I suspect Apple is targeting the people who buy those crappy Bose radios.
If they wanted to sell it mainly as a boom box, the iPod would not be sticking out of the top like that, but rather would slide in to a plastic enclosure like a cartrige. It would also have a single top handle.
They are probably hoping that boomers will use this for a personal stereo in their dens, offices, sewing rooms, sitting rooms, patios, etc.
It does look a lot more like a piece of mod furniture than something you would set on your tailgate while grilling brats outside Lambeau Field.
Your comparison only "works" because the cheapest Apple display is vastly superior to anything you would ever see attached to a notebook computer.
I'm positive I could buy a very nice LCD for about a hundred bucks. Most of the mods I made to the Dell would be a royal pain in the ass to do via after-market upgrades, so my comparison is considerably more valid.
It could be that they originally planned it to be 5400s (which was still a jump up from the 4500RPM drives in the first G4 minis of the line) and were pleasantly suprised that their supplier was going to send them something better at the price point they wanted.
Oh, I stand corrected. The Pound has risen against the dollar last time I looked. The PC is slightly cheaper, if you ignore the missing hardware and lower specs.
Then again, it comes out to slightly more when adding the shipping costs WITHIN THE UK. Shipping one to the US probably costs quite a bit more, so the Mac still wins.
Inferior CPU (Celeron vs. Core Solo) Slower bus (400 vs. 667) Slower HD (5400 vs SATA 7200) Slower Ethernet connection (10/100 vs. Gig) No Wi-Fi No Bluetooth No digital audio WAY more expensive.
Huh. It's like I woke up in some kind of bizarro world, where Macs actually look better in terms of specs vs. cost than the PC knock-off versions of them.
It's looking like the Mac is even a better by than the "Eversham" if you actually want to run Windows Vista (when it arrives Real Soon Now) instead of OS X!
I did my best to match up the specs on Dell's page.
Add: "Dell Reccomended" XP Pro Add: remote control Upgrade: HD to 80 GB Upgrade: Media drive to dual-layer DVD burner Add: Dell On-Call to match the free year of AppleCare
Total cost: $1141
Still missing: Bluetooth, SPDIF audio, and DVI out.
But hey, we can add bluetooth with a $40 USB dongle. Oh, and we can do the same with audio for about $50. Of course, now we are way behind the 4 USB ports on the mini, but we can expand that with a $30 USB 2.0 hub.
Total cost: $1261
So now the Dell you linked is the same system, only without the iLife software, and missing a couple peripherals, for $462 more.
Must be a damn nice 15.4 inch monitor on that laptop for $462.
Go to the mini in the Apple Store, select a model, where they list hard drive options, click on "Read More." The text in my previous post is pasted directly from there.
The specs page you linked to is probably the one for the old mini.
However, the 5200RPM drive is just really slow. I ended up taking it out and using a firewire drive (MiniStack) to run it off of. It's quite a bit faster now. I think that is the big flaw in the model they are offering now. There should be an option for 7200RPM drives for extra.
From the specs page:
A variety of hard drive capacities are available for Mac mini. All Mac mini models include standard Serial ATA hard drives featuring data transfers up to 1.5 Gigabits per second. All hard drives run at 7,200 revolutions per minute (rpm).
Even if it is, my line might be different than yours. If more "reality" makes you happy, limit your "virtual" experiences. If you prefer to be a brain-in-a-jar who lives entirely in a virtual world, the means to do so may someday exist.
Being the libertarian crackpot that I am, I'm very pro-freedom when it comes to this sort of thing. If somebody feels their best means to a fulfilling and happy life it to disappear into an electronic world, I say God bless 'em. Any discomfort other people have with their choices should be more or less irrelevant.
Isn't this something you could just do with a web site on your own? Hell, even a myspace page or something would do the job. Don't most X-Box Live players own computers?
Last time I looked, the X-Box 360 has no keyboard. Not an ideal machine for interacting with people beyond in-game chat.
Personally I wouldn't miss the 'ice pick in the ears'-like sensation of a subwoofer. Almost enough to give 'soundsystem rage' when one of those idiots drive by with one of those thump cars.
I assure you that the experience of a high-quality listening-room sub is vastly different from the coffin-with-pyle-driver subwoofer units you hear pumping out hip-hop beats from the backs of rusted out Honda Civics.
Bring some of your best music to your local hi-fi store (not electronics chain store... the hi-fi store downtown run by a mustached hippie in birkenstocks who thinks Billy Preston was the peak of 20th Century pop.) Bring your favorite CD's.
Start with the Velodyne. I fine little sub which goes for about $500 - $600. You will be surprised how well it does.
