Apple had a bunch made, with some to ship to stores & some to ship to pre-orders. Those of us that pre-ordered on day 1 completely depleted their stock, so yours is probably still being assembled.
It looks like they drastically underestimated how popular these little suckers would be.
(They still seem genuinely surprised that so many of us want to use them in the media room. As recently as yesterday, Apple reps were still adamantly insisting to the press that the mini is not a media console, but a low-cost "switcher's" Mac.)
The EyeTV comes with a remote, but it is unclear whether it can be used to control things like the Apple DVD player. I'm not holding my breath, though. I'll probably end up picking up a separate remote for that, and programming the functions of both into my universal one.
People who talk about how much they hate cell phones annoy me almost as much as people who brag about not owning a TV.
Okay. You don't think we all need to carry phones around all the time. We get it. You can get used to it, or go live in a 12x12 shack in the mountains of Montana.
Personally, I think they're terrific.
Then again, I also think Philo T. Farnsworth was doing God's will when he invented television, so I'm somewhat of an extreme anti-Luddite. I want more technology "intruding" on my life, not less.
Since you actually have one, maybe you can comment on the amount of noise it makes. I have heard comments that it is essentially silent. This is another reason that it would be good in the media room.
What is your impression?
My impression?
It is essentially silent.
The fan usually doesn't run, and when it does, you probably won't hear it. The "whisper quiet" fans on most video projectors are louder.
Confirms exactly what I was saying. Well-designed, and not large at all. They managed to do quiet computing with a fairly small fan.
I think part of the trick is the external power supply and the laptop drive instead of a high-RPM standard HD. Two very potent heat sources have been removed from the system, allowing the cooling to happen without spinning the fan very fast.
The X-Box, by comparison, uses and internal supply and a full-size HD, and needs to run a noisy fan pretty much the entire time that it's on.
The problem (and this is a legitimate issue with Apple that PC bigots can make hay with), is that Apple uses some funky calls of their own to use the video card with their DVD player which they don't share with third-party folks.
That means that, unless somebody reverse-engineers Apple's DVD player, the EyeTV and other devices like it need to process all the video with the CPU.
To do full-frame 1080i HDTV with the EyeTV500 requires a dual-G5 system.
This sucks, but it probably won't be a problem for me, because I'm planning on using a DLP projector system, which is a fixed-pixel design that (for the one I'm buying) is only 720 lines tall.
Exactly. The issue here is that you and I clearly have a very different idea of what a "big" fan is.
The fans that go into a typical off-the-shelf PC are what I describe as "too small."
However, with a fan which is obviously even smaller than that (or it would not fit in there), the mini somehow manages to run very quietly, which is impressive.
You might have missed it, but the iPod can play uncompressed music, and the reviews from the audiophile press for the docked iPod playing AIFF files have been downright giddy.
Let me give you an idea of how quiet this little sucker is...
Most of the time when it's in operation, the fan does not appear to run at all, meaning it's as silent as a laptop.
By way of comparison, the eMac has a big, slow-turning fan (about 4" wide) in order to ensure fairly quiet operation. It's quieter than some of the amps in my music studio... When the fan on the mini does engage, it's actually somehow quieter than the massive fan on the eMac.
The loudest component on the whole darn thing is the DVD drive, which is far from the loudest drive I've heard, but still about what you would expect from a slot-loading computer drive.
This is one of Cringely's less-original flights of fancy, (lots of people have been suspecting that iTMS could expand to movies for some time now), but also one that seems to me to be very on-target.
My mini arrived at my office via FedEx on Thrusday, and I've been setting it up for exactly the same purpose as almost everybody else I've heard from who's buying one: It's going into the media room.
A $300 digital tuner called the EyeTV gives me PVR features, and a $60 USB break-out box gives me DTS sound for DVD's. (The G4 solution can't quite do 1080i in full-screen mode, but I only need 720p anyway...) The DVI port is compatible with the wide-screen projector I'm planning on buying next month. In spite of the relatively light-weight video card, it plays World of Warcraft nearly as well as my AMD Frankenstein box with a 256 MB GeForce card.
So this thing is already serving up movies, TV, music, and games, and will be just about the only media device in the room (I might consider moving the X-Box into whatever room my old TV goes to.)
However, like many geeks, I also sometimes watch downloaded materials. I'm not as big on bootleg DivX's as some folks, but the occasional anime "fan-sub" has found its way onto my HD, and there's also plenty of legit stuff out there, such as "Red vs. Blue."
If it was possible to click on a movie or classic TV show in the iTMS, and download it as an MPEG2 stream for a reasonable price, even if it took overnight to get it, I would probably snap it up.
