The Mini-Mac has me fascinated. And the reason "WHY" is NOT because it's a cheap Mac. The Mini-mac is so underpowered, that using it as a computer would be frustrating. It's too slow to do movie editing, or graphic art stuff. With a paltry 32 Meg on the video card; it's NOT for games either.
The super cool part is this. There are going to be 2 non-compatible HDTV standards, one is the HD-DVD format, the other is the Blu-Ray. These cover Sony and MGM studios. The MiniMac has a processor that can READ BOTH FORMATS. Hmmmmm.... The MiniMac has a DVI output, for connecting directly to a HDTV; and it has an ethernet connection; with wireless support.
IMHO, the MiniMac will be a home appliance, that will allow you to download HDTV DVD's to the Mac Hard Drive from a pay-per-view website; store it on the hard drive, and play it on your TV. This will be cheaper than buying both a HD-DVD player and a Blu-Ray disk player.
When you add all this up; I think Apple has a Grand-Slam coming up. Again, IMHO; your opinions, gas mileage and tax rate may vary.
Next, Apple needs to release a wireless Bluetooth remote control for iTunes and the DVD Player.
It's also a mom and pop because it is cheap, small, quiet, and has OS-X which has so much less spyware or viruses and easier to use IMO. I expect by next Christmas they'll have it even cheaper and I'll get my parents one and couple it with a good LCD.
I remember when 32 meg was a lot for a hard drive.
The problem with that is that the Mac Mini's hard drive is too small to store much of any HDTV content. I'm also not sold on its video capabilities (Radeon 9200? Come on!) or its sound capabilities (not even Apple lists any details about its sound card.) If you have a network server hosting DVD rips, you could just stream content to the Mac mini and avoid the entire issue of the thing's HD.
I see the Mac mini as a cheap computer. It's not an HDTV yet, though Apple could clearly make an HTPC Mac mini if they wanted to move into that market.
I agree with you on the DVD issue, but it is not an underpowered machine. The G4 is not a Pentium. It is designed to do exactly what you assume it can not do...video and graphics. I do both for a living on a G4 with the same specs as the Mini. The G4 has always compared well in graphics and video editing against Intel chips with twice the listed speed. As for games, I couldn't tell you. I don't use my system for games.
Yeah, I mostly agree with that (FWIW), and I think the fits-and-starts of TiVo laid some groundwork. Consumer electronics are ever-shifting and profitable, provides one bets right. Marketing it as a low-cost (and mostly unavailable; I've never seen one, and I've been looking) CPU upgrade product looks like a normal course of action. It gauges demand for the product in that category. Showing it as a video recorder and player later could pay off bigtime.
This statment is very incorrect.
The speed of the G4 processor is just one of those things you have to try in order to believe.
You can compare Mhz & specs all you want, but I know for a fact that when I sit down in from of a 2.4 GHz Pentium at work, the thing just feels dog slow compared to my 1 GHz Powerbook.
Now I do not do heavy-duty graphics work and if I did I would have the dual 2.5 GHz G5, but for causual photo-editing, editing & joining short movie clips, etc. a 1 GHz G4 easily outstrips a 2.4 GHz Pentium. Maybe it is the interaction of the OS and the hardware, maybe it is just that the software is better optimized, but for the average consumer a Mini-Mac is going to "feel" faster than a Pentium.
Just like your average moving van has more horsepower than my BMW Z3, but I can run rings around the moving van.
"It's too slow to do movie editing, or graphic art stuff."
Not true - a G4 tower with similar specs was considered top of the line before the G5 shipped, and plenty of pros did high end work on them. A Mini will run the entire Adobe CS suite just fine (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat), and I run all that at work, and more, working on large (300 megs) files on a 400 mhz G4 Tower.
Drop a gig of ram in the Mini, it'll run Photoshop and the Macromedia web stuff like a champ.
A lot of office managers and art directors I know are looking at the Mini in a big way for production machines in prepress and design shops. No, the Mini will not be a good Maya machine, but very few consumer computers are - it'll run Maya, but if you want to work relatively painlessly, you need a pro machine, a G5 or Pentium 4 with all the bells and whistles. (It will run Strata3D fine, and my fave, Sketch-up)
As for games, it should run everything acceptably, except for the high-end ones, like Doom3, which you need a $3000 machine to run, even on the Windows side. I've been reading people are playing games like World Of Warcraft and Sim City4 with no issues.
The way I see it, look at it like a low-end Powerbook - if it'll run there, a Mini will run it.
Of course, it's pretty slow compared to the dual 2 gig G5 I'm typing this on at home. :)
"When you add all this up; I think Apple has a Grand-Slam coming up."
That's where my money is - with Tiger (Mac OS 10.4) being the next piece of the puzzle.