"better and cheaper"... heh, tell that to the subjectivist audiophiles out there...
I am a subjectivist audiophile. I reliably hear vast differenced in double-blind tests where most "objective" engineers would swear that I'm imagining things. It's based on listening that I've concluded that low-end electronics have improved by leaps and bounds over the last 30-or-so years.
Don't get me wrong. An old "Hyperbrid One" amplifier is still a thing of beauty to behold. The snooty high end was really, really good back then, just as it is now. It's just that the gap has closed to the point that the Next Best system below a dream system is much easier to obtain.
"Affordable" electronic parts in the 70s were pretty much junk, as far as audio applications were concerned. True Hi-Fi only came one of two ways:
1. Spend a shitload of money on an system components that were built entirely out of pristine parts which were hand-crafted by virgins using only the finest materials.
or 2. Find the rare and magical system components for which some brilliant audio engineer managed to find just the exact recipe of of shitty parts which worked together to overcome the shortcomings of each, and output a sound that actually fooled the ear into thinking it was hearing a faithful reproduction of the sound.
Now days, that is simply not true. The cheapest-assed parts out there preform as well (or better!!!) than some of the best stuff from 30 years ago. It has gotten to the point that even audiophiles can't always tell a cheap modern amp from the high-end gear (of the same output rating.) An amp which doesn't mess up the signal is an amp which doesn't mess up the signal, end of story.
Media players are another area where money doesn't always get you much. Yes, the $300 Rotel CD players are pretty darn good, but we all remember the famous super-cheap Radio Shack portable units which audio geeks were snapping up by the truckload when it turned out to be one of the best players out there. These days, I'm ripping everything to lossless compression, sending the digiat signal out the TOSLink output of my Mac, and doing the D/A conversion in the preamp, it it's a moot point anyway.
The speakers are one of the few areas where large money buys a large difference, but even then, as long as you stay away from Bose and/or the Best Buy show-room, there are a lot of terrific speaker systems that sound good enough for 99% of the world, yet are a fraction of the price of a pair of Carver towers.
Turntables... Yeah, the best of them still cost a fortune. Nevertheless... If, like me, you are one of those kooks who still occasionally listens to vinyl, there's hope for savings there, too. Classic Thorens, Lenco, and radio-broadcast Technics turntables (etc) show up in estate sales all the time. If you are a the sort of person who likes to tinker with the hardware (or are related to somebody who does), the cutting edge of 1981 can be yours for just a few hundred bucks.
You really don't think Grandma tests her patches first, do you?
No, but if Grandma's been burned once, she'll wait and apply the patch after it's been out there for a few weeks, and her nephew the BOFH tells her that *this time* it appears to be safe to run.
It's worth noting that the default user on OS X is Admin, but on the Mac there's one important distinction:
Administrator != root.
Unlike Windows, it's perfectly safe to run full-time as the "Administrator" user, and nearly every OS X user does. You'll still need to enter a password to do stuff which requires root-level access.
For $20 you can get a pair of headphones that give you (or at least, me) the same perceived quality as $1000 speakers.
I would miss that sensation of the subwoofer shaking my nostrils and pelvis when the bass guitar kicks in along with the bass drum on the opening downbeat of "Breathe" from "Dark Side of the Moon."
In 5.1 the surrounds aren't really supposed to be "rears", but more "sides". I always thought they were rears and put them way far back behind the couch. Never really sounded great. Looked at the dolby website once and they were almost even with the couch. Sounds better there.
Odds are, your amplifier has a setting which let's you designate where your back speakers are. Behind you is still the ideal, but most people don't have 6-8 feet of space behind their living-room couch, so 5.1 systems are designed to compromise by putting them on the sides.
If yours sound better on the sides than in back, then it's probably because your amp is currently set up that way.
How to I know this? I have back speakers which sounded like ass until I stumbled upon this particular feature in my amp settings. Now they sound great.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect Apple is targeting the people who buy those crappy Bose radios.
If they wanted to sell it mainly as a boom box, the iPod would not be sticking out of the top like that, but rather would slide in to a plastic enclosure like a cartrige. It would also have a single top handle.
They are probably hoping that boomers will use this for a personal stereo in their dens, offices, sewing rooms, sitting rooms, patios, etc.
It does look a lot more like a piece of mod furniture than something you would set on your tailgate while grilling brats outside Lambeau Field.
Not to mention that all those great iLife programs have free PC equivalents
Pffft!
Show me ANYTHING in the PC world which compares to GarageBand at five times the retail cost of the entire iLife suite!
Repeat the same process, but for iDVD.
Prepare to be mocked mercilessly for whatever pathetic answer you come up with.
