Mac Mini

As with everything, there are tradeoffs. (He rationalises, as he gazes into his two 17" LCD's)

My biggest beef with MacOS is simply that I dont have any of the s/w for it and I'm not about to go and get it all (p'shop, illustrator, macromedia suiet etcetc) again.

Also, no SimCity4 rushhour for mac :(

Trayce, you are quite correct. Providing keyboard and mouse is USB not PS/2. Apple are even advertising a little Belkin KVM as an accessory for just this style of use.

One thing that bugs me about LCD, whether using a Mac or ClearType on a PC, is that text-smoothing has little effect. The monitor is ever-so-slightly too pixelly.

What's 1Gb? The memory, according to the Apple Store, is only 256Mb. Which is a bit shit if you want to run a horribly fat and bloated OS like Mac OS X. If you get one, you're best off putting Linux on it.

I don't know about "expensive niche products." I think the midrange monitors will fade, but smaller CRTs are still the cheaper alternative to a comparably-sized LCD, and if you're really strapped, you can get a $50 15" CRT online or at value computer stores. They'll only last a year, but hey, $50.

Indeed. But you can upgrade to as much as a gig of memory and still come out with a cheap Mac.

If you get one, you're best off putting Linux on it.

I think that's bad advice for almost everybody. Unless you're talking about running a server.

LCDs have made subtle color combinations almost useless for websites

The important thing there, though, is "design for what your users will see it on." The proportion of web-users with TFT screens is increasing all the time; you have to design with that in mind.

Personally, what I've found with TFTs is that JPG compression artifacts are much more obvious on them, compared to CRTs. Maybe that's just something weird with my eyesight.

I think that's bad advice for almost everybody. Unless you're talking about running a server.

They would make pretty good headless servers, I imagine; but they'd also be half-decent desktop machines. Linux isn't for everyone, but I'd say it's good advice for at least 30-40% of the market.

(pulling numbers out of my arse here, of course)

1 Mac mini with airport extreme, and DVD burner add one Elgato EyeTV DVB-T box, and a stick of RAM (not from Apple, I'm not that dumb), control with VNC and I have one hell of a DVD Player, PVR, MP3 server, router and wireless base station. Given that I was going to spend £100 on an airport express it seems like a steal to me.

Caitlin, OS X is the best *nix desktop, bar none. Once you put KDE or Gnome on Linux it's just as bloaty. I'd say OS X is more resource efficient especially for the whizz bangs.

£439 for a very capable computer (an extra £70 to burn DVDs, don't know if I need that)

Elgato Eye-TV 410, DVB-T box is £199, which is a lot compared to PC PCI cards but it's meant to be very good at what it does, I belive you can record the MPEG-2 Transport stream whch makes for lossless recording.

This is the most completely fucking insane advice I've ever heard. What's the point on paying the premium for Apple hardware if you're not going to run OS X? OS X is the entire point of owning a Mac.

There will be differences with movies. Essentially the appliance is a computer, even if it is in the form of an STB or a games console. I doubt apple will be able to corner the market in the same ways as with the iPod. The mac mini could be one such appliance. I could also see a G4 version of the iMac with TV tuner in it, possibly in black or aluminium becoming and Apple TV/Movie Terminal.

What any service would take is content and Jobs has clout in that arena, he's CEO and a major shareholder of Piaxar, which gives him some great launch titles (and titles that hold up very well under compression), he's getting matey with Sony (a major content owner) and it would be much easier for him to get next to the major content owners.

The other thing that's going to change is that TV as an independent data pipe into the home is going to disappear. Analogue or ASI Muxing is a very inefficient use of technology and bandwidth in this day and age. Already many people get TV, Data and phone on the same cable or data and phone. The layer of abstraction between services is dissapearing. everything is becoming packet data. The telcos and cabalecos are installing mutlicasting technology into their networks allowing for the first time, bandwidth efficient broadcasting in a mass market way. STBs are already MPEG-2TS terminals with some basic computer functionality (proprietory iTV apps) they will become more general purpose, requiring more computational power to process the new standards (h.264, VC-1, java, flash). Instead of watching one of hundreds of straems coming into your house you will only bring the relavent stream into your house, and share it with other interested parties down your branch of the network (multicasting).

Also I wouldn't put it past a puttative apple movie store to use bittorent or similar technology to make content delivery more efficient. Rights and licenses come from a central point but the content comes from the most efficient sources.

3Gs is an interesting ase study as, because of its totuously long gestation, is very old fashioned. Yes you get a bg pipe to the handset but there is abstratction between voice and data. Much better to have made 3G into an IP platform, sent the voice over IP and make the phone agnostics as to where i got it's connection from, WiFi or over the cellular network a work on making sure the hand-off is seamless.

We'll see though.

*i still don't really understand the implications of the change

I think it's more the metaphysics of an Apple computer containing "PC" chips, which is wadding up the tighty-whiteys of more than one hardcore Mac geek. Ultimately, the new machines are still Macs - they'll be running OS X, and the new CPU design will allow for some drastic increases in speed and performance.

