Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Apple's new Mac mini certainly doesn't break any new ground in technology; it's basically just the same guts from a last-generation Mac portable, sans the screen, keyboard and cursor controller. From a technical point of view, the mini is pretty minimal. The basic configuration of a single 1.25-gigahertz G4 chip, 256 megabytes of system memory, a CD-R/W and DVD-ROM combo drive, and a 40-gigabyte hard drive would be considered ho-hum, if not slug-like, if one of the Windows-based box-makers had come up with the idea. In fact, one can easily find entry-level Windows-based PCs that offer faster processors, more memory, greater storage—plus a display, keyboard and mouse—for less money.

There are other annoyances with the Mac mini, too. The mini is a bitch to upgrade, even more so than its ancestor, the quickly discontinued Mac Cube. Apple ought to include a putty knife in the box, because you'll need one to crack into the case if you ever decide to upgrade the memory or add a wireless access card on your own.

The $499 price point looks good in the advertisements, but it's not realistic. The 256MB of RAM is simply inadequate to run all the Mac's software efficiently. At the very least it's a $574 computer. I consider the upgrade to 512MB to be essential, and apparently so does Apple, based on the 512MB reviewer's machine it sent out.

But wait: There are three exceptional and very important things about the Mac mini that render those gripes less significant: design, price, and software.

The Mac mini is a Trojan horse. No, not the virus kind that turns your unprotected Windows PC into a porn- and spam-spewing zombie, but rather a sneaky way for Apple to get its secret weapon—creative software—in front of all those Windows users who are fed up with the other kind of Trojans—the worms, viruses and other scumware that feed on the Microsoft Windows operating system like vampires and leeches.

For an investment of less than $600, Windows users can see for themselves what all the Mac fanatics have been raving about all these years. No system crashes? No viruses? No network configuration nightmares? Being curious at $574 is a lot more attractive than being curious at $1,500, which for a long time was the opening ante for exploring the Mac mystique.