I've just been reading about the Mac mini. A box measuring 16x16x5 cms with DVD drive, Bluetooth, USB 2.0, Firewire, Ethernet and it's silent too. All for £399! It seems really cool, am I missing something? Is it too good to be true?

I can see one of these things being the frontend for my Myth setup.

Sounds like a typical VIA mini-ITX system, but in a smaller case than usual!

EDIT: Oh, that kind of Mac. Very nice!

Cheers

Bluetooth costs extra, but everything else sounds about right. It's not really cheap for a computer when you comepare it to cheap PC's, but it's definitly a cheap mac.

"iPod Shuffle" is the one that amazes me. Flash players were crap that ends up in a drawer, and now they're the greatest addition to the ipod family? Especially one without a screen and with battery life shorter than a carbon? (And apperently with the lanyard running through the usb cap to make sure you only lose the player, and don't lose the cap)

This was a very odd keynote for apple, seeing as they killed three of their biggest myths at once (headless imac, flash ipod, apple phone(which perhaps doesn't really count))

Matthew

The mini mac is gorgeous - definitely my new living room system. I'm sure a lot of them will end up in cars also.

The iPod shuffle is a trivial piece of hardware (though quite cute) but if the rumours of 5 million pieces to meet initial demand are true then I guess Jobs is expecting to pull off one of his legendary strokes of marketing genius. I doubt any other manufacturer has ever sold 5 million of any one player, let alone as a channel fill. I'd guess their software effort was near zero, compared with three years of painful DSP development on the same platform at Rio.

Rob

Yes, I'm ordering a Mac mini just as soon as their estore comes back up

The flash I'm sure will sell very well - it's priced very keenly, no doubt related to the next step decrease in flash prices - but in my opinion such a big player with no music navigation is a stretch.

I'm not sure how much it will cannibalise the market for higher-functionality, expandable MP3 players, but if I was making an mp3 plug player... ouch!

Hugo

How are the specs on this? Is it lacking something it should have (like a faster processor)? I assume the hard drive is a laptop drive based on the size of the device and space options. That will probably be a bottleneck.

Spec wise, it sits about the same as an eMac, or the iBooks. Considering I have been just fine on my 1.25 G4 Powerbook for most everything, it is an awesome little system.

The only thing that will really make you see how slow it is compared to a G5 is doing video processing on it. But still the speed of it isn't bad.

I don't know about the HD but the CPU is either 1.25GHz or 1.41GHz

My iBook is 1.25GHz and for normal every day stuff, it flys. Even a small fan would be better than my XP3200 hovercraft sitting in the living room at the moment.

I can see well-heeled people buying several units at a time. It also looks seriously sexy (without trying to sound too sad) Mini-ITX systems that look as cool seem to cost a lot more.

The apple info page http://www.apple.com/uk/macmini/design.html has a shot of some of the innards.

Why, WHY could they not have it dual-display capable?!?!

I would have alrady hit "BUY"....

Buy two of them?

They need to make some nice jukebox (not itunes blah) software and a remote.

Please excuse the probably really stupid question...

If I got one of these things can I see the shares I have on my windows network ???

If I can, this will be a very cheap upgrade for me, using my existing 2 (well 3 really) PC's for all the downloading/storage and server stuff while having a nice mac for web browsing etc...

Cheers

Cris.

Yes you can.

Yes.

Here's how powerful OpenBoot is:

On a Sun, you can drop to OpenBoot via a key chord. If you type "go" from there, the OS will resume. This is usually 100% safe, even though your OS doesn't get run at all for the time you're in OpenBoot.

OpenBoot has access to all system memory. It has write access.

You can get ps to tell you the address of a running process. You can figure out where inside that running process the uid is stored. You can drop to OpenBoot and change that value. If you do that with, for example, a shell, you have nearly instantaneous root access.

Nifty. Much easier than shutting down the OS (usually hard) and booting off of a CD when you've screwed something up very badly.

Of course, that doesn't show how powerful it is outside the realm of being able to tweak your OS. But it implements a Forth interpreter and knows about most of the computer's hardware, third party stuff sometimes, but not always, excluded. It even implements TFTP and DHCP clients.

Dammit! Now I really hate Mr Jobs! He has taken away every excuse I had for not owning a mac!

I mean I hate Mr Gates too, but I can get my hands on most things he does without parting with too much cash if you know what I mean

Now anyone want to buy a pinball machine so I can pay for this sucker

Cheers

Cris.

Oo oo oo I want one! My first impression when I saw this was (see if you geddit) "IPX!"

Now I know.

I messed with OpenFirmware a bit on a 6400 with linux. Not all OF implementations are created equal. Some of the stuff in the 6400 was broken and you couldn't get linux to boot straignt from OF. Newer machines don't have that problem.

iRCC, The 6400 even had enoughtfree programmable memory for short custom program. One I recall was to let you select a display modes other than the default. How many pc's do you see booting at resolutions above vga?

The 6400 only let you drop into OF during the post. Not like the Suns where stop-1a would take you the OF monitor mode anytime so long as it hadn't been passworded.

Well that did it!

They did it on 6 months interest free! Couldn't resist!

It arrives early Feb(ish)

Cheers

Cris.

Which one did you get Cris? 6 months interest free sounds like I'll be getting one too!

True, but the 6400 was quite a while ago, and they've mostly got all the bugs worked out now.