Apple Unveils Mini Mac, iPod Shuffle

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-01-12 04:50am

I reckon that Apple's gambling on people who buy this not being very process-heavy oriented... ie- they want word processing and 'Net surfing without viruses, not editing, image manipulation, encoding, or gaming.

Vohu Manah · Post by **Vohu Manah** » 2005-01-12 07:35am

Who says they (Apple) trimmed their margin's that much to release the Mac Mini? We'll know for certain when Apple releases their first quarter statement with Mac Mini sales totals.

Dahak · Post by **Dahak** » 2005-01-12 02:02pm

I may even be tempted to try this miniMac.
It would be certainly useful, sometime in later life, to have some Mac experience...

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2005-01-12 03:29pm

For $500, you can get a box that will run a word processor, a web browser, an IM client, and iTunes? And it won't rot, and won't get viruses, spyware, or adware? Shit, that's EXACTLY what most people are looking for, including me. I'm a history major going into teaching--when will I need to run high end, power-hungry programs for work? I have a PS2 for games, and I only play Grand Theft Auto and Madden anyway. My computer is for surfing the internet, writing, talking to friends, and looking at porn, which the mini Mac can do well even with its anemic specs.

And there is a better alternative to Word already out there. It's called Word Perfect, and as far as I'm concerned, it's worth the investment.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2005-01-12 03:40pm

SPOOFE wrote:I reckon that Apple's gambling on people who buy this not being very process-heavy oriented... ie- they want word processing and 'Net surfing without viruses, not editing, image manipulation, encoding, or gaming.

They're aiming for people like my father, who think of computers the same way they do a refrigerator--an appliance that only has to do a few jobs well--and get very frustrated when the computer does not, in fact, do those few jobs well, which is any virus-infested, Windows-rotting computer no matter how nice the specs. And they resent the fact that THEY have to buy additional software, plus subscriptions, to protect it and their privacy. My dad's exact words: "The computer should be like the God damn radio. You turn it on, and it works." This little Mac will do exactly that--or come much closer than a Windows box, anyway. And for cheaper than anything other than a custom built system, which, frankly, the target market would never buy and might not even be aware is an option, or a pile of shit from Gateway or Dell.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-01-12 08:27pm

There aren't many word processors for MacOS, though. IIRC, WP hasn't been on the Mac for quite awhile. You could try out Apple's new Pages program.

YT300000 · Post by **YT300000** » 2005-01-12 09:54pm

darthdavid wrote:http://www.apple.com/ipodshuffle/

2 Do not eat iPod shuffle.

Some computers require either the optional iPod shuffle Dock or a USB cable extender (sold separately).

Why do I get the feeling that "some computers" = "non macs"?

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-01-12 09:58pm

phongn wrote:There aren't many word processors for MacOS, though. IIRC, WP hasn't been on the Mac for quite awhile. You could try out Apple's new Pages program.

AppleWorks comes free with some Macs (Mac Mini, iMac, eMac, iBook), TextEdit on all Macs (in Tiger it can open Word documents, in current form can open RTF and TXT), this new Pages looks sweet, and there's MS Word. I think there's a couple others too.

And there's NeoOffice, a Java version of OpenOffice that runs real slow. OpenOffice is being ported and currently runs only in X11.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2005-01-12 10:08pm

Pages apparently won't convert Word Perfect files, which is what virtually all my writing is in. I can convert it all to Rich Text and then transfer it, but that will be a giant pain in the ass.

Damn it, I thought Word Perfect was still available for Mac. Not surprising that it isn't, though--turns out Microsoft owns a 25% share of Corel.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2005-01-12 10:21pm

YT300000 wrote:Why do I get the feeling that "some computers" = "non macs"?

Because you're an idiot. The computers which require the power adaptor would be ones which don't pump power through their USB 2.0 ports.

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2005-01-12 10:35pm

When I first saw these two products I thought "Oh, you stupid fucks. You take something good and then you fuck it up". No reason for Mac to get into cheap shitty MP3 players, the low-end computer market is already taken up, etc etc etc.

Things look a lot different today. I'm strongly considering one of those itty bitty iPods, and were I married and looking at picking up a second computer, that little box would be high on my list.

How are networking, printer sharing, and file transfers between Macs and PCs these days?

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-01-12 11:05pm

the low-end computer market is already taken up,

With no Apple presence. Until now, if you wanted a low-end Mac, you had to get a 3- or 4-year old tower.