I passed on the DVD burner option for the mini. I figure I can get a better & faster double-density burner sometime down the road as an external firewire option. If this movies-on-demand feature of iTMS actually comes to pass, I might find myself buying a burner sooner rather than later.
Why would I compare and advanced text editor to the iLife suite?
I suppose you could say it's expensive compared to Emacs, but compared to most high-quality, full-featured, GUI-based text editors which support context coloring, regular expressions, and batch processing, it's actually a very inexpensive program.
The cost of a bottle of soda mostly the cost of bottling it, shipping it, and keeping it in a refrigerator until you buy it.
Apart from carbonated water, there's only a couple cents worth of actual ingredients in a soda bottle. Which means that the cost of a bottle of water, even if they just fill it from an unfiltered tap at their factory, is almost exactly the same cost as a bottle of soda.
When I buy a bottle of water on a hot summer day, I don't think of it as buying water. I think of it as leasing refrigerator space. I'm paying the convenience store to keep cold water on hand for when I want it.
It might seem like a stupid thing to buy to many people, but if that is so, then buying a bottle of Mountain Dew is even more stupid. That would be paying for a bottle of cold water which also rots your teeth, taxes your pancreas, and tastes disgusting.
That said, those one-gallon jugs of filtered water often cost about the same as the 1-liter bottles on the shelves immediately above them. Even if you only drink half the jug during your evening of playing volleyball, you come out way ahead buying the bulk stuff, and it's usually more pure than the various bottled waters.
Here's the scoop on the unfortunate dual-USB G3 iBook:
A design flaw was caused by the way the video was mounted on the motherboard.
Even if you didn't buy AppleCare on your it, they extended the basic coverage on the motherboard for that particular model from one year to three, just because of this problem.
If you sent yours in sometime in the last year, odds are that they put in a motherboard which added a small spacer between the video card and the board, which is supposed to put a stop to the video problems. In my case, it just so happened that the tech who fixed it also re-assembled it incorrectly, and it came back damaged as a result.
Since I had gone back and forth with them a couple of times before the design flaw was discovered, and now they were not able to resolve the problem on the first attempt after the fix was known, they decided this time around that enough was enough, and gave me a new replacement.
I didn't insist on it or pound my shoe on the table or anything, I just persisted in my expectation that they would resolve the matter somehow.
If yours was fixed properly last time you sent it in (with the newly-modified mobo) the odds are against you having any further problems with it.
So you have to get your own and figure out how to install it, which is probably painful and/or warranty-voiding.
MacWorld confirmed with Apple that opening the case does not void your warranty, so long as you don't actually break shit in the process. Even then, breaking the goofy plastic clips will not prevent them from honoring the warranty on something like a bad video card.
Also, it didn't take long for the Mac press to discover the magic tool for prying open the mini case without breaking anything: An ordinary putty knife. That's reportedly what even the folks at Apple typically use to get it open when they service these things. A quicktime video of the process is linked on another of the stories here on Slashdot today.
I always found it ironic that people who NEED a processor as powerful as the G5 are clapping their hands over the space saved by Mac mini.
And when did I say I need a G5?
I said that if you are looking for a small, quiet system, then the Mac mini currently gives you the most bang for the buck.
If you really NEED power, then space shouldn't be an issue.
I need power. Space is still an issue. My Mac mini is going into the media room, and fits beautifully into the space I have for it.
Show me a more powerful system than the Mac mini which is just as small, just as quiet, and just as cheap, or concede that this is actually a rather remarkable system, in spite of your anti-Mac zealotry.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, that system is not just "ugly" (as if most Slashdotters would care), it's also bigger, louder, slower, and more expensive than the Mac mini.
For once, Apple has released the fastest & cheapest system available in its class.
Yes, you can get a much faster & cheaper desktop system than the G5 iMac.
You can probably also build a sweet AMD system for the price of the G5 tower.
The iBook remains fairly competitive, but far from the cheapest laptop out there.
However, if you are looking for a small & quiet media room brick, there is no comparison: Mac mini wins.
This is even true if you completely ignore the advantages of OS X, and say you want a Debian Linux system. For this form factor (or anything close to it), the Mac mini is still the best deal out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple had a bunch made, with some to ship to stores & some to ship to pre-orders. Those of us that pre-ordered on day 1 completely depleted their stock, so yours is probably still being assembled.
It looks like they drastically underestimated how popular these little suckers would be.
(They still seem genuinely surprised that so many of us want to use them in the media room. As recently as yesterday, Apple reps were still adamantly insisting to the press that the mini is not a media console, but a low-cost "switcher's" Mac.)
The EyeTV comes with a remote, but it is unclear whether it can be used to control things like the Apple DVD player. I'm not holding my breath, though. I'll probably end up picking up a separate remote for that, and programming the functions of both into my universal one.
