel looking option is the new universal dock + remote (about 100$) that lets you use a video iPod like a little media device attached to speakers or a TV. Very portable!

But but but!!

[pubjames]

You Apple fanboy!

Don't you know you can get a machine from Dell with similar specs for about $100 less! A machine exactly the same in all respects! Well, I guess except a bit bigger. Well, quite a lot bigger actually. And heavier. But otherwise the same! Oh except it will be grey and kind of crappy looking. But the specs will be the same! Oh apart from running Windows XP rather than OSX. And without the iLife software. But otherwise exactly the same. You Apple fanboys are nuts!

Re:But but but!!

[ivan256]

The Dell machine is clearly superior, because it doubles as a 'white noise' generator.

Re:$99 for a leather case?

[confusion here]

An Apple logo, duh.

Mac Mini now a real computer

[timeOday]

Which independent benchmarks confirming that the Intel Core Duo really is about 4x the speed of the G4, I'd say the Mini just got a whole lot more viable. At $800 the price is a significant step up, but I guess you gotta pay to play, and it's still the cheapest Duo system I've noticed.

Well

[rworne]

It should be pointed out that the new iMacs are using the Intel graphics that share system memory:

Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory

Add to that Steve Jobs stating that "Yes you can hook it up to your TV" - well sorta. You can use the Apple DVI-Composite/SVideo adpater cable, but that doesn't necessarily look so hot.

What this thing has going for it is the integrated FrontRow, remote and it's super small form factor. I was interested in this as an XBMC Media Center replacement. Unfortunately it seems that Frontrow will only play videos that are compatible with Quicktime. This rules out most of what I have on XBMC. When you boil it all down, it's the old Mac mini + Frontrow w/intel inside.

Info on the Mini that's not immediately obvious

[CausticPuppy]

From the apple store... which is very slow right now, it took me about 15 minutes to find out this info:

The new mini uses DDR2 SO-DIMM's. Must be installed in pairs, comes with 2x256 by default but is upgradeable to 2x1024. $188 to upgrade from 512MB to 2GB, which is slightly more than Newegg pricing when you consider you don't get any credit for the original 512-- but still, nowhere near as bad as the old ripoff memory pricing.

5400rpm SATA drives-- but you can upgrade to a 120GB drive for another $118 vs. the standard 80GB

64MB **Shared video memory.** Nuts. Intel GMA950 graphics chipset. This chipset is better suited for home A/V use though.

PXE boot?

[chill]

Can the Mac Mini boot via PXE? I'd love to be able to rip out the hard drive and just have a couple of these boot and run via GigE...

Re:PXE boot?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called NetBoot, and it needs a Mac OS X server (doesn't have to be an Xserve, you can buy the server software and put it on any Mac, but it isn't cheap). See http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/netboo tnetworkinstall.html . Apple has had NetBoot of some form since before OS X, since the early teardrop iMacs (or maybe earlier) and it's popular in school lab environments etc. HD's are so cheap that it isn't worth their bother to sell you a computer without one, plus it will use it as swap space, so you may not want to rip out the HD should you do a NetBoot like setup.

Re:PXE boot?

[commonchaos]

No PXE boot, but you can do a "diskless NetBoot". The official way to do NetBoot is to use a Mac OS X Server machine with Apple's imaging tools. The basics are:

• The client uses an extended version of bootp to get a kernel.
  
• Kernel uses HTTP or NFS to mount a read-only DMG on a remote host.
  
• Writes back to the DMG are "redirected" to a "shadow file". This shadow file can lives on a local hard drive, or (as of OS X 10.4) on AFP mounted share.
  

I've heard rumor that people have been able to get this to work using Open Source. But I've never seen any evidence of anybody actually doing Mac OS X NetBoot using Open Source.

I would guess that without modifying the Mac mini's firmware, you could NetBoot Linux on a Mac mini by using the extended version of bootp that Apple uses.

Re:PXE boot?

[anagama]

I've netbooted linux on macs equiped w/ openfirmware (I know the g3 and g4 laptops use this). cmd-opt-o-f on power up to do installs. As you surmised, bootp is necessary as well as nfs and tftp -- just make yaboot available on the linux side, and on the mac at the openfirmware prompt:

boot enet:XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX,yaboot

assuming yaboot (or whatever image) is the document root -- use back slashes between directories if it isn't. The XXXs denote the ip of the server.

