You missed the best part :
it's pretty clear from everything being said ( and what the attacked servers run ) that they hadn't applied SP2 and/or IIS patches, and the attack was done using one of many fairly well-known exploits. Ok, maybe not comedy, but certainly irony or something close too it. Just desserts?
Someone alerted me to google watch the other day. It's definitely an interesting take on the company, I have to say.
You do have to wonder how much of the 'do no evil' philosophy is cover for the "let us store and index all information about everything, including you" philosophy. Not that I'm going to stop using Google until their results become less usable than Yahoo's results...
so, uh, which companies are undercutting Dell on price? Can I go out and buy one-off parts that will result in a cheaper machine than I could buy from Dell w/ similar specs? Because I looked, and the mid-to-low-end machine I was going to make ran over $500 easily... maybe I was looking at higher-quality parts, or actually including a real video card, but still... last time I saw a "how to make a cheap pc" question floated on/., the consensus was "you're better off buying a Dell"
So er... so why then can I buy ram, direct from 3rd parties for 1/2 what apple charges for it? i'm not buying in volume. I'm buying qty 1.
and the third-party is buying in large quantities, and often it's not quality-guaranteed. I'm not saying Apple's not marking up their RAM pretty badly; they are. I'm saying the markup isn't as huge as it seems, since you and I can get RAM from DealRAM or whereever for pretty much the same price ( or quite possibly less than ) Apple does. I wouldn't buy RAM from Apple either, at least not right now...
More seriously, yes. CRTs will become a niche market as better displays are made more cheaply available. This is not shocking; it's not even really news. It's been predicted for a long, long time. There are a lot of drawbacks to CRTs, and for most uses current LCD technology is more than adequate and in some important regards better. Mainly, they use less power, take up less space, and produce a sharp, no-tuning-required picture.
As refresh rates, color accuracy and price all improve, CRT markets will continue to dwindle. The manufacturers know this, and are adjusting their production appropriately to compete.
After reading a lot about it and discussing it with several health care professionals, I've come to the conclusion that the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis is, at least currently, far too general. What, like 10%, probably more, of the population has it, given the current criteria? At what point is something just a bit of personality characteristic as opposed to a mental problem? What's the diagnosis for the overly-outgoing, socially-obsessed technophobe who can't do math!?!
It appears I'm not alone in thinking this, either. Check the Wikipedia entry under "Criticisms", which references The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain. Several medial professionals I've spoken with have had very strong opinions on this, to the effect that kids who are simply smart and a tad shy are being labeled as 'mildly autistic', when autisim is a much more serious problem. While it's good to point out to someone that they're likely to do better if they improve their social skills, and give them the tools and guidance to do so, it's possibly detrimental to label them as having a mental disorder when they're just at one end of a personality spectrum.
Sorry, had to rant. This stuff is starting to piss me off. People suck.;-)
integrated north and southbridges already enjoy massively low pricing thanks to economy of scale. while apple can use many off the shelf parts, there are still enough apple-specific parts in the mini to drive up its cost relative to a massive-economomy-of-scale PC.
uh... actually, no. The northbridge chipset is pretty much the same. The components in a modern mac ( especially a G4 system like the mini ) are about like any other computer. Where PC's get cheaper is all about volume ( pay attention to this next part ) from a single manufacturer. This is why Dell rules the price wars. They're the Wal-Mart of computer manufacturers. Suppliers know they'll get a lot of volume in sales from them so they can negotiate rock-bottom prices. In *large* volume. Apple can't meet that volume, so they get memory at much higher prices than Dell. Think about that for a minute. Part of the reason Apple's memory is more expensive than Dell's memory is that, well, Dell gets it much cheaper than Apple. So, to compete with a company like Dell, Apple ( and other manufacturers, even in the PC world, like Sony ) have to compete by not competing- they need compelling designs that Dell lacks, like the mini and the Vaio.
you seem to be under the impression the only integrated video chipsets in existence are the intel i8xx stuff. this is simply not the case.
There must be some reason why the parent post, I, and everyone else in the world thinks integreted video chipsets suck. Number one is likely a memory use issue, but other than that, can you name one that doesn't suck? Is there one that's used in laptops, or is there a different reason why halfway decent laptops all use something like the mobility?
why would it have to skimp on video, other components or software? it can use the exact same video the mini uses, because an ati radeon 9200 isn't exactly an apple-specific design.
It wouldn't have to, but unless it's manufactured in large numbers by Dell, it wouldn't be any cheaper than Apple's offering if it did. Even the demo unit here doesn't have Firewire/IEEE1934, and they're not going to... not that it's important, I suppose... and uh, not that I'm going to change your mind, clearly. I just don't see this being a lot cheaper than the mini, though, and you've yet to make a compelling argument as to why it would be. Maybe it'll be like $80 cheaper, but not much more- and I predict it won't have a non-integrated video, won't have IEEE1934, and, like the guy from Shuttle says, won't sell that well as it's not very user-expandable, which is a key feature of wintel PCs.
