So, Apple Can Build 'Half-a-Cube' for $499


Make no mistake: the Mac Mini is the Power Mac G4 Cube redux. Half of it. Out of the ice. Take a peek at the spec sheet: G4, FireWire, Combo drive, And the unmistakable design panache of Jonathan Ive.

And it's not $1,799. Not even half that. And, despite the paucity of VRAM, it even has a decent video card.

And...don't you just want one?

As soon as I saw the design, I instantly thought it could be an excellent cut-price portable Mac - even as an alternative to a PowerBook. For instance, you could grab the Mac Mini and plug it straight into a video projector and a keyboard and you're ready to go. I wonder if we'll see a portable battery pack developed for it by third parties in the near future.

The Price is Right

True, you can up-spec a Mac mini so it costs just as much - more - than an eMac. Just order one of those Cinema Displays. Or 58 bucks just for a wired keyboard and mouse, although a number of plain-jane Wintel bits should do. The SuperDrive isn't badly priced at $100. And doubling the hard drive space for $50 is okay. The 1.42GHz option isn't bad either, and that gives you the 80 gig HD. So you get an extra almost-200MHz for $50. Frankly, you'd probably be hard-pressed to notice the difference though.

In offices or Mac-based shops, it would be a breeze to simply move it from office to office. And you could buy around four of them for the price of one decently-specced PowerBooks. And, if nothing else, the Mac Mini is proof positive that Apple can build a decently-specced Mac for under $500. If it wants to.

And how about as a nicely-powered little server? It's got 100baseT, so that's a reasonable start. And you can move it anywhere. Easily. Or as a more-expensive Airport Extreme Base Station that just happens to be a Mac as well.

It's a bit stealable, so you'd want it tied down in insecure places. And because it's so damn cute, thieves will probably want to keep it for themselves.

In some respects, the Mac Mini fulfils the design promise of the iMac G5 to the letter: literally, 'where did the computer go?' And you could conceivably put a gigantic hard drive in it, and 1GB of RAM is decent. And the mobo can probably accommodate bigger RAM modules; there's surely no hardware/software block on that.

Yes, it could flop, miserably, like the Cube. But we don't think so. It's almost like pulling a Mac Plus out of your closet again...but with the power to crunch gigabytes of digital video.