It’s A Brand New Day
I never thought I’d see it. I still can’t believe I just saw it. Yes, this is the time for superlatives. Awesome. Groundbreaking. Stunning. Redefining. No, I’m not talking about the new iPod Shuffle, which is a beautiful thing to behold.
I’m talking about the Mac mini. A product that I and countless others have been clamoring for for years is now here. A mac that, out of the box, comes with everything you need for a fantastic macintosh experience at a price that is truly affordable and competitive.
This will be a new day for Apple and the Macintosh. Countless windows users, fed up with putting up with viruses, spyware, and a cruddy operating system will no longer have a price barrier to conversion. Plus, millions of them now have had a positive Apple brand experience with the iPod. They have experienced first hand the technical prowess and usability of Apple products. And for $499 they can now chuck that Dell and get a Mac mini.
But it would be unwise to get too caught up in what the Mac mini can do for Apple. The fact remains that corporations remain the domain of Windows. An enormous IT infrastructure, whose best interest is to keep applying multiple patches to Windows, as well as a plethora of IE-required intranet applications, means that corporations will not be switching anytime soon.
But for the consumer who now typically has more than one machine at home the fact that there is a Mac that is within the same price range as the Dells, emachines, and HPs of the world is huge. PCs at home could become relegated to accessing corporate intranets via a VLAN (although that is entirely possible on the Mac, it is just a matter of the aforementioned IT staff) while the Mac will become, increasingly, the digital hub.
Kudos to Steve Jobs for helping the company grow in this new direction. A year ago he introduced the iPod mini, while scoffing at even the idea of flash players. Today he stood up and introduced and Apple flash player. And now with the Mac mini Apple is truly poised to grow its personal computer market-share once again.
But its not all about the hardware for Apple. Buy a Dell and you get, well, a Dell. Maybe with a demo version of Office but you have to buy everything else. Pundits have often used this point to prove that Mac’s weren’t really that much more expensive. But now the value proposition has really been upped dramatically. For $499 consumers can get a machine with everything they need to get things done. iLife, with the newly revamped versions of iDVD, iMovie, iTunes, and iPhoto. With Quicken, Appleworks and much more.
Its a new day for the Macintosh. I can’t wait to see the sales numbers next year.
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Personally I am looking at using them for a number of things beyond home use, these would work great for everything from DNS servers (which generally are run on less expensive hardware anyway as DNS is redundant by nature), to small office file server as it can be locked away in a much smaller place, or locked down on the “office IT guys” desk and a KVM switch would allow him to switch to it, but not eat up a ton of space with a single processor G5 tower that is probably way over powered for most small office file serving needs. Heck I know people that have been using things like eMacs for in office web servers. Combine two of the 1.42 systems as a web + database server combo and you have a powerful but small little web application server setup for under the price of an iMac. Have even talked to someone that is looking at this for a limited time frame webcam setup, much easier to setup a Mac mini + iSight to point out a window, than trying to get an iMac or G4/G5 tower in the same location. This has not even scratched the surface of the thoughts/ideas coming to mind to use these for.
People that discount the G4 as being underpowered compared to the G5 don’t understand the needs of things like servers, compared to “general computer use”. Heck I am considered by just about everyone that knows me to be a “power user” and my primary system is a Powerbook 12” at 867mzh w/640megs of ram, it goes with me just about everywhere, and until I upgraded to this system at the time of its release at this speed I was using a Powerbook 15” at 400mhz I ordered after seeing them revealed at Macworld back then
. So a G4 at 1.25 or 1.42 is going to cover 95%+ of the users needs out there, beyond power photoshop users (and even then the speed is not the limiting factor, but the 1gig of ram) and game players, I can’t think of anything that would over power a 1.25 or 1.42. Heck there are IT shops with single 1.33ghz G4 Xserve’s out there! 
I see a huge beginning for these little guys.
Everyone is buzzing about the Mac mini. And everyone meaning not the news, mags, or blogs… but everyone around me.
iPod Shuffle - sure is cool, some might say about time. They even posted Shuffle ads around SF an hour after the annoucement.
But the Mac mini - I echo all the superlatives Hadley mentions.
I bought a Dell for my parents for Christmas… too bad I didn’t wait. That Dell, for a respectable system I knew I wouldn’t have to replace in a year went for $1000. It started as a $500 machine. Just as strong as the myth that Macs are overpriced - is the myth that Windows machines are cheap.
Thank the gods that the myth about Macs is now over.
Just read this extraordinary review of the mini.
This ‘reviewer’ actually confuses the mini with the shuffle, and thinks that the mini weighs the same as four quarters!
http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/MacMini2.html
Its actually a satire site, but still a great read. You need to see the Dell coffee maker, or the 18lbs. Apple Powerbook G5