I predict they sell more of these than apple ever does of the mini.
That's entirely likely. It's all relative. Funny how we both get to be right there, huh? The president of Shuttle disagrees with you there, though. From TFA :
"The PC is more powerful and popular than Apple systems because of its open architecture -- you can upgrade it. When the PC gets similar to the Mac mini, you have no space to upgrade, and you will lose this advantage," he said.
Of course, this is his territory that Intel is moving in on, so you might expect such talk, but... Shuttle could make a similar system if they thought the market was there. They don't. They make a slightly larger, more expandable system using cheaper, more powerful non-laptop processors. The folks looking for something smaller want fanless, often diskless low-power systems for embeded use. Again, I'll say it's entirely likely that this Intel mini, for these reasons, could sell less in total numbers than the Mac mini. Why exactly would I buy it, when I can buy that full-sized Dell for much less money?
Cut a pc down to similar specs as the mini, and it would be far cheaper than the mini. Even if you included high end video.
Sure, a *full size* PC. You missed my earlier point entirely, or you're refusing to acknowledge it. The mini is not a full size PC. It's actually a laptop without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. We'll see how cheap these new Intel minis are, but I honestly doubt they'll really be "far cheaper" than a Mac mini, especially if you bother to bundle some apps with it. I base that on the current cost of the Pentium M, laptop hard drives, etc - really, it's cool and all, but I'm no Apple hardware fanboy. I'm a platform-agnostic realist who happens to think that the only way an Intel mini will really end up being 'much' cheaper is by skimping on video, other components, and software. It'll be a little cheaper, perhaps, but 'much'? It's not going to be half the price.
Is Intel supplying motherboards for this bad boy? Any word on pricing? Meh. Not that it matters, I guess. I'm about as interested in this machine as I am in the mini... which is to say, it's interesting, and maybe a good machine for someone else...
I originally thought that this was an issue, but more and more I've come to decide it's something Apple actually got right. In a way. Really, I'm not a Mini guy. I'd rather have a pro rig, one where I can drop in the kind of audio input I want. There's the issue, though. What kind of audio input do you want? You want the cheapest possible audio input? Get an iMic, they're like thirty bucks. Want something higher-end? There's an unbelievable range of USB audio input devices. Want really high-end? Check out the selection of Firewire audio devices.
they could easily do a $499 x86 mini pc with all the trimmings _and_ a copy of windows xp.
I don't know about 'easily', but I'd like to see them do it. Competition is good, anything that makes these things cheaper is a bonus for me.
you can get a full desktop pc with lcd monitor, keyboard, mouse, dual layer dvd burner, 80gb hd, 512mb ram, 2.66ghz p4, speakers and windows xp for $529.
The parent said quite clearly : This Intel clone is guaranteed to have on board video and be pretty non-upgradeable, except for RAM. I've had an intel 845G built in video, I'll take the Mac Mini Radeon over that piece of crap any day.
Not only is the system you quoted not at all mini, and a Dell ( oh, sorry, just had to... ), it's definitely of the intel on-board video variety. So add another 80 bucks or so for a video card, not that they're really systems you should compare... don't underestimate the cost of converting the quoted system to 'mini'. That Dell 80gig drive isn't a laptop drive, that's for sure. But regardless of that, it's not quite right to compare a Mac mini to a full-size Dell. Compare it to a wintel laptop minus screen and keyboard, that's a little closer. It's a product category this new intel-designed PC is moving to fill, one the PC market hadn't _quite_ hit before Apple showed up with the Mini.
If you want a full-size wintel PC, get that. If you want a little, quiet OS X-runnin' Mac mini, get that. They're not the same, except in that they're both computers.
Given that a Pentium M is around $241 all by itself, I don't know how cheap these intel minis are really going to be. I predict they don't sell a lot of them, actually. But we'll see, and I'm glad they're copying Apple here, because competition is good.
Just about every web-based email provider, and most ISPs, have methods by which you can flag and report messages as spam... so why doesn't AOL, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and everyone else not already share this data ?
This includes spam that users themselves mark as such. Very smart idea if ISPs actually use it.
Even better. If you are a spammer, this gives you the most useful data ever: how much of my spam is actually being recognized as spam? I'd want my spam messages to be so clever or so interesting that users don't readily figure out that it's spam.
Of course, I'm not a spammer, and few who stoop to such pathetic marketing tactics would think enough to craft a message that ( to a person ) in not easily recognizable as spam, so I guess you have a point.
What, you actually think Sun isn't actively working on Java for Longhorn ? You've got to be kidding. They're working on it. I promise. You can check Sun's website for information if you want, but I don't even have to. Java *working* and working *correctly* on current Microsoft operating systems is a *major* goal for Sun with Java, arguably *the* major goal. That's why they went to court to stop Microsoft itself from making a non-interoperable, bastardized version of a JVM and releasing it as "Java", and why they spend tons of development effort making the Windows JVM the best they can make.
