Thursday, January 13, 2005

The first Mini Mac review worth anything (ars technica)

The Mac mini preview
If, as Apple states when they consign rumor sites to the ninth plane of legal hell, innovation is the DNA of the company, then it must be fossilized. Low-margin, low-tech, white box, red state PCs have been around since before Michael Dell first declared Apple doomed, so what is the big deal about Apple finally doing what most PC manufacturers have been busy losing money at for years?...

...It's clear that the xMac [jf: Mac Mini] performs considerably faster than both my iBook, which cost me $200 more than an xMac, and nearly as fast as my wife's PowerBook, which cost four times as much and is less than a year-old...

...It’s not about the computer. It’s about the effect, or rather the affect. The “y” of xMac, or Mac mini, is another question: why not Windows? For people in the real world, the Mac mini, with the included software, does everything people need, while not doing things they don't need, like becoming infected with malware.

And the Mac mini does it at a price, US$499, competitive with the charcoal turds produced by more successful PC vendors. It's taken twenty years, but Apple may have come full circle at last.

This is a funny, slightly scatological and somewhat impish review. It's also very good, and done by someone who really knows their stuff -- including speculation on whether Apple would revise Tiger's video infrastructure to accomodate the low end Mac Mini video specs.

Bottom line, this is a really positive review.

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