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RANT: Apple's Latest from MacWorld
Posted on Saturday, March 05 @ 05:03:56 PST by lincomatic
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As usual, Steve Job's zombie sycophants were mesmerized with his latest product announcements at MacWorld in early January. The iPod Shuffle has to be the lamest product he's come up with in recent years. With so many flash-based players out there that have real controls and displays on them that sell for less, does it have a chance? Of course, since it's bathed in Jobs' aura...
I still find the whole iPod "revolution" incredibly puzzling. Yes, it's slick looking (to people who think white on white is real style) and very good quality, but the user interface is not particularly easy to use. I have an old 10GB Archos jukebox that's heavy and ugly, but it works great in my car, because I can easily navigate it and switch tracks with its simple 4-way button w/o taking my eyes off the road for too long. Try doing the same w/ an iPod (a regular one, not the Shuffle), rotating your thumb through all the slide-out menus, and you'll be more of a threat to your fellow drivers than the cell-phone wielding SUV driver next to you.
I have to admit though, Steve Jobs is an incredible marketing extraordinaire. Take the "click wheel" grafted from the iPod mini to the full-sized iPod's, for instance. The iPod mini used the touchpad wheel because the mechanical one was a bit bulky on the regular iPods. So Jobs figured out, "why not put something that's cheaper to make on the regular iPods, convince the Maczombies that it's actually an upgrade, and then we can maximize profits per unit while at the same time get users buy new iPods to replace their old ones which don't have this `feature.'"
And of course the minions and the buttlicking press just ate it all up! Amazing isn't it? Make something less functional (the older iPods had tactile feedback, so you could operate them more easily w/o looking at them), cheaper to make, and then convince buyers that it's worth paying more $$ for it. Simply brilliant!
The Mac mini, on the other hand, looks much more interesting. I've been experimenting w/ Mini-ITX machines for the past couple of years (http://itx.lincomatic.com), but have found them to have too many shortcomings. I am very interested in small, power saving computers. This interest started when I wanted to build a PVR; existing computers were way too big, ugly, loud and power hungry to keep in the living room. Unfortunately, the Via's EPIA Mini-ITX boards have been crippled by weak performance; after weeks of playing around w/ a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250 hardware MPEG encoder board w/ both Linux and Windows, I gave up. Besides, my 900MHz machine couldn't even play DiVX's smoothly. Now, the box is relegated to home server use... finally, I have a machine that can stay on all day and night to serve out files to the rest of my house. I have quite a big archive of photos, TV shows and ripped music from my CD collection now; it was finally getting too big to carry on my laptop everywhere I went. While my EPIA M9000 machine runs all day & nite on <100watts, it doesn't stand a chance against its larger SFF brethren such as a Shuttle or AOpen XC Cube. These kinds of machines are the size of a toaster, and pack as much wallop as a full-sized PC. The only problem is that they're also noisy, run hot, and eat too much power.
So where does the Mac mini fit in? It's a tiny computer that's quiet and low power, looks sharp, and doesn't cost a fortune. It even fits into a DIN-sized automotive stereo slot. A similarly equipped EPIA-based system costs much more if you buy it pre-made, so you have to cobble together your own case and put a lot of labor into building one. Unfortunately, Apple chose to equip it w/ a relatively slow CPU, small drive, and not enough RAM, but that can be remedied. My first use for one would be to replace the laptop that I'm constantly plugging into my home theater w/ a dedicated box to serve as a front end for the my HTPC system.
The main problem is the PowerPC CPU. While OS-X, being built on BSD Unix, seems like a worthy OS, there is really a dearth of apps and open-source bits to hack it with. Windows is out of the question, so I'm waiting for a decent Mac mini Linux distro to appear. If anyone catches wind of one, please let me know. For the first time in years, I think Apple is building something pretty cool and affordable that I want to tinker with.
Intel has taken up the Apple's gauntlet, and displayed an ugly empty plastic box at the recent Intel Developer's Forum which looks suspiciously similar to a Mac Mini. With the simultaneous launch of numerous Pentium-M-based ITX motherboards this year, it looks like tiny desktop computing is finally hitting primetime, and will finally have the horsepower to do anything your big, loud, hot, power hungry box has traditionally been used for. Maybe this is the year that I'll finally build a decent HTPC/PVR.
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