Have you seen the new Mac Mini that was just released a week or two ago? It’s a tiny little box that has a whole Apple computer in there. Now, I love my Windows machines (especially my TabletPC) and I would never think of switching to a mac, but I am seriously considering getting one of those things just to play around with it. I know it comes with the iLife ’05 package which is pretty cool looking. It looks like this little box would be excellent for those people that would like to make movies and/or music (I hear GarageBand is excellent)…you would need a SuperDrive upgrade (that’s the Apple term for DVD burner) which means the system is $499 (base) + $100 (SuperDrive), but that’s still not a bad deal.
I also ran into an article this week by Robert Cringley about why he thinks Apple released a little unit like this out of the blue…and it actually sounds like he is on to somethiing…
I wonder if Microsoft will ever get into this market (kinda did with Xbox in a way) beyond the Media Center PC. If Cringley is right, then is might actually make sense for MS to built their own Media Center Mini PC as it would be awesome and it would make a lot of sense to have a low cost PC (in the $600 range) that was a complete media center. The current generation of machines are nice, and I really like the Media center interface and all, but the machines just aren’t something you want to sit next to your entertainment center (or I should say, I wouldn’t want to put it there).