“Even while at the top of its game, Apple Inc. can seemingly find faults with just about anything, including a bit of itself. The Mac maker is constantly evaluating the market segments in which it wishes to participate and those which it does not. It’s an application of love-hate methodology that inevitably produces its share of casualties,” Kasper Jade reports for AppleInsider.
“Take, for instance, the firm’s petite line of headless desktop computers known as Mac minis. They retail between $599 and $799, catering to the once critical sub-$800 PC market,” Jade reports.
Jade reports, “…It comes as little surprise that sources, for whom AppleInsider holds the utmost respect, are now pointing towards the mini’s impending demise. For it’s according to those people that the miniature Mac will soon follow in the wake of its similarly-proportioned counterparts of years past: the PowerBook 2400, the PowerMac G4 Cube, and, most recently, the 12-inch PowerBook.”
Full article here.
Yeah Chris, I agree.
I want the same thing. MacPro class speed with HALF the slots and bays at less than HALF the size. Pizza box or mini-tower? I don’t care which. Just give it to us, Apple!
And YES, there’s room for the Mac mini, which IS a nice machine for some, just not for me.
My point was that some just can’t mentally get outside a-mini-tower-is-the-only-posible-form mindset and that those types might consider non-conventional form-factors if they used some imagination.
They could have waited a bit since they’re going to release a mac on a single chip at the end of 2009.
I swear, the mac mini is the best unit I’ve ever bought.
Sure the guts of it isn’t as good as those imacs.
For starters, if my LCD screen on my mac mini fails, I don’t need to bring the whole machine in.
If I had an iMac, I’d be out of business … until I get the thing repaired.
And if my mac-mini stuffs up, well I have all my stuff backed up and just use my ibook.
As much as I like iMacs as they are space saving, the cube and the minis are my choice for business.
I’m just being conservative here. My macs have never failed me, but I hate placing all my eggs in one basket.
Apple could simplify their manufacturing by having two machines: the iMac and a white “pizza box” a little thinner than the iMac. Same motherboard/CPU/inside configuration, just the iMac has an LCD, the iPizzaBox has DVI ports.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a headless iMac?
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The mac Mini is the perfect computer for me.
I don’t need any more power or graphics or whatever…
I love the size.
And I loved the price when I wanted to get a new computer.
It let me get back into owning an Apple after I had to junk my venerable LC, and had been obliged to buy a cheap PC to tide me over.
If the Mini is dead, then replace it with something that has a similar price-point and a similar footprint.