Anyway, googling for "open firmware" is pretty informative, although open firmware isn't a well advertised feature and thus an unlikely to be used search term.

All I ever loaded was a linux installer. It would be interesting to put other images in the document root and see how things went.

Full spec list

[swid27]

Ask, and you shall receive

As a media geek, this is exactly what I wanted

[SilentChris]

Ever since the Mac Mini came out, I considered using it as a media PC in my living room. I currently have a stylish Shuttle box I built myself for $800 that, while not the quietest thing in the world, looks good amongst the receiver and other electronics equipment. I use it to dish out ripped DVDs to a 40" HDTV with Windows Media Center 2005 (not a bad OS, although lately I've had a few issues with crashing).

Once I saw Front Row, I always said, if Apple were to release a version for Mac Mini, I'd buy the little box immediately. Just did.

To me, this fits perfectly with what I want: quiet, small, cheap, able to play a large DVD collection. I'll have to save them as MPEG4s, but that's no big deal. The fact that it can play videos across the network from both Mac and PCs pretty much seals the deal.

With a wireless keyboard and 1 GB of RAM my box came out to $750 (employee discount). The video card is pretty crappy, but otherwise it fits perfectly with what I want. I'm not a Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination (I like all machines, and run a ton of different boxes/OSes in my home), but this is a very nice product for what I need to do.

Where'd the design go?

[SilentJ_PDX]

The Hi-Fi is a bit of a stretch. It's basically a big box with little iPod jutting out of the top. It would look much better if the iPod sat between the speakers. Even the product page, doesn't do it any favors.

If you ask me, that's not the kind of innovation or design that we're used to from Apple.

Re:Where'd the design go?

[ZzzzSleep]

Quoth SilentJ_PDX:

The Hi-Fi is a bit of a stretch. It's basically a big box with little iPod jutting out of the top. It would look much better if the iPod sat between the speakers.

Do you mean something like this or this?

Re:Fairly disappointing...

[greed]

Don't forget the built-in Bluetooth, for even more keyboards and mice to choose from. Add a program like Salling Clicker, and you can use your Bluetooth PDA or cellphone as a remote.

Re:New Mac mini video chipset! Made for Home theat

[adam1101]

> It's amazing when you consider the previous model did'nt have those features.

From ATIs 9200 specs: VIDEO FEATURES

• FullStream Hardware accelerated de-blocking of Internet video streams
• Video Immersion II delivers industry-leading DVD playback
• Integrated MPEG-2 decode including iDCT and motion compensation for top quality DVD with lowest CPU usage
• Unique Adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing feature combines the best elements of the "bob" and "add-field" (weave) techniques
• YUV to RGB color space conversion
• Back-end scaler delivers top quality playback
• 4-tap horizontal and vertical filtering
• Upscaling and downscaling
• Filtered display of images up to 1920 pixels wide
• Hardware mirroring for flipping video images in video conferencing systems
• Supports 8-bit alpha blending and video keying for effective overlay of video and graphics

If you read the manufacturers specs every graphics card is the best out there. Heck, even the crappy VIA Unichrome has hardware MPEG2 acceleration and motion compensation. The problem is not the hardware support in the 9200, the problem is that Apple's DVD Player didn't use the hardware features (nor does any other Mac DVD app AFAIK). I don't see why that would change with the Intel GMA. They even have less incentive, now that the CPU is much more powerful.

Re:New Mac mini video chipset! Made for Home theat

[tji]

Actually, the previous model had superior MPEG2 capabilities.

'Hardware Motion Compensation' is one part of the MPEG2 acceleration capabilities available in GPU hardware (same as used with DxVA in Windows and XvMC in Linux). But, MC actually provides relatively little CPU offload.

The other portion, iDCT (inverse Discrete Cosine Transform) offloads a LOT more CPU.

The Radeon in the old Mini could do both iDCT and MC (as can all Radeons, dating way back to when, the early 90's?).

But, neither matter anyway.. Apple does not expose an open API to use the video acceleration capabilities in GPU hardware. Only their DVD player can use it. So, all video decoding is done on the CPU -- which makes the new Mini a big improvement with a faster CPU & optional dual core.

