“Here’s how I know Apple Computer Inc. has a hit on its hands with the new Mac Mini. No sooner had I opened the box than our Technology editor joked: ‘Who wants that cheap Mac thing?’ Now, when’s the last time someone used the words ‘cheap’ and ‘Mac’ in the same sentence? Another co-worker almost grabbed it from my hands; still another popped up, gopher-style, over an office partition to ask how much it weighed; yet another asked whether it could be used for digital video editing (yes, it can),” Ken Mingis writes for Computerworld.
“All this commotion, and the Mini — sent out by Apple for review purposes — still had the plastic wrapping on it,” Mingis writes. “It’s meant to be Grandma’s or Junior’s first computer, or maybe a second or third computer for the house. Or maybe, for those enterprising IT folks out there, it’s meant to give them a chance to try out a Mac at work to see whether it has a place there, too. My hunch is that it does.”
Full article here.
all my windows friends are wanting one… it’s a hit!!
good job APPLE!!!!
first
Er, he does also happen to work for a computer oriented magazine and thus the people in his office would be a bit more interested than the general population.
Apple should sell them in six-packs!
Right … grandmas computer … just another “toy” from Apple .. why play with your computer when you can spend so much time configuring, updating, reformatting etc … that’s what a “real” computer does …
Still blows me away, a mini with SuperDrive and a 20″ screen is the same price as a 14″ iBook with same. Now if I could only find a battery…
Can you “chain” “cliuster” these things together to make a “Super Mini” computer. Don’t know the correct term. I know places have done it with the G5s.
Yes Randy, there is a company in Texas who are using them in server clusters. Of course with 10/100 ethernet and laptop drives, Im not sure how fast it really is. Of course I have seen people have already upgraded to fatser HDD and get a noticable difference
Randy:
Check out Xgrid [http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid/], Apple’s free program that, along with a couple of ethernet cables, allows you to cluster Macs together. It’s a mini Big Mac!!
More on Xgrid, courtesy of MacDevCenter:
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/05/11/xgrid_pt1.html
http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/05/18/xgrid_pt2.html
Mmmmm…Mini Big Mac. Great taste without all of the fat!
I occured to me, does anyone know what the implications are of clustering several of these together? I’d be interested to see how it compares to more expensive systems.
My brother in law is going to Jump into the Apple experience by buying THREE of these. One for him, one for his Mom, and one for his Dad so they can all video chat. Up til now he has been on windows but has been too bummed out by all the viruses.
“Suddenly, you’re out $873 for a Mac with the previous-generation processor and only 512MB of RAM.”
Let’s see, 1.2Ghz G4 = 1.8Ghz P4? “Previous generation”? My corporate beige box PC has a 20GB HD (admittedly I have unlimited network drive space), and 512MB memory. For this we paid $1500 and pay $2000 per year to our IT department for “support”.
$873 and 1/10th the annual support budget sounds pretty good for an equivalent machine to me.
Buffy, where did you see the info on upgrading the hdd?