See, I'd never get one of these, but I'd never get a Dell or HP or any other ready-made computer. I'm the guy that likes constantly tinkering with his machine. This product obviously isn't designed for me... but I can easily see the usefulness.

Who says they (Apple) trimmed their margin's that much to release the Mac Mini?

They probably did a bit, but think about it... no LCD monitor (that probably saves $500 right there), no DVD burner, cheap video card, meager RAM, low-end (for Apple) processor...

I'm sure they're betting on selling far more of these than their high-end power-intensive towers, to make up for the trimmed profits, but that's business.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2005-01-12 11:11pm

The thing Apple needs to do now is get people to understand that a Mac is fundamentally better than a Windows PC from the standpoint of security and reliability. This might be tricky because the target market is still largely unaware of how pervasive viruses and other malicious programs are (or they wouldn't be as pervasive).

Completely unrelated note: today I had to go to the registrar's office at Rowan, and discovered that sometime since August, Rowan University has switched completely to Macs for the public computers.

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2005-01-13 12:29am

The thing Apple needs to do now is get people to understand that a Mac is fundamentally better than a Windows PC from the standpoint of security and reliability.

Absolutely. Right now, the average user thinks "Mac" and pictures a beret-wearing cappucino-sipping artsy-fartsy whiner with Greenpeace bumper stickers editing together their French-language B&W student film while sitting in Starbucks chatting on three cell phones at once.

Kinda hard to identify with that image, really.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-01-13 12:42am

Howedar wrote:When I first saw these two products I thought "Oh, you stupid fucks. You take something good and then you fuck it up". No reason for Mac to get into cheap shitty MP3 players, the low-end computer market is already taken up, etc etc etc.

Things look a lot different today. I'm strongly considering one of those itty bitty iPods, and were I married and looking at picking up a second computer, that little box would be high on my list.

I know what you mean.

I started with, "No screen, cheap dinky little thing? That sucks." Then "Hmm, after checking, this thing costs BARELY more than a 512 MB USB keychain that I was considering buying anyway, yet has an iPod attached." And finally, "This could be good".

How are networking, printer sharing, and file transfers between Macs and PCs these days?

Very good. Mac OS X 10.3 has full Samba and CIFS support, and Windows Printer Sharing via Gimp-Print (which is admittedly dodgy sometimes), and Mac OS X 10.4 (a full new OS, not a software update, the updates are 10.3.x) is coming out in June most likely and should be even better.

The only thing you have to remember is to add a cifs: before the rest. For example, on Windows, to reach a PC named noname, you'd go to \\noname\SharedDocs. On the Mac, you'd go to cifs:\\noname\SharedDocs.
(Or just browse network shares, but that takes more waiting and doesn't always pick it up right away so I perfer to just type it in fast).

But the Mac is fully capable of accessing Windows shares and Windows printers and Windows' internet connection sharing.

Vohu Manah · Post by **Vohu Manah** » 2005-01-13 12:49am

Just an excerpt: Highlights of Apple's Earnings Conference Call

The Mac Observer wrote:• Gross margins for the quarter were 28.5%, mainly because of "a more favorable commodity environment," Mr. Oppenheimer commented.

• Mr. Oppenheimer said he is projecting fiscal Q2 revenue at $2.9 billion, and diluted earnings per share of "about 40 cents," he said. Apple expects gross margins to be about 27.25%.

• What will profit margins be on the new Mac Shuffle and Mac mini? Mr. Oppenheimer said under 20% and around 25%, respectively.

FYI, Mr. (Peter) Oppenheimer is Apple's Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2005-01-13 02:03am

Praxis wrote:On the Mac, you'd go to cifs:\\noname\SharedDocs.
(Or just browse network shares, but that takes more waiting and doesn't always pick it up right away so I perfer to just type it in fast).

The back-slash is an escape character. For some dumb-ass reason, NTFS uses it as a path separator. And thus, there are hoards of people who use back-slashes where they should use proper, forward-slashes because that's what Windows uses. Some idiots at the ITK department actually posted fliers with URLs which used back-slashes. I wanted to find out who they were and ban them from computing.

Howedar wrote:How are networking, printer sharing, and file transfers between Macs and PCs these days?

Depends on the scope of what you're doing. If it's strictly SOHO-type stuff, then Macs and Windows boxes will live together in harmony. If you want to integrate a Mac into an enterprise environment based on ActiveDirectory, things get trickier. Apple's support for ActiveDirectory took about 5 point releases to work like it should, and even then, it's very rudimentary. (And there are still things that don't work, which I have endlessly nagged them about, but for some reason, the engineers insist that it must be something I'm doing wrong.)