If they *ever* are unable to make a windows JVM, I suspect IBM will... oh, wait, they already do...
Get the latest Ubuntu LiveCD and check out Gnome 2.10. I think you will be surprised
Thanks, I think I will. I haven't had time to check out Gnome 2.10 quite yet, but getting my Linux PC back up to snuff is a priority again, it might happen in like another month or so...
My point was/is that there's quite a bit of stuff in OS X well beyond Darwin and we shouldn't think OS X is _merely_ leveraged OSS stuff, even though it's a great example of a company leveraging OSS and combining it with proprietary code and technology to make a great commercial product. I think that point still holds, though to be sure Gnome and KDE have made great strides, and maybe my exact examples of where Linux desktops are lacking might be a tiny bit dated...
hardware manufactures have to save a few cents and give us those lobotomized winmodems instead of real modems.
dude, you use a dial-up modem? You're sooo not the target market for these graphics cards. They're trying to sell these to people who can afford broadband. If you still remember when computers used real modems, they've already written you off as too poor to be a customer...
Yeah but scammers are now useing new souper P-P-P-Powerbooks!
No mod points today, so I just have to say it: Thanks for that link. That made my morning. Friggin' hi-larious, though it does bug me a bit that nobody ever heard from Jeff again...
Here's my answer to the WinTel problem: We need an open Simple Operating System (SOS) that meets the needs of the majority of people who buy PCs for everyday home and enterprise tasks. Get rid of the complexity and simplify the interface between SOS, BIOS and hardware. In other words, KISS. You know what it means. KISS SOS.
Hahahahahahha. That was great. Too funny. Where did they dig up this loser? He's a security expert? Fire him, give me the job. I'm glad others caught the SOS reference. He doesn't even know OS history, or he'd have mentioned that. Har.
That said, does anyone think OS X is "Simple"? Damn, it sure doesn't seem simple to me... at least, not under the hood. It's not a total mess, but it's just too powerful to be simple. You can have functional, or you can have simple. But you *can* have functional *and* secure, and that's where Microsoft is failing. They'll have to jettison a good deal of old technology to really get secure. On the other hand, a great deal of typical end-user security issues on WinTel boils down to (1)Outlook and (2)IE. Why Microsoft can't fix that is beyond me... it's just clearly not a high priority.
You mean because Apple puts a slick top on their completely open source, community-contributed Darwin OS?
Dude, that's a hell of a lot of slick top there. Your description belittles something that those of us who love Linux only wish we could duplicate. Heck, Microsoft would love to duplicate it, too. Plenty of the tools to do what Apple has done are available to us, but actually pulling it off in a unified manner, putting a truly user-friendly face on that core, that's a tall task.
If it wasn't hard, there'd be several similar implementations. Just duplicating the nice printer setup UI they have for CUPS would be a good start, but I don't think I've seen that yet... much less point-and-click software update with push and server administration UIs.
I'm not saying our desktop UIs are terrible, but... an OS X experience is not what they deliver. Apple also has a pretty deep stack of stuff you won't find elsewhere, even well beyond the UI and ease-of-use space, and since OS X has developed a *nix-like ability to absorb anything else. It's a useful combination, and a very useful platform as a result.
Bluetooth keyboard and this... maybe...
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That would make it usable to me. Virtual Keyboards suck, pure and simple, and as much as I like to surf the web, I'm not laying down $350 for something to look at websites with a tiny screen.
IF the CPU ( uh, I don't see that in the spec, that makes me worry, folks... ) is powerful enough, and you could pack on external batteries to keep it going for 3 hours *while* actually using your Bluetooth keyboard, it looks like it could *almost* work as a more-portable laptop replacement. Something to type up notes on while sitting in the park or coffee shop, that kind of thing.
Not that I'm going to run out and get one. I still look at this and think "but... maybe I just want a laptop..". On the other hand, if you could use a BT keyboard with it, it might be sort of like a low-power, extremely small laptop with a keyboard you can ditch when you're not entering lots of data... that does have a certain appeal.
my keyboard is like that anyway...
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well, at least the most-used keys. S, D, L, ", C, command... after a little over 4 years of constant use, the markings have just worn away on those keys, completely. F,V and > are all slowly fading as well. I have no idea why some other keys, like J, K and I haven't worn yet.
I think it's because the keys were cheaply painted. No, it doesnt' bother me. It's an otherwise fairly nice keyboard, and I never, ever look at it. The idea of buying a keyboard *because* it doesn't have marks on it strikes me as lame, though. I'd loose a bit of respect for somebody who thought it was cool enough to actually buy. If you want weighted keys, buy a weighted keyboard, they're out there and cheaper. I actually prefer an ergonomic layout with non-weighted keys.
Check out the PS2 price history on the wikipedia entry. With XBox360/PS2 price wars, I'm hoping prices will drop faster, but they'll be expensive on launch, no doubt. Remember how crazy we all thought it was to spend $300 on a console when the PS2 first came out? Then nobody could get one, and we all wanted one... expect more of that.