Re:New Mac mini video chipset! Made for Home theat

[davez0r]

i have a gen 1 mac mini doing 1920 x 1080 on an HDTV. of course i have no actual HD video at that res to test it with, but i feel cool doing it. regular HDTV scaled up looks fabu.

there are some jumps in the video at the higher resolutions, but i'd be willing to bet they're due to the HDD not being able to keep up.

Re:oxymoron...

[djpenguin808]

Incorrect. MP3 compression affects all parts of the audible frequency spectrum. If you are careful when you encode them, and you set the quality settings to high enough values, you will get compressed audio that sounds good on consumer-level equipment, but I gaurantee you that if you put that MP3 on a pair of $50K-a-pop Meyer studio mains, you [b]will[/b] hear the difference between the compressed MP3 and the uncompressed PCM audio (.wav) I know this for a fact, because I have performed this comparison more than once.

Just because your MP3s sound good to you with your settings on your audio equipment do not mean that they have not lost any audio quality, it merely means that you cannot hear the lost quality. If you want to reduce file size and retain full quality, you either need to use lossless compression, or a packing scheme such as shorten (.shn)

Re:Stick a better GPU in it, and you have an XBox

[vertinox]

I wonder if Apple is going to go this route next. It would be certainly far more usable than a dedicated gaming console.

Thats my biggest gripe about this new version:

Graphics and Video Support

* Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory.

Shared memory? Yuck! If you could only get a 128mb or a 256mb I'd get one. However, I bet it would be more than $1,000, but I'd still be interested.

Re:That's what I was wondering, too. I need Quartz

[jcr]

It runs Quartz Extreme. I don't think Apple will ever introduce another machine that doesn't.

-jcr

Re:$99 for a leather case?

[nblender]

> What can a $99 leather case get me?

Laid.

Re:Do you know what you're talking about?

[dfghjk]

FW800 was created becaue they could, not because there was a specific application that required it.

There are no hard drives that are firewire native. Internal drives or SATA attached drives will always outperform firewire ones, 400 or 800 doesn't matter. If you take a SATA or ATA drive and put a firewire translator board on it, you think it will yield I/O rates better than native attachment? It doesn't.

Mac mini

[jmorris42]

The new Mac Mini is ok. At least they finally fixed the fatal flaw of the original and got optical audio on the rear panel like they should have done first time. Whoever thought selling a 'media center' machine without digital audio should have been sacked.

Still way overpriced though. Yes it is tiny, but laptops face the same issues and you can buy a laptop with similar specs just about anywhere for the same prices Apple is getting for a mini. Seriously, go price a laptop with 1.5Ghz Mobile Pentium (about the same as the 'Core Solo') a puny (for a media center) 60G laptop hard drive, 512MB memory shared with a crap Intel integrated video and a DVD/CD-RW drive. Bet you don't have much trouble finding some for $599 and that gets you a head, while the mini is sold headless.

Still, once Linux gets up and running stable on em they would make really sweet MythTV frontends. And with the new Plextor USB capture having supported drivers you could even use it for a backend/frontend setup.

Airport Express S/PDIF out, iPod HiFi S/PDIF in

[mjm75]

Looks to me like the iPod HiFi has an interesting iPod-less application. Connect an iPod HiFi to an Airport Express using a fiber optic cable, and you have digital remote speakers wherever you want.

All for only $480 per node...

Apple releases leather pouch..

[srcosmo]

..And socks.

Well, I think I'm about ready to uncheck the "Apple" category from Homepage now...

This is the absolute WORST 'announcement' ever.

[teamhasnoi]

A box of speakers for Three HUNDRED fifty dollars.
A leather ENVELOPE for ONE HUNDRED dollars.
Mac Minis for one hundred extra bucks, and a neutered video card.

This is just CRAP. Why was there even a show? This stuff should just appear on the Apple store, not have a friggin' party.

Ugh. Is this what the Intel Transition is bringing me? Is Apple delirious?

Apple needs to leave the accessories market to the little companies and crappy eBay sellers, and stick to what it was good at.

Why did Steve even show for this one? Has he lost immunity to his own Reality Distortion Field?

This is truly disappointing - I expect weak crap like this from someone who's copying Apple, not Apple themselves.

I hope anyone who buys the iMoBviouslyaNiDiot box starves, because I really don't want that in the gene pool.

Before an Apple Zealot mods this down, please note. I have more Macs than you.

Re:iPod hi-fi?