Your comparison only "works" because the cheapest Apple display is vastly superior to anything you would ever see attached to a notebook computer.
I'm positive I could buy a very nice LCD for about a hundred bucks. Most of the mods I made to the Dell would be a royal pain in the ass to do via after-market upgrades, so my comparison is considerably more valid.
Which Dell would you reccomend for the living room media cabinet at that price point? Something that fits nicely on a 4" shelf.
Because I suspect that's where most of these minis are going to get used.
(My old G4 mini is getting built into a mobile rack for guitar and mic processing, but that's another story.)
Does anybody even make a 5400RPM SATA?
It could be that they originally planned it to be 5400s (which was still a jump up from the 4500RPM drives in the first G4 minis of the line) and were pleasantly suprised that their supplier was going to send them something better at the price point they wanted.
Oh, I stand corrected. The Pound has risen against the dollar last time I looked. The PC is slightly cheaper, if you ignore the missing hardware and lower specs.
Then again, it comes out to slightly more when adding the shipping costs WITHIN THE UK. Shipping one to the US probably costs quite a bit more, so the Mac still wins.
A useful comparison, thanks! Let's see.
Inferior CPU (Celeron vs. Core Solo)
Slower bus (400 vs. 667)
Slower HD (5400 vs SATA 7200)
Slower Ethernet connection (10/100 vs. Gig)
No Wi-Fi
No Bluetooth
No digital audio
WAY more expensive.
Huh. It's like I woke up in some kind of bizarro world, where Macs actually look better in terms of specs vs. cost than the PC knock-off versions of them.
It's looking like the Mac is even a better by than the "Eversham" if you actually want to run Windows Vista (when it arrives Real Soon Now) instead of OS X!
I'm going to trust the store over a brochure which was probably written a month before the Stevenote.
I did my best to match up the specs on Dell's page.
Add: "Dell Reccomended" XP Pro
Add: remote control
Upgrade: HD to 80 GB
Upgrade: Media drive to dual-layer DVD burner
Add: Dell On-Call to match the free year of AppleCare
Total cost: $1141
Still missing: Bluetooth, SPDIF audio, and DVI out.
But hey, we can add bluetooth with a $40 USB dongle. Oh, and we can do the same with audio for about $50. Of course, now we are way behind the 4 USB ports on the mini, but we can expand that with a $30 USB 2.0 hub.
Total cost: $1261
So now the Dell you linked is the same system, only without the iLife software, and missing a couple peripherals, for $462 more.
Must be a damn nice 15.4 inch monitor on that laptop for $462.
So you think everybody who reads slashdot has been keeping track of what Richard Stallman has been doing for the last few years?
YMBNH.
Oh what the heck. I'm in a good mood. I'll do the work for you:
Not positive this link will work, since it's a drill-down in their store, but have fun.
Go to the mini in the Apple Store, select a model, where they list hard drive options, click on "Read More." The text in my previous post is pasted directly from there.
The specs page you linked to is probably the one for the old mini.
However, the 5200RPM drive is just really slow. I ended up taking it out and using a firewire drive (MiniStack) to run it off of. It's quite a bit faster now. I think that is the big flaw in the model they are offering now. There should be an option for 7200RPM drives for extra.
From the specs page:
A variety of hard drive capacities are available for Mac mini. All Mac mini models include standard Serial ATA hard drives featuring data transfers up to 1.5 Gigabits per second. All hard drives run at 7,200 revolutions per minute (rpm).
Umm... he wrote it so... um....
Another detail which ought to be in the summary, yes?
here do we draw the line?
Who says a line even needs to be drawn?
Even if it is, my line might be different than yours. If more "reality" makes you happy, limit your "virtual" experiences. If you prefer to be a brain-in-a-jar who lives entirely in a virtual world, the means to do so may someday exist.
Being the libertarian crackpot that I am, I'm very pro-freedom when it comes to this sort of thing. If somebody feels their best means to a fulfilling and happy life it to disappear into an electronic world, I say God bless 'em. Any discomfort other people have with their choices should be more or less irrelevant.
How does plugging a keyboard into your game console make you sound like a dick?
Is that some new voice modulation option which can only be accessed via keyboard?
Still, the summary should at least give you some idea whether he's "fer it" or "agin it." Sheesh!
Isn't this something you could just do with a web site on your own? Hell, even a myspace page or something would do the job. Don't most X-Box Live players own computers?
Last time I looked, the X-Box 360 has no keyboard. Not an ideal machine for interacting with people beyond in-game chat.
Personally I wouldn't miss the 'ice pick in the ears'-like sensation of a subwoofer. Almost enough to give 'soundsystem rage' when one of those idiots drive by with one of those thump cars.