I guess I just don't understand the economics behind these new consoles.
I think one thing to do is to look to the past. These machines are going to be around for several years. They're going to be expensive to start with. Heck, the PS2 launch price was $300- over four and a half years ago, when nobody could believe a console could be so expensive.
Not everyone is going to have one or be able to get one - which is a good thing, if we *all* went out to get an XBox this christmas, there wouldn't be any on the shelves. I'm guessing they'll be in short supply anyway, and that MS will rightly be able to cite IBM chip shortages as the reason. Of course, that scarcity will only make them more sought-after. Heck, it works for Apple. Sony will have the same scarcity at launch, but there will be plenty by *next* Christmas... at the same high price. Once Microsoft flinches, or if they're doing really well, then the 'price war' will start... and it'll be time for everyone else to take a side.
Something you and I have to remember is that _someone_ is clearly buying HD displays. I actually know a number of people who have them, I'm just not ready to drop that kind of cash on a TV... but give me another couple of years, they'll get cheaper and I'll join in on the fun as well. These companies know this is how it works, and they'll be sure to start selling the machine at the high end of what they think the marketable price will be, so they can drop it later to generate more sales...
All I know is.. as much as I may want a NextGen console.. and even if I could afford one.. I would never spend over $200 - $300 on a console.
Who are they marketing to? Not you.
Like Apple ( well, at least Apple before the Mac mini ), they're marketing to People With Money.
They're marketing to people who buy their _kids_ iPods and color-screen cell phones. People who buy their kids new cars the second they get their learner's permit. If you're worried about how much it'll cost... they're not marketing it to you, at least not for the first few years.
Here's the real test, IMHO. You don't have at least one High-Definition television in your house? They're not marketing to you.
Which is to say, they're marketing to gamers. They're marketing to people who are thinking really hard about spending that $800 on a graphics card that they know will cost $250 in 8 months. They know they'll pick up blokes like you and I a year to two down the road, when their costs have dipped a little. But first, it's time to fleece People With Money ( and early adopters and gaming fanatics with skewed priorities ).
If Apple does start making machines with Intel processors, you can bet the new machines will be able to run PowerPC binaries through emulation. I don't think they're dumb enough to make all existing Mac software stop working on new machines and think people would be willing to "upgrade" their Apple hardware
Which is all part of why I don't think Apple is going to abandon the PowePC. It's too invested in Altivec, for starters. It'd be more likely that Apple would release an OS X for Intel, leveraging some existing cheap PC manufacturing, for some sort of low-low-end machine. People with newer Macs ( and PowerPC-only software ) thus wouldn't buy it, and it'd be like "look at this pathetically cheap stuff you Windows folks are forced to work with, but if you want it cheap, you can at least have it nice and OS X-y"... not that they're going to do that. But they could. By actually having some cheap-ass plant in asia somewhere cranking out nearly-standard Intel PC stuff, they could probably do it cheap enough that they'd be able to keep selling the "true" PowerPC Macs as well.
They *could*, in theory, also go the 'fat binaries' route, just like NeXT did. They stopped making their own hardware and sold _just_ software for x86 machines. According to some, it actually sold pretty well. If they did it today with OS X, it'd sell a hell of a lot better. And sure, maybe they'd throw in some sort of PearPC-style emulation engine ( maybe they'd "leverage" the existing open source project, what the heck ), that's not a bad idea, although it's clearly a stop-gap idea. I don't use Classic; people in practice upgrade the things they can and only use emulation where they have no other choice ( unless performance is not an issue at all ). People who really objected to getting new apps and moving to OS X are still clinging to OS 9's cold, dead body, and many of them will stay that way until their machines give up the ghost.
My point is that if Apple went to another CPU across the board ( not happening, folks! ), third-party developers would as a general rule, be able to offer cheap 'upgrades' as porting would be a snap, much like it was in the NeXTStep for Intel case. For most people, this would mean new software; emulation would be the exception, not the rule.
Again, I don't think that's the current strategy, unless they're finding that IBM just won't or can't get it together, in which case anything could happen. I think they'll give IBM another couple of years before doing anything drastic though, and this is just pre-WWDC media confusion. Not that I know anything... but IBM is getting a lot of dollars from these game console makers, which hopefully will fund more chip R&D and manufacturing infrastructure, eventually boosting their offerings for Apple. If not, Apple does have options.
On the other hand, the current G5 machines aren't exactly slow. They're pretty damn fast, actually. I think going Intel would have to be about price, and with the Mac Mini, I don't think that's any longer a very valid reason.
When the Mac OS was all PPC native code (8.1? 8.5?), the one-way compatibility was turned off and all the PPC chips had to grow up for ever and ever.
Boy is that ever wrong. You can *to this day* run 68k code... in OS X, on a G5 !! I don't know why you would want to, you'd have to be super-cheap not to upgrade your software at some point, but...