People who talk about how much they hate cell phones annoy me almost as much as people who brag about not owning a TV.
Okay. You don't think we all need to carry phones around all the time. We get it. You can get used to it, or go live in a 12x12 shack in the mountains of Montana.
Personally, I think they're terrific.
Then again, I also think Philo T. Farnsworth was doing God's will when he invented television, so I'm somewhat of an extreme anti-Luddite. I want more technology "intruding" on my life, not less.
I thought the whole point of the article was that DVORAK should be presented to newbies, before the get QWERTY patterns into their muscle-memories.
Right, because it's so easy for newbies to remember that:
""" is for "Quit"
Since you actually have one, maybe you can comment on the amount of noise it makes. I have heard comments that it is essentially silent. This is another reason that it would be good in the media room.
What is your impression?
My impression?
It is essentially silent.
The fan usually doesn't run, and when it does, you probably won't hear it. The "whisper quiet" fans on most video projectors are louder.
Confirms exactly what I was saying. Well-designed, and not large at all. They managed to do quiet computing with a fairly small fan.
I think part of the trick is the external power supply and the laptop drive instead of a high-RPM standard HD. Two very potent heat sources have been removed from the system, allowing the cooling to happen without spinning the fan very fast.
The X-Box, by comparison, uses and internal supply and a full-size HD, and needs to run a noisy fan pretty much the entire time that it's on.
Old habits die hard.
You are correct, of course. Dual-layer is the right term.
The problem (and this is a legitimate issue with Apple that PC bigots can make hay with), is that Apple uses some funky calls of their own to use the video card with their DVD player which they don't share with third-party folks.
That means that, unless somebody reverse-engineers Apple's DVD player, the EyeTV and other devices like it need to process all the video with the CPU.
To do full-frame 1080i HDTV with the EyeTV500 requires a dual-G5 system.
This sucks, but it probably won't be a problem for me, because I'm planning on using a DLP projector system, which is a fixed-pixel design that (for the one I'm buying) is only 720 lines tall.
Exactly. The issue here is that you and I clearly have a very different idea of what a "big" fan is.
The fans that go into a typical off-the-shelf PC are what I describe as "too small."
However, with a fan which is obviously even smaller than that (or it would not fit in there), the mini somehow manages to run very quietly, which is impressive.
I plan on submitting a detailed story to MacSlash sometime shortly, once I've had time to really give this thing a proper trial.
Already took it apart. The fan is obviously small enough that I didn't even notice where it was when I was swapping the RAM out.
Seriously, if you had a fan as big as the eMac's in that little case, you wouldn't have room for the computer.
Are you kidding? The height of the whole mini is smaller than most small PC case fans.
You might have missed it, but the iPod can play uncompressed music, and the reviews from the audiophile press for the docked iPod playing AIFF files have been downright giddy.
Let me give you an idea of how quiet this little sucker is...
Most of the time when it's in operation, the fan does not appear to run at all, meaning it's as silent as a laptop.
By way of comparison, the eMac has a big, slow-turning fan (about 4" wide) in order to ensure fairly quiet operation. It's quieter than some of the amps in my music studio... When the fan on the mini does engage, it's actually somehow quieter than the massive fan on the eMac.
The loudest component on the whole darn thing is the DVD drive, which is far from the loudest drive I've heard, but still about what you would expect from a slot-loading computer drive.
This is one of Cringely's less-original flights of fancy, (lots of people have been suspecting that iTMS could expand to movies for some time now), but also one that seems to me to be very on-target.
My mini arrived at my office via FedEx on Thrusday, and I've been setting it up for exactly the same purpose as almost everybody else I've heard from who's buying one: It's going into the media room.
A $300 digital tuner called the EyeTV gives me PVR features, and a $60 USB break-out box gives me DTS sound for DVD's. (The G4 solution can't quite do 1080i in full-screen mode, but I only need 720p anyway...) The DVI port is compatible with the wide-screen projector I'm planning on buying next month. In spite of the relatively light-weight video card, it plays World of Warcraft nearly as well as my AMD Frankenstein box with a 256 MB GeForce card.
So this thing is already serving up movies, TV, music, and games, and will be just about the only media device in the room (I might consider moving the X-Box into whatever room my old TV goes to.)
However, like many geeks, I also sometimes watch downloaded materials. I'm not as big on bootleg DivX's as some folks, but the occasional anime "fan-sub" has found its way onto my HD, and there's also plenty of legit stuff out there, such as "Red vs. Blue."
If it was possible to click on a movie or classic TV show in the iTMS, and download it as an MPEG2 stream for a reasonable price, even if it took overnight to get it, I would probably snap it up.
