“The home and business PC soon may have to move over to accommodate an unwelcome guest: a new Macintosh. With its inexpensive, compact Mac mini, Apple aims to lure more users to the Mac platform and snare a bigger share of the home and office desktop–and maybe even space in the living room, bedroom, den or kitchen, industry observers say,” Russell Redman reports for Digital Connect.
“Price, along with a relative dearth of Mac-compatible software vs. the Microsoft Windows platform, has historically hampered Apple’s computer market share. But the Mac mini starts at just $499, putting it squarely in the budget PC market and well within reach of users who previously didn’t want to fork over $1,000-plus for a Macintosh,” Redman reports. “The Mac mini’s price, portability, wireless networking capabilities and bundled iLife ’05 multimedia software make it an attractive option to Windows-based PCs for consumers.”
MacDailyNews Canard Alert: Dearth of software? There are over 18,000 software applications for Macintosh. Spend a week to learn each one and you’d be finished in just over 346 years. Check them out here.
Redman reports, “‘The base model of the Mac mini could make a fine second computer, possibly dedicated to music, movies and video, as its USB and FireWire ports enable storage, audio and video expansion,’ Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds said in a recent report. ‘Watch for the emergence of USB peripheral boxes that fully integrate the Mac [mini] into a home theater system, which will signal that the Mac mini has become a model for what a media PC could be,’ Reynolds added.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The Mac mini would make a fine computer for 95% of the world (most people surf the ‘Net, type a letter, do their budget, send email; they’re not power users, they just want something that works) and the first thing anyone stuck with Windows should think about dedicating a Mac mini to do would be to use it to connect to the Internet for Web and email use. Have you used a consumer’s Windows machine on the ‘Net lately? Littered with malware, prone to viruses and worms; it’s a joke. Today they add a Mac, in a bit of time, they realize they haven’t booted up their Windows machine for weeks.