In Classic mode, the very first FileMaker Pro *ever* runs on my G5. In OS X 10.3.9. Strange but true. The file date on it? 1991. The icon is a little ugly, and I wouldn't actually use it, but if I wanted to, I could. Actually, I just did, to check the copyright date. 1988-1991. Now, getting that code onto this machine without a floppy drive or SCSI, that's a different issue... but it does run. In no less than two layers of emulation. I'm sure it runs 10x faster than it did on any machine available in 1991...
Please explain the process whereby Apple will convert everyone's old applications into fat binaries. Without access to the source.
If you're going to have a different CPU, clearly you're going to have different binaries. However, I'm not sure you need to be so flippant about it. Do you know about NeXTStep for Intel ? Do you know how hard it was for most companies to recompile their binaries for it? They opened up their projects, pressed "Build" in Project Builder, and it was done. That's how hard it was. The biggest problem was for folks who wrote binary data files ( the endian issue ), but that's pretty easily worked around or avoided, really. The hurdles Apple and it's third party developers would face to provide binaries for *any* gcc-supported CPU are not as huge as many folks seem to think
Yea, if you had a huge investment in current OS X software, you'd have to buy new copies ( more likely upgrades ) if you bought a different machine. That typically wouldn't be the case, though. I'm going to be using my current Macs for years. Most new Macintosh purchases ( like most new WindowsXP purchases ) require buying some new software.
However, just because it could be done doesn't mean it will be done. I just don't think they're going to start making Intel-based Macs any time soon- I can't think of a good reason. If they're in talks, it's likely to be about one of the many other types of non-CPU chips Intel makes.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the best part :
it's pretty clear from everything being said ( and what the attacked servers run ) that they hadn't applied SP2 and/or IIS patches, and the attack was done using one of many fairly well-known exploits. Ok, maybe not comedy, but certainly irony or something close too it. Just desserts?
You do have to wonder how much of the 'do no evil' philosophy is cover for the "let us store and index all information about everything, including you" philosophy. Not that I'm going to stop using Google until their results become less usable than Yahoo's results...
So er... so why then can I buy ram, direct from 3rd parties for 1/2 what apple charges for it? i'm not buying in volume. I'm buying qty 1.
and the third-party is buying in large quantities, and often it's not quality-guaranteed. I'm not saying Apple's not marking up their RAM pretty badly; they are. I'm saying the markup isn't as huge as it seems, since you and I can get RAM from DealRAM or whereever for pretty much the same price ( or quite possibly less than ) Apple does. I wouldn't buy RAM from Apple either, at least not right now...
More seriously, yes. CRTs will become a niche market as better displays are made more cheaply available. This is not shocking; it's not even really news. It's been predicted for a long, long time. There are a lot of drawbacks to CRTs, and for most uses current LCD technology is more than adequate and in some important regards better. Mainly, they use less power, take up less space, and produce a sharp, no-tuning-required picture.
As refresh rates, color accuracy and price all improve, CRT markets will continue to dwindle. The manufacturers know this, and are adjusting their production appropriately to compete.
It appears I'm not alone in thinking this, either. Check the Wikipedia entry under "Criticisms", which references The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain. Several medial professionals I've spoken with have had very strong opinions on this, to the effect that kids who are simply smart and a tad shy are being labeled as 'mildly autistic', when autisim is a much more serious problem. While it's good to point out to someone that they're likely to do better if they improve their social skills, and give them the tools and guidance to do so, it's possibly detrimental to label them as having a mental disorder when they're just at one end of a personality spectrum.
Sorry, had to rant. This stuff is starting to piss me off. People suck. ;-)
uh... actually, no. The northbridge chipset is pretty much the same. The components in a modern mac ( especially a G4 system like the mini ) are about like any other computer. Where PC's get cheaper is all about volume ( pay attention to this next part ) from a single manufacturer. This is why Dell rules the price wars. They're the Wal-Mart of computer manufacturers. Suppliers know they'll get a lot of volume in sales from them so they can negotiate rock-bottom prices. In *large* volume. Apple can't meet that volume, so they get memory at much higher prices than Dell. Think about that for a minute. Part of the reason Apple's memory is more expensive than Dell's memory is that, well, Dell gets it much cheaper than Apple. So, to compete with a company like Dell, Apple ( and other manufacturers, even in the PC world, like Sony ) have to compete by not competing- they need compelling designs that Dell lacks, like the mini and the Vaio.
you seem to be under the impression the only integrated video chipsets in existence are the intel i8xx stuff. this is simply not the case.
There must be some reason why the parent post, I, and everyone else in the world thinks integreted video chipsets suck. Number one is likely a memory use issue, but other than that, can you name one that doesn't suck? Is there one that's used in laptops, or is there a different reason why halfway decent laptops all use something like the mobility?
why would it have to skimp on video, other components or software? it can use the exact same video the mini uses, because an ati radeon 9200 isn't exactly an apple-specific design.