I passed on the DVD burner option for the mini. I figure I can get a better & faster double-density burner sometime down the road as an external firewire option. If this movies-on-demand feature of iTMS actually comes to pass, I might find myself buying a burner sooner rather than later.
Why would I compare and advanced text editor to the iLife suite?
I suppose you could say it's expensive compared to Emacs, but compared to most high-quality, full-featured, GUI-based text editors which support context coloring, regular expressions, and batch processing, it's actually a very inexpensive program.
The cost of a bottle of soda mostly the cost of bottling it, shipping it, and keeping it in a refrigerator until you buy it.
Apart from carbonated water, there's only a couple cents worth of actual ingredients in a soda bottle. Which means that the cost of a bottle of water, even if they just fill it from an unfiltered tap at their factory, is almost exactly the same cost as a bottle of soda.
When I buy a bottle of water on a hot summer day, I don't think of it as buying water. I think of it as leasing refrigerator space. I'm paying the convenience store to keep cold water on hand for when I want it.
It might seem like a stupid thing to buy to many people, but if that is so, then buying a bottle of Mountain Dew is even more stupid. That would be paying for a bottle of cold water which also rots your teeth, taxes your pancreas, and tastes disgusting.
That said, those one-gallon jugs of filtered water often cost about the same as the 1-liter bottles on the shelves immediately above them. Even if you only drink half the jug during your evening of playing volleyball, you come out way ahead buying the bulk stuff, and it's usually more pure than the various bottled waters.
Why can't Apple have a promotion with some product I'd actually want to buy?
Why invent the future when you can sell sugar-water to children?
btw, what exactly is an appropriate name for the sequel: Y Files? XX Files? X Files II?
X-Files version 10.1
lol! Sorry to make you a little green.
Here's the scoop on the unfortunate dual-USB G3 iBook:
A design flaw was caused by the way the video was mounted on the motherboard.
Even if you didn't buy AppleCare on your it, they extended the basic coverage on the motherboard for that particular model from one year to three, just because of this problem.
If you sent yours in sometime in the last year, odds are that they put in a motherboard which added a small spacer between the video card and the board, which is supposed to put a stop to the video problems. In my case, it just so happened that the tech who fixed it also re-assembled it incorrectly, and it came back damaged as a result.
Since I had gone back and forth with them a couple of times before the design flaw was discovered, and now they were not able to resolve the problem on the first attempt after the fix was known, they decided this time around that enough was enough, and gave me a new replacement.
I didn't insist on it or pound my shoe on the table or anything, I just persisted in my expectation that they would resolve the matter somehow.
If yours was fixed properly last time you sent it in (with the newly-modified mobo) the odds are against you having any further problems with it.
So you have to get your own and figure out how to install it, which is probably painful and/or warranty-voiding.
MacWorld confirmed with Apple that opening the case does not void your warranty, so long as you don't actually break shit in the process. Even then, breaking the goofy plastic clips will not prevent them from honoring the warranty on something like a bad video card.
Also, it didn't take long for the Mac press to discover the magic tool for prying open the mini case without breaking anything: An ordinary putty knife. That's reportedly what even the folks at Apple typically use to get it open when they service these things. A quicktime video of the process is linked on another of the stories here on Slashdot today.
I always found it ironic that people who NEED a processor as powerful as the G5 are clapping their hands over the space saved by Mac mini.
And when did I say I need a G5?
I said that if you are looking for a small, quiet system, then the Mac mini currently gives you the most bang for the buck.
If you really NEED power, then space shouldn't be an issue.
I need power. Space is still an issue. My Mac mini is going into the media room, and fits beautifully into the space I have for it.
Show me a more powerful system than the Mac mini which is just as small, just as quiet, and just as cheap, or concede that this is actually a rather remarkable system, in spite of your anti-Mac zealotry.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, that system is not just "ugly" (as if most Slashdotters would care), it's also bigger, louder, slower, and more expensive than the Mac mini.
For once, Apple has released the fastest & cheapest system available in its class.
Yes, you can get a much faster & cheaper desktop system than the G5 iMac.
You can probably also build a sweet AMD system for the price of the G5 tower.
The iBook remains fairly competitive, but far from the cheapest laptop out there.
However, if you are looking for a small & quiet media room brick, there is no comparison: Mac mini wins.
This is even true if you completely ignore the advantages of OS X, and say you want a Debian Linux system. For this form factor (or anything close to it), the Mac mini is still the best deal out there.
Totally reminds me of the Eddie Murphy "Welfare Burger" skit. "Better than McDonalds!"
That's brilliant. A very adroit choice of a pop-culture reference that fits the situation perfectly.
I propose that the day Gateway or HP or somebody tries to come out with a mini copy, we unofficially dub it The Welfare Burger.