Every armchair analyst's dreams come true

[mmcirvin]

The mythical headless iMac and the mythical flash iPod both emerge from the realm of legend on the same day.

The "Mac mini" looks like an almost perfect product for what it's intended to be, except that the default RAM installed (256MB) is a little stingy (and it's supposedly not user-serviceable, so they want you to pay Apple's steep premium for additional RAM installation). I'd probably go for half a gig, which is $70 extra.

There are people on the Web complaining that Mac OS X is unusable without a gig of RAM (which will cost you something like $400 extra and completely eliminate the thing's price advantage), but you don't really need that much. I get by with half a gigabyte just fine, and I probably run this thing harder than the Mac mini's target market would. What I always say about OS X is that, since it has a decent virtual memory scheme, there's an abrupt usability threshold somewhere around 256 megs; below that the OS thrashes into oblivion, but when you get very far above it there's a realm of diminishing returns. Apple's default RAM installation for their consumer Macs is a bit close to the edge, but you don't have to have four times as much (well, maybe you could use that if you're doing a lot of complicated video editing or something).

The "iPod shuffle" is entering a crowded market; physically there's not much to distinguish it from other low-end MP3 players other than the lack of a screen. Presumably the big advantage is seamless iTunes integration (if you use iTunes). People have already started misunderstanding the name to imply that you can only use it in shuffle-play mode.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

People have already started misunderstanding the name to imply that you can only use it in shuffle-play mode.

Not sure why they named it the "iPod shuffle" if they don't want people to have this mistaken idea.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think they're trying to put a nice face on the fact that it's just a single-playlist player. What can you do with a single playlist, once it's on the player? Play the songs in order or shuffle them, the latter being about the fanciest thing possible.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Actually, I should amend that: I think the thing they're stressing is that that the new iTunes revision has the ability to "AutoFill" the tiny thing randomly from your library, so you have something close to the effect of full-library shuffle play as long as you keep syncing it every day.

They've paid attention to the fact that most iPod users bother with playlists little at all, and just shuffle their entire music collections. Of course you could always do the rough equivalent of AutoFill with a Smart Playlist, but Smart Playlists are actually beyond most users' willingness to tinker.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

My suspicion is that the appearance of the original (well, current generation) iPod's "shuffle" feature getting notice as some sort of phenonemon in the NY Times (based on those keywords, I have no chance of finding the original reference, sorry). Mainly people thought it was amusing that the shuffle feature either read their moods when it picked songs, or amusingly humiliated them at parties by digging up cheesy old crap.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

an almost perfect product for what it's intended to be

Agreed. I think it's probably mainly a marketing schtick, trying to catch the attention of on-the-fence potential switchers. It's a cheap "first hit is free" entry into the Mac world, for the person who has a couple of PCs already and an iPod and has been wondering about trying one of them things out, but doesn't want to blow a couple thousand on it.

But for a lot of people, or at least some people, it's potentially a terrific second or third computer. I've already got a couple of keyboards and a decent monitor kicking around (monitors go for $70 at Best Buy now, you know?), and once the kids are a little older and can use a more modern machine, this is the way to upgrade. I bet a lot of people will go that route.

The Shuffle thingie may not seem all that practical, but I bet it'll sell a billion. Kapil, a mac-oriented grad student, came by my desk this afternoon to tell me about the release, and announced that he had already bought one. They'd been avaiilable fora good half hour. He needs a little thing for jogging, you see, his big iPod doesn't work well for that.

It's got style, it's got the iPod name for cachet, and it's got an excuse for practicality.

I'm mildly intrigued by the new Keynote, but recognize that the new stuff is useless for me (I give lots of slide talks, but in our fields fancy backgrounds and transitions are anathema). Pages looks interesting, but it's not likely to be more useful than Word (again, for what I do, fanciness is a no-no). The only thing I'm interested in is the new iPhoto -- and that's the thing that's gone from free to pay. Bastards.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I paid list for iLife to get the last major iPhoto upgrade. It was actually worth it, even though I'm too clueless to do much with GarageBand or iDVD.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...as for the iPod shuffle, I said in November 2003 (http://www.livejournal.com/users/mmcirvin/64382.html) that the lack of such a thing was a significant hole in Apple's product line, so I guess I ought to welcome its existence. Though there's little physically to distinguish it, the support for it in iTunes probably amounts to a lot in practice, as it does for the iPod.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...It's also apparently cheaper than most comparable Flash MP3 players; I haven't been keeping track of the prices of those.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I had, up until 2-3 months ago-- I was shopping for one on behalf of a coworker. IMO, it's price-comparable with parts of Creative's MuVo line of flash players, even the ones with built in radio and voice recording (and, indeed, radio recording). The 1GB iPod Shuffle might even be cheaper than the MSRP of the 1GB version of the Creative MuVo TX FM, but then again, stores will discount the Creative product off the MSRP, while Apple products usually sell right at what Apple says they'll sell at, less rebates, if iPods and equivalent players are any indication.

[ckd]

My one complaint about the Mac mini: 10/100 and not gigabit Ethernet. (Yeah, as if I actually expected GbE on a freakin' $500 machine.)

If it had GbE, I'd buy a couple for small servers and retire older slower more power-hungry gear. I'm not quite silly enough to buy a mini-rack and a pair of Xserves though.

[glitter-ninja.livejournal.com]

Now those are cool. If the price on the Mac mini goes down, which presumably it will, I'll be all over that thing. The 256 is a little stingy, but it's the default on PCs. Or I think it is, every PC we checked into last year started at 256 and we had to pay more if we wanted more.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

There'll probably be some deals on reconditioned ones before long; that is the usual way.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Another thing about the RAM issue is that, for all I know, the threshold of usability may actually have gone down. My direct experience of this came from my insistence on running OS X 10.0.x and 10.1.x on my beige desktop G3, before the days of Quartz Extreme; the code was slower than it is now and the machine was way underpowered in every way. A Mac mini running Panther will obviously kick the ass of that setup even in its minimum configuration.

I'm impressed that for video it has a low-end Radeon with 32MB VRAM; it's no hardcore gamer's machine, but the cheapest PCs often have shared video RAM, and there was a time when the cheapest Macs did too.

[reverendluke.livejournal.com]

and it's supposedly not user-serviceable...

Yeah, when I read that, the first thought that crossed my mind is "Yeah, I'LL be the judge of that!"

I'm so buying one, FWIW.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A common reaction, from everything I've seen.

[reverendluke.livejournal.com]

Yes; you know you're a good computer geek when the first thing you do upon getting a new computer is void the warranty.

[jwgh]

I only ("only"!) have 512 meg of RAM and that has been enough to let me work on some fairly complex Garage Band projects, which is probably about the most memory-intensive thing I do, unless searching through my giant work-related Eudora mailboxes is worse. So I agree that saying a gig is required is kind of silly. That's on my 500 mhz Titanium Powerbook. You can't get a computer from Apple that's that slow any more.

Speaking of which, no new powerbooks, I see.

[iayork.livejournal.com]

The "Mac mini" looks like an almost perfect product for what it's intended to be

It suddenly occured to me that I could get one of these and set it up as a web server at home -- that's not practical with our laptops, since they go with us everywhere, but a cheap box that could host a web site, blogs, WebDAV for iCal ...

Stop me now.

They're going to sell a billion of those thing.