It wouldn't have to, but unless it's manufactured in large numbers by Dell, it wouldn't be any cheaper than Apple's offering if it did. Even the demo unit here doesn't have Firewire/IEEE1934, and they're not going to... not that it's important, I suppose... and uh, not that I'm going to change your mind, clearly. I just don't see this being a lot cheaper than the mini, though, and you've yet to make a compelling argument as to why it would be. Maybe it'll be like $80 cheaper, but not much more- and I predict it won't have a non-integrated video, won't have IEEE1934, and, like the guy from Shuttle says, won't sell that well as it's not very user-expandable, which is a key feature of wintel PCs.
That's entirely likely. It's all relative. Funny how we both get to be right there, huh? The president of Shuttle disagrees with you there, though. From TFA :
Of course, this is his territory that Intel is moving in on, so you might expect such talk, but... Shuttle could make a similar system if they thought the market was there. They don't. They make a slightly larger, more expandable system using cheaper, more powerful non-laptop processors. The folks looking for something smaller want fanless, often diskless low-power systems for embeded use. Again, I'll say it's entirely likely that this Intel mini, for these reasons, could sell less in total numbers than the Mac mini. Why exactly would I buy it, when I can buy that full-sized Dell for much less money?Cut a pc down to similar specs as the mini, and it would be far cheaper than the mini. Even if you included high end video.
Sure, a *full size* PC. You missed my earlier point entirely, or you're refusing to acknowledge it. The mini is not a full size PC. It's actually a laptop without a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. We'll see how cheap these new Intel minis are, but I honestly doubt they'll really be "far cheaper" than a Mac mini, especially if you bother to bundle some apps with it. I base that on the current cost of the Pentium M, laptop hard drives, etc - really, it's cool and all, but I'm no Apple hardware fanboy. I'm a platform-agnostic realist who happens to think that the only way an Intel mini will really end up being 'much' cheaper is by skimping on video, other components, and software. It'll be a little cheaper, perhaps, but 'much'? It's not going to be half the price.
Is Intel supplying motherboards for this bad boy? Any word on pricing? Meh. Not that it matters, I guess. I'm about as interested in this machine as I am in the mini... which is to say, it's interesting, and maybe a good machine for someone else...
I originally thought that this was an issue, but more and more I've come to decide it's something Apple actually got right. In a way. Really, I'm not a Mini guy. I'd rather have a pro rig, one where I can drop in the kind of audio input I want. There's the issue, though. What kind of audio input do you want? You want the cheapest possible audio input? Get an iMic, they're like thirty bucks. Want something higher-end? There's an unbelievable range of USB audio input devices. Want really high-end? Check out the selection of Firewire audio devices.
they could easily do a $499 x86 mini pc with all the trimmings _and_ a copy of windows xp.
I don't know about 'easily', but I'd like to see them do it. Competition is good, anything that makes these things cheaper is a bonus for me.
you can get a full desktop pc with lcd monitor, keyboard, mouse, dual layer dvd burner, 80gb hd, 512mb ram, 2.66ghz p4, speakers and windows xp for $529.
The parent said quite clearly : This Intel clone is guaranteed to have on board video and be pretty non-upgradeable, except for RAM. I've had an intel 845G built in video, I'll take the Mac Mini Radeon over that piece of crap any day.
Not only is the system you quoted not at all mini, and a Dell ( oh, sorry, just had to... ), it's definitely of the intel on-board video variety. So add another 80 bucks or so for a video card, not that they're really systems you should compare... don't underestimate the cost of converting the quoted system to 'mini'. That Dell 80gig drive isn't a laptop drive, that's for sure. But regardless of that, it's not quite right to compare a Mac mini to a full-size Dell. Compare it to a wintel laptop minus screen and keyboard, that's a little closer. It's a product category this new intel-designed PC is moving to fill, one the PC market hadn't _quite_ hit before Apple showed up with the Mini.
If you want a full-size wintel PC, get that. If you want a little, quiet OS X-runnin' Mac mini, get that. They're not the same, except in that they're both computers.
Given that a Pentium M is around $241 all by itself, I don't know how cheap these intel minis are really going to be. I predict they don't sell a lot of them, actually. But we'll see, and I'm glad they're copying Apple here, because competition is good.
Just about every web-based email provider, and most ISPs, have methods by which you can flag and report messages as spam... so why doesn't AOL, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and everyone else not already share this data ?
Even better. If you are a spammer, this gives you the most useful data ever: how much of my spam is actually being recognized as spam? I'd want my spam messages to be so clever or so interesting that users don't readily figure out that it's spam.
Of course, I'm not a spammer, and few who stoop to such pathetic marketing tactics would think enough to craft a message that ( to a person ) in not easily recognizable as spam, so I guess you have a point.
What, you actually think Sun isn't actively working on Java for Longhorn ? You've got to be kidding. They're working on it. I promise. You can check Sun's website for information if you want, but I don't even have to. Java *working* and working *correctly* on current Microsoft operating systems is a *major* goal for Sun with Java, arguably *the* major goal. That's why they went to court to stop Microsoft itself from making a non-interoperable, bastardized version of a JVM and releasing it as "Java", and why they spend tons of development effort making the Windows JVM the best they can make.