[TheRaven64]

The iPod supports AIFF (uncompressed) and Apple Lossless audio, so it's possible to listen to CD-quality (which may or may not be high fidelity, depending on your viewpoint) audio on the iPod. Actually, the hardware supports 24-bit 96KHz audio (not sure if the software does, but Linux on the iPod does), so if you have a source for high quality digital audio then you might be in luck.

With 60GB of space, I could fit my entire music collection in lossless format.

User-installable memory?

[pjcreath]

According to the Apple Store:

Mac mini contains 667MHz (PC2-5300) double data rate, synchronous dynamic random-access memory (DDR2-SDRAM), one of the fastest memory technologies available today. Your Mac mini comes standard with two 256MB SO-DIMM chips for a total of 512 megabytes (MB) of memory... You can upgrade your memory later by taking your system to an Apple Authorized Service Provider or doing it yourself.

This sounds like you no longer have to tear the thing apart simply to upgrade the RAM.

Re:The iPod stuff is disappointing.

[Doctor Memory]

Well, let's look at the specs!

Apple iPod Hi-Fi (from Apple):
* Class D amp
* Two 180mm midrange drivers (acoustically suspended)
* One 130mm woofer (ported)
* Frequency response: 53Hz to 16kHz ± 3 dB
* Maximum peak sound pressure level: 108 dB at 1 m (AC); 102 dB at 1 m (DC)

Bose SoundDock (from Bose):
* 6.65" H x 11.91" W x 6.48" D 16.89 x 30.26 x 16.47 cm 4.56 lb (2.1 kg)

Can you show specs that demonstrate the Bose product to be superior? To anything? Can you even find specs for the SoundDock on Bose's site (beyond those shown here)? If so, trot 'em out, Bose-tool.

Comparison of PPC Mini Specs to Intel Mini Specs

[MCSEBear]

Looking over Apple's specs for both versions here is a comparison of the old PPC Mac Mini specs http://web.archive.org/web/20050401063720/www.appl e.com/macmini/specs.html and the new Intel Mac Mini specs http://www.apple.com/macmini/whatsinside.html

Things That Are Changed:

An Intel Core Solo at 1.5GHz with 2MB of L2 Cache onboard and a 667 Mhz Frontside Bus. (was a PowerPC G4 processor at 1.25GHz with 512K of L2 Cache onboard and a 167 Mhz Frontside Bus.)

A larger hard disk 60GB (was 40GB)

Bluetooth 2.0 built in (was optional)

WiFi G built in (was optional)

Gigabit Ethernet (was 100Mbit)

512 Meg RAM (was 256 Megs)

4 USB 2 ports (was 2)

Digital Audio Out(was headphone jack)

Digital Audio In (Was totally missing)

Remote Control

Support for up to 2 Gigs of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300) instead of 1 Gig of 333MHz DDR SDRAM (PC2700)

Things You give up:

ATI's Radeon 9200 with 32MB of DDR SDRAM for Intel's GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory

A built in 56K V.92 modem

Things You Keep:

400 Mbps Firewire

Slot Loading Combo Drive DVD-ROM/CD-RW

VGA adapter

Re:And the most important graphics question is...

[megan_of_wutai]

Er... the 9200 is an almost direct descendent of the former top of the line 8500 part.

Max memory too low!

[Cadallin]

That's the one thing that really hurts about the intel transition. We lost 64-bit addressing. My G5 could hold up to 16GB of RAM, all of it usable by the system. While I suspect the pro-systems will use Xeons and their hacked on 48-bit addressing to get around this. If they don't their will be an unholy ruckus from the pro-users. The G5's are used for Pro HD A/V, and high resolution still camera work, and there are many working systems out there USING 4+GB of RAM. Of course, we probably won't see a replacement for the G5 tower until ALL the pro-apps are fully ported anyway, which should still be awhile, although I'm sure they're working furiously on it now.

I can see replacing my G5 tower with a decendent of the current dual core mini in a few years, I just hope they increase the ram ceiling by then. Realistically my computing needs could be met by a maxed out dual-core mini with a couple of mini-stack 3.5in HD enclosures connected by FW.

My one plea: Ever since I've switched from windows, the ONE(!) app I miss dearly is Irfanview. My now fellow macheads don't understand, because showing it run under emulation cripples it horribly, but I'd pay a LOT for a Mac port of Irfanview.