PPC Macs will still be supported for years (too many people with too much software invested in the platform - I can't afford to spring for the Adobe package again any time soon), but they will, in a way, be obsolete. I don't think anyone has run benchmarks on 'professional' PPC programs (Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, etc.) running on the Intel Macs, so if you have any investment in those things, you might need to wait a while before switching.

I'm actually interested to see what the performance delta is between the Mac Mini with the Core Duo and the Mac Mini with the Core Solo. Of course they're claiming up to 5x the performance, but that's just in Spec, not in real life apps. If the Core Solo model is much slower than the Core Duo version, I can't imagine what advantage there would be in moving to it from a Mac Mini with a G4 in it, just yet.

However, if you don't already have a Mac, the consensus seems to be that Rosetta is good enough for now.

(Annoyed, because I quite fancied a Mac mini. And I now have the fear for the iBook, as mine is coming up for replacement and I have this horrible feeling it's going to be Solo only)

thinking about getting one of these just to hook up to my tv and be a "media center". i don't normally fuck with macs, but they're just so SMALL!

i love mine, it's a perfectly acceptable home machine for any of my uses currently (it's from last year, so it's not as fast as the newest ones, but cost more).

Echoing AKM -- mine's a few years old now and it's definitely starting to lag especially given the size of my music library but when my AppleCare plan for it expires in September I'll probably go ahead and just get a newer model.

thinking about getting one of these just to hook up to my tv and be a "media center". i don't normally fuck with macs, but they're just so SMALL!

I honestly don't think that you've even had an option here. Fu-Fme.com was only for PCs.

If you want a media centre with the TV then take a look at the apple TV plus patchstick and Boxee, which are a couple of hack which allow you to make to convert the apple TV from an extension of iTunes to a more fully featured media centre that can play anything, stream from, netflix, hulu and tv.com etc. Some people have reported that they have got it working with tuner sticks as well. The advantage over the mac mini is that it has an HDMI port, the disadvantage is that it is not quite a fully fledged computer, although the hacks bring it close.

http://code.google.com/p/atvusb-creator/

Or get a Popcorn Hour and have it just work.

holy shit at popcorn hour. I had no idea hardware makers could make something so sensibly useful!

popcorn hour looks great but it appears to NOT be a case of "have it just work", I think there is a fair amount of configuration, if you have a mac, particularly, since the drive is formatted as ext2 so you can't just mount it, and it also won't play anything purchased from iTunes that has drm on it.

Also popcorn hour costs $215 with no internal storage vs $229 for the Apple TV with 40GB. No Netflix on popcorn hour either where as you can hack the apple TV easily to get netflix support.

cool, i was under the impression that apple tv was considered kind of a dud product from apple, glad that it's getting hacked to be more useful

the PCH's internal drive is formatted as ext3, which can mount either via SMB, NFS or supposedly UPnP (which i have never tried) although i bought mine diskless since i already have a NAS. plus i don't want to have hot device making noise next to my TV.

it plays all file formats but yeah services like hulu and netflix aren't supported. the netflix thing on AppleTV is kinda cool i have to admit..

PCH and apple tv both sound like they have some complications and limitations, but if i just get a cheap laptop or computer and hook it up to the tv then i don't have to worry about any of that, right?

- no remote
- how do you get the files onto the computer
- weird wire situation
- you can't play hi-res video on a cheap computer

but yeah that can work for a lot of things and it's what i did for years, i was just tired of unplugging and replugging my laptop all the time, and have to go crouch over it every time i wanted to pause, or having to fiddle with the aspect ratio in VLC to get it to look right on the TV, or trying to figure out what i needed to get rid of in order to make space for something

with the PCH i literally drag a file onto a drive, and turn on my tv and it's there

-wireless keyboard!
-wifi?
-not sure about this
-hmm, why not?

xp

mine is still working just fine, been few years now.

- no remote
- how do you get the files onto the computer
- weird wire situation
- you can't play hi-res video on a cheap computer

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, 12 March 2009 17:25 (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

So many wireless remotes on the market.
network
lots of tvs have VGA or DVI ports. lots of laptops have S-video or composite ports. Most DVI ports support digital and for those that do you can get a DVI to HDMI.
depends on the spec of the laptop

What is worth looking it if dedicating a laptop or desktop to this role is MythTV and or Boxee which are linux based media centres. There is an easy to install version of Myth called Mythbuntu and configuration is not too bad if a little involved.

I just got one of these thingdings.

First time in my life I've owned a *brand* *new* computer (previous ones I got were 5+ yrs old when I first owned them). It's a pretty deluxe feeling!

It was one of these that made Emma switch, which made me switch.

Got my second one a few months back. Love these little guys.

I've had Macs before (well, my first computer was a 386...in 2002). This guy just got too impractical to use anymore:

http://www.forevermac.com/mac%20systems/g4-graphite-tower.gif