If they *ever* are unable to make a windows JVM, I suspect IBM will... oh, wait, they already do...
Thanks, I think I will. I haven't had time to check out Gnome 2.10 quite yet, but getting my Linux PC back up to snuff is a priority again, it might happen in like another month or so...
My point was/is that there's quite a bit of stuff in OS X well beyond Darwin and we shouldn't think OS X is _merely_ leveraged OSS stuff, even though it's a great example of a company leveraging OSS and combining it with proprietary code and technology to make a great commercial product. I think that point still holds, though to be sure Gnome and KDE have made great strides, and maybe my exact examples of where Linux desktops are lacking might be a tiny bit dated...
dude, you use a dial-up modem? You're sooo not the target market for these graphics cards. They're trying to sell these to people who can afford broadband. If you still remember when computers used real modems, they've already written you off as too poor to be a customer...
No mod points today, so I just have to say it :
Thanks for that link. That made my morning. Friggin' hi-larious, though it does bug me a bit that nobody ever heard from Jeff again...
Hahahahahahha. That was great. Too funny. Where did they dig up this loser? He's a security expert? Fire him, give me the job. I'm glad others caught the SOS reference. He doesn't even know OS history, or he'd have mentioned that. Har.
That said, does anyone think OS X is "Simple"? Damn, it sure doesn't seem simple to me... at least, not under the hood. It's not a total mess, but it's just too powerful to be simple. You can have functional, or you can have simple. But you *can* have functional *and* secure, and that's where Microsoft is failing. They'll have to jettison a good deal of old technology to really get secure. On the other hand, a great deal of typical end-user security issues on WinTel boils down to (1)Outlook and (2)IE. Why Microsoft can't fix that is beyond me... it's just clearly not a high priority.
Dude, that's a hell of a lot of slick top there. Your description belittles something that those of us who love Linux only wish we could duplicate. Heck, Microsoft would love to duplicate it, too. Plenty of the tools to do what Apple has done are available to us, but actually pulling it off in a unified manner, putting a truly user-friendly face on that core, that's a tall task.
If it wasn't hard, there'd be several similar implementations. Just duplicating the nice printer setup UI they have for CUPS would be a good start, but I don't think I've seen that yet... much less point-and-click software update with push and server administration UIs.
I'm not saying our desktop UIs are terrible, but... an OS X experience is not what they deliver. Apple also has a pretty deep stack of stuff you won't find elsewhere, even well beyond the UI and ease-of-use space, and since OS X has developed a *nix-like ability to absorb anything else. It's a useful combination, and a very useful platform as a result.
IF the CPU ( uh, I don't see that in the spec, that makes me worry, folks... ) is powerful enough, and you could pack on external batteries to keep it going for 3 hours *while* actually using your Bluetooth keyboard, it looks like it could *almost* work as a more-portable laptop replacement. Something to type up notes on while sitting in the park or coffee shop, that kind of thing.
Not that I'm going to run out and get one. I still look at this and think "but... maybe I just want a laptop..". On the other hand, if you could use a BT keyboard with it, it might be sort of like a low-power, extremely small laptop with a keyboard you can ditch when you're not entering lots of data... that does have a certain appeal.
I think it's because the keys were cheaply painted. No, it doesnt' bother me. It's an otherwise fairly nice keyboard, and I never, ever look at it. The idea of buying a keyboard *because* it doesn't have marks on it strikes me as lame, though. I'd loose a bit of respect for somebody who thought it was cool enough to actually buy. If you want weighted keys, buy a weighted keyboard, they're out there and cheaper. I actually prefer an ergonomic layout with non-weighted keys.
I didn't say secret. i just said the door was locked...
Check out the PS2 price history on the wikipedia entry. With XBox360/PS2 price wars, I'm hoping prices will drop faster, but they'll be expensive on launch, no doubt. Remember how crazy we all thought it was to spend $300 on a console when the PS2 first came out? Then nobody could get one, and we all wanted one... expect more of that.
I think one thing to do is to look to the past. These machines are going to be around for several years. They're going to be expensive to start with. Heck, the PS2 launch price was $300- over four and a half years ago, when nobody could believe a console could be so expensive.
Not everyone is going to have one or be able to get one - which is a good thing, if we *all* went out to get an XBox this christmas, there wouldn't be any on the shelves. I'm guessing they'll be in short supply anyway, and that MS will rightly be able to cite IBM chip shortages as the reason. Of course, that scarcity will only make them more sought-after. Heck, it works for Apple. Sony will have the same scarcity at launch, but there will be plenty by *next* Christmas... at the same high price. Once Microsoft flinches, or if they're doing really well, then the 'price war' will start... and it'll be time for everyone else to take a side.