I assure you that the experience of a high-quality listening-room sub is vastly different from the coffin-with-pyle-driver subwoofer units you hear pumping out hip-hop beats from the backs of rusted out Honda Civics.
Bring some of your best music to your local hi-fi store (not electronics chain store... the hi-fi store downtown run by a mustached hippie in birkenstocks who thinks Billy Preston was the peak of 20th Century pop.) Bring your favorite CD's.
Start with the Velodyne. I fine little sub which goes for about $500 - $600. You will be surprised how well it does.
"better and cheaper"... heh, tell that to the subjectivist audiophiles out there...
I am a subjectivist audiophile. I reliably hear vast differenced in double-blind tests where most "objective" engineers would swear that I'm imagining things. It's based on listening that I've concluded that low-end electronics have improved by leaps and bounds over the last 30-or-so years.
Don't get me wrong. An old "Hyperbrid One" amplifier is still a thing of beauty to behold. The snooty high end was really, really good back then, just as it is now. It's just that the gap has closed to the point that the Next Best system below a dream system is much easier to obtain.
"Affordable" electronic parts in the 70s were pretty much junk, as far as audio applications were concerned. True Hi-Fi only came one of two ways:
1. Spend a shitload of money on an system components that were built entirely out of pristine parts which were hand-crafted by virgins using only the finest materials.
or 2. Find the rare and magical system components for which some brilliant audio engineer managed to find just the exact recipe of of shitty parts which worked together to overcome the shortcomings of each, and output a sound that actually fooled the ear into thinking it was hearing a faithful reproduction of the sound.
Now days, that is simply not true. The cheapest-assed parts out there preform as well (or better!!!) than some of the best stuff from 30 years ago. It has gotten to the point that even audiophiles can't always tell a cheap modern amp from the high-end gear (of the same output rating.) An amp which doesn't mess up the signal is an amp which doesn't mess up the signal, end of story.
Media players are another area where money doesn't always get you much. Yes, the $300 Rotel CD players are pretty darn good, but we all remember the famous super-cheap Radio Shack portable units which audio geeks were snapping up by the truckload when it turned out to be one of the best players out there. These days, I'm ripping everything to lossless compression, sending the digiat signal out the TOSLink output of my Mac, and doing the D/A conversion in the preamp, it it's a moot point anyway.
The speakers are one of the few areas where large money buys a large difference, but even then, as long as you stay away from Bose and/or the Best Buy show-room, there are a lot of terrific speaker systems that sound good enough for 99% of the world, yet are a fraction of the price of a pair of Carver towers.
Turntables... Yeah, the best of them still cost a fortune. Nevertheless... If, like me, you are one of those kooks who still occasionally listens to vinyl, there's hope for savings there, too. Classic Thorens, Lenco, and radio-broadcast Technics turntables (etc) show up in estate sales all the time. If you are a the sort of person who likes to tinker with the hardware (or are related to somebody who does), the cutting edge of 1981 can be yours for just a few hundred bucks.
It's mostly safe, not perfectly safe. The iChat virus/trojan suggests one reason
It would, if Admin users didn't still need to enter their password and authorize the iChat trojan.
As it stands, it supports my point, that Admin != root.
You really don't think Grandma tests her patches first, do you?
No, but if Grandma's been burned once, she'll wait and apply the patch after it's been out there for a few weeks, and her nephew the BOFH tells her that *this time* it appears to be safe to run.
It's worth noting that the default user on OS X is Admin, but on the Mac there's one important distinction:
Administrator != root.
Unlike Windows, it's perfectly safe to run full-time as the "Administrator" user, and nearly every OS X user does. You'll still need to enter a password to do stuff which requires root-level access.
For $20 you can get a pair of headphones that give you (or at least, me) the same perceived quality as $1000 speakers.
I would miss that sensation of the subwoofer shaking my nostrils and pelvis when the bass guitar kicks in along with the bass drum on the opening downbeat of "Breathe" from "Dark Side of the Moon."
That moment is easily worth $980. YMMV.
In 5.1 the surrounds aren't really supposed to be "rears", but more "sides". I always thought they were rears and put them way far back behind the couch. Never really sounded great. Looked at the dolby website once and they were almost even with the couch. Sounds better there.
Odds are, your amplifier has a setting which let's you designate where your back speakers are. Behind you is still the ideal, but most people don't have 6-8 feet of space behind their living-room couch, so 5.1 systems are designed to compromise by putting them on the sides.
If yours sound better on the sides than in back, then it's probably because your amp is currently set up that way.
How to I know this? I have back speakers which sounded like ass until I stumbled upon this particular feature in my amp settings. Now they sound great.