But anyway, for small-scale things, Mac OS X will work well with Windows. It can connect to Windows shared folders relatively simply with a URI formatted as "smb://server/share".

Mac OS X can also serve out Windows shares. Of course, if you try to do this, prepare to join me in the picket line outside of Cupertino demanding some sort of built-in interface for setting up share points, rather than having to rely on third-party applications. Once you get past that, though, it works well.

But the Gods of Apple have answered the prayers of sysadmins everywhere, and upcoming in 10.4 are fully Windows 2003-compliant access control lists. This will help out Windows integration greatly from a server end.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2005-01-13 03:04am

phongn wrote:There aren't many word processors for MacOS, though. IIRC, WP hasn't been on the Mac for quite awhile. You could try out Apple's new Pages program.

I'm pretty happy with AbiWord's MacOS X port. It's very slick and integrates nicely into the OS X environment, plus it's light and supports MS Word files natively, and WordPerfect, OO, et al through plugins.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-01-13 04:29pm

I noticed there have been no threads mentioning the new software from Apple, btw.

iLife '05 looks sweet (so if you get a Mac Mini and do any kind of video work, GET A SUPERDRIVE, because iDVD 5 is awesome). And it comes free with new Macs (starting with the Mac Mini).

iWork looks awesome. Has anyone here ever tried to position pictures in Word? It's a mess. A nightmare.

Just that short demo they did on the stage was amazing.

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2005-01-13 06:01pm

God help me.

I'm actually considering buying this thing once Tiger is released (so I won't pay $129 for the upgrade).
It'd look great in the corner of my desk connected to a KVM switch so's I can enjoy OSX in 1600x1200 DVI glory.

My only concern is the laptop 4200rpm HD it uses and the single RAM slot.
Replacing that 256 stick with a 512 or 1GB stick of PC2700 shouldn't be too difficult, but I'm not so sure how easy it'd be to replace that 40GB 4200rpm drive with a 60 or 80 GB Momentus.

iLife '05 looks sweet (so if you get a Mac Mini and do any kind of video work, GET A SUPERDRIVE, because iDVD 5 is awesome). And it comes free with new Macs (starting with the Mac Mini).

Does iDVD output files in .iso format?
If it does, I'd just use iDVD to create the file and then transfer it to my PC for the actual burn.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-01-13 06:17pm

Memory upgrades actually look to be a PITA -- look at all those clips holding the metal top in! Same goes for an HD upgrade.

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2005-01-13 06:18pm

Probably no more of a PITA than the processor upgrade on my laptop was.
But yeah, it doesn't look like it's a matter of loosening a few screws, does it?

YT300000 · Post by **YT300000** » 2005-01-13 07:27pm

Durandal wrote:
YT300000 wrote:Why do I get the feeling that "some computers" = "non macs"?
Because you're an idiot. The computers which require the power adaptor would be ones which don't pump power through their USB 2.0 ports.

Ah, the iPod Shuffle dock is meant to pump in power? That makes sense, but it doesn't jive with the second part though, the USB cable extender. There won't be any power coming through that.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-01-13 09:28pm

Actually, it appears memory upgrades are perfectly doable if you get the case off.

Praxis · Post by **Praxis** » 2005-01-13 09:28pm

Glocksman wrote:God help me.
I'm actually considering buying this thing once Tiger is released (so I won't pay $129 for the upgrade).
It'd look great in the corner of my desk connected to a KVM switch so's I can enjoy OSX in 1600x1200 DVI glory.

My only concern is the laptop 4200rpm HD it uses and the single RAM slot.
Replacing that 256 stick with a 512 or 1GB stick of PC2700 shouldn't be too difficult, but I'm not so sure how easy it'd be to replace that 40GB 4200rpm drive with a 60 or 80 GB Momentus.

iLife '05 looks sweet (so if you get a Mac Mini and do any kind of video work, GET A SUPERDRIVE, because iDVD 5 is awesome). And it comes free with new Macs (starting with the Mac Mini).
Does iDVD output files in .iso format?
If it does, I'd just use iDVD to create the file and then transfer it to my PC for the actual burn.

I don't think so, though I can check later. I believe you can save them in an iDVD format and transfer them to another Mac with a superdrive, but I don't think you can go ISO. Not sure though.