Something you and I have to remember is that _someone_ is clearly buying HD displays. I actually know a number of people who have them, I'm just not ready to drop that kind of cash on a TV... but give me another couple of years, they'll get cheaper and I'll join in on the fun as well. These companies know this is how it works, and they'll be sure to start selling the machine at the high end of what they think the marketable price will be, so they can drop it later to generate more sales...
Who are they marketing to? Not you.
Like Apple ( well, at least Apple before the Mac mini ), they're marketing to People With Money.
They're marketing to people who buy their _kids_ iPods and color-screen cell phones. People who buy their kids new cars the second they get their learner's permit. If you're worried about how much it'll cost... they're not marketing it to you, at least not for the first few years.
Here's the real test, IMHO. You don't have at least one High-Definition television in your house? They're not marketing to you.
Which is to say, they're marketing to gamers. They're marketing to people who are thinking really hard about spending that $800 on a graphics card that they know will cost $250 in 8 months. They know they'll pick up blokes like you and I a year to two down the road, when their costs have dipped a little. But first, it's time to fleece People With Money ( and early adopters and gaming fanatics with skewed priorities ).
Which is all part of why I don't think Apple is going to abandon the PowePC. It's too invested in Altivec, for starters. It'd be more likely that Apple would release an OS X for Intel, leveraging some existing cheap PC manufacturing, for some sort of low-low-end machine. People with newer Macs ( and PowerPC-only software ) thus wouldn't buy it, and it'd be like "look at this pathetically cheap stuff you Windows folks are forced to work with, but if you want it cheap, you can at least have it nice and OS X-y"... not that they're going to do that. But they could. By actually having some cheap-ass plant in asia somewhere cranking out nearly-standard Intel PC stuff, they could probably do it cheap enough that they'd be able to keep selling the "true" PowerPC Macs as well.
They *could*, in theory, also go the 'fat binaries' route, just like NeXT did. They stopped making their own hardware and sold _just_ software for x86 machines. According to some, it actually sold pretty well. If they did it today with OS X, it'd sell a hell of a lot better. And sure, maybe they'd throw in some sort of PearPC-style emulation engine ( maybe they'd "leverage" the existing open source project, what the heck ), that's not a bad idea, although it's clearly a stop-gap idea. I don't use Classic; people in practice upgrade the things they can and only use emulation where they have no other choice ( unless performance is not an issue at all ). People who really objected to getting new apps and moving to OS X are still clinging to OS 9's cold, dead body, and many of them will stay that way until their machines give up the ghost.
My point is that if Apple went to another CPU across the board ( not happening, folks! ), third-party developers would as a general rule, be able to offer cheap 'upgrades' as porting would be a snap, much like it was in the NeXTStep for Intel case. For most people, this would mean new software; emulation would be the exception, not the rule.
Again, I don't think that's the current strategy, unless they're finding that IBM just won't or can't get it together, in which case anything could happen. I think they'll give IBM another couple of years before doing anything drastic though, and this is just pre-WWDC media confusion. Not that I know anything... but IBM is getting a lot of dollars from these game console makers, which hopefully will fund more chip R&D and manufacturing infrastructure, eventually boosting their offerings for Apple. If not, Apple does have options.
On the other hand, the current G5 machines aren't exactly slow. They're pretty damn fast, actually. I think going Intel would have to be about price, and with the Mac Mini, I don't think that's any longer a very valid reason.
Boy is that ever wrong. You can *to this day* run 68k code... in OS X, on a G5 !! I don't know why you would want to, you'd have to be super-cheap not to upgrade your software at some point, but...
In Classic mode, the very first FileMaker Pro *ever* runs on my G5. In OS X 10.3.9. Strange but true. The file date on it? 1991. The icon is a little ugly, and I wouldn't actually use it, but if I wanted to, I could. Actually, I just did, to check the copyright date. 1988-1991. Now, getting that code onto this machine without a floppy drive or SCSI, that's a different issue... but it does run. In no less than two layers of emulation. I'm sure it runs 10x faster than it did on any machine available in 1991...
If you're going to have a different CPU, clearly you're going to have different binaries. However, I'm not sure you need to be so flippant about it. Do you know about NeXTStep for Intel ? Do you know how hard it was for most companies to recompile their binaries for it? They opened up their projects, pressed "Build" in Project Builder, and it was done. That's how hard it was. The biggest problem was for folks who wrote binary data files ( the endian issue ), but that's pretty easily worked around or avoided, really. The hurdles Apple and it's third party developers would face to provide binaries for *any* gcc-supported CPU are not as huge as many folks seem to think
Yea, if you had a huge investment in current OS X software, you'd have to buy new copies ( more likely upgrades ) if you bought a different machine. That typically wouldn't be the case, though. I'm going to be using my current Macs for years. Most new Macintosh purchases ( like most new WindowsXP purchases ) require buying some new software.
However, just because it could be done doesn't mean it will be done. I just don't think they're going to start making Intel-based Macs any time soon- I can't think of a good reason. If they're in talks, it's likely to be about one of the many other types of non-CPU chips Intel makes.