iMac Mini and iPod Shuffle

Unbelievable: www.apple.com

This was the best Macworld ever.



LOL!

some VERY cool stuff. also new Final Cut Express, iWork which is Keynote 2 (very PowerPoint-like but the new version seems pretty full-featured) and Pages (word processing, very template-driven), iLife '05 (new iPhoto, iMovie, etc.)

the links:

Mac Mini

iPod Shuffle


iWork
iLife '05
Final Cut Express HD

chris

Dek's romance with Apple has bloomed anew, like the dew of a fresh spring morning....

I wonder if the iPod flash, er, shuffle, er whatever indexes ID3 tags, so you can add/remove songs on other computers. The only player that does that (needing no proprietary software) is the entempo spirit (this thingy here). I think it's kinda odd that it decides what music you want to hear. Well, kinda. It ports over stuff from your most played list, or something like that.

Either way, it's pretty cool, and fortunately seems to be priced much closer to the market rate for flash-based DAP's, so I think that despite nerds everywhere (both macfans and PC geks) shouting from the rooftops that the iPod Mini would be an absolute flop, it's clearly shown itself to be quite the contrary. I think this will be the case here as well.

The Mini Mac will probably go the way of the cube. Not by any means a flop, but I think that it might not be quite the hit that it's intended to be. Well, the price is pretty killer, so I think this might be more than a flash in the pan. Well, it's priced well into Dell's pretty strongly held cheap-PC territory...

As I'm writing this, I'm changing my own mind.

ANYWAY, it's always cool to see new apple products, just because they're always guaranteed to be unlike anything you've ever seen.

i dont get how mac processors work? i know they arent the same speed rating as pc;s are they? how do you judge buying a mac when you only know pc speeds?

The rough estimation (so I've been told) just to get a crude idea of what you're looking at as far as how it stacks up to most market standard PC's is to multiply the processor speed by about 0.75.

So, the 1.25 ghz model would be roughly comparable to a 2 ghz P4, and the 1.42 is roughly comparable to a 2.17 ghz athlon or pentium.

Of course, these are by no means benchmark numbers, these are more commercial estimates, just to give you an idea of where they stand when compared to the rest of the market.

These also aren't intended to be powerhouses of any kind. They're aimed at the vast middle class of computer users who have no idea what goes on inside that mysterious beige box of theirs, and want something a little nicer, and hey, if it's as tiny as an automatic can opener, then so much the better. I think that there's a lot of people who think that 'smaller is better' in terms of computer size, given that they consider the thing an eyesore anyway, and have it in a cabinet under their wal mart computer desk, and wish they had something that wasn't so godawful huge.

Conversely though, there's another group who'd just as soon go with a dell, because, like their SUV driving ilk, decide that there must be a reason why their computer is about the size of two VCR's stacked together, and that reason must be that their computer is astonishingly powerful. I mean, what's more hi-tech souding than the word 'Celeron'?

Nonetheless, I think that this is going to be pretty big, and by the time that the back to school rush takes off over the summer, I think that the big PC companies are going to be feeling the sting of an inexpensive Mac.

Of course, PC fans, this may mean even cheaper pc's on the market in the coming months.

I'm sure we'll see a lot more under-$500 laptops this year as well.

This is absolutely nothing like the cube... The cube was three or four times the price of the Mac Mini, and that was the main reason for its failure, because it was greatly overpriced. The Mini is ridiculously low-priced, and I'm sure they won't be able to make enough of them.

yeah...for all those people who have said "i would buy an iMac but i already have a keyboard, mouse, and monitor" this is a fantastic solution, just unplug and lug your ugly windows box over to a corner, set this smooth little thing on your desktop and plug it in. plus its running OSX and has all the iLife stuff going for it, for people who are getting into shooting with their digital camera, shooting DV of their kid's soccer game...perfect.

i'm gonna try to sell my parents on getting one, it'd be perfect for them

chris

[quote=Pganguly]The Mini Mac will probably go the way of the cube. Not by any means a flop, but I think that it might not be quite the hit that it's intended to be. Well, the price is pretty killer, so I think this might be more than a flash in the pan. Well, it's priced well into Dell's pretty strongly held cheap-PC territory...[/quote]I know, that's what I said Deker. The general concensus among both my tech savvy, and computer illiterate friends seem to be that this is actually pretty cool, and something that they'd genuinely consider as a contender when they were next going to buy a computer.

At first glance, I thought it was kinda lame, but then after thinking more about the price, it became more and more evident that this was a different story.

I think that apple should remanufacture some of their old studio dispay CRT's, and maybe update the design to match up a little more closely with these, so people can have the complete mac desktop look, without having this pretty little white box, and cool lookling keyboard next to their (at best) black, or in most cases, typical beige monitor.

Yeah that would be nice. I love Apple's displays but they are way too expensive. I don't see them ever going back to CRT though. They are too old fashioned now and wouldn't fit into their product line-up at all. :(