From The New York Times, my emphasis: "The new Mac mini, priced as low as $499 without a keyboard, monitor or mouse, is aimed squarely at the needs of this new digital household." Those items, especially monitors, are necessary and aren't cheap.

CultureCat

An entry level, generic monitor from many computer stores is $100. Keyboard and mouse, another $25. So, IMHO, this is still within the entry level computer market.

That being said, it may be more popular as an upgrade, where someone with a PC that's 3 or 4 years old and has been wanting to try a mac, can simply buy the computer and use their old monitor.

Charlie, et al:

Will the new keyoards, monitors & mice need not be proprietary Apple devices? My distant memory is that Apple usually required such.

(And that's part of the reason I never jumped on board the Macintosh bandwagon. I mean, sure, it had a GUI, but after I got burned by paying $2800 for the Apple IIe only to watch in become obsolete by the release of the Mac I swore off Apples. No joke! My house is littered with cheap Chinese knockoffs of Taiwanese hardware components. But i digress. . . substantially.)

If it's only $500, hmmmmm, even I could swing that. I've been wanting to check out OSX.

I've been told by a few people that Mac's will run 2 and 3 button mice; many of the Logitech mice and keyboards are Mac compatible. I'm sure there are cheaper alternatives.

Also, seems like I've seen many monitors saying Mac or PC. And if you take a look at the mini-mac, it has standard vga connection for a monitor and uses DVI.

Since it has a very small footprint, a good way to play with this would be to find a KVM switch which is compatible with PC and Mac--this KVM at Newegg is $25 (I've used it; find out if it's Mac compatible). Then you can switch back and forth with one button and use one monitor, keyboard and mouse.

I'll chime in with Charlie and agree that yes, this is designed to let you swap out your outdated PC CPU and go Mac, or if you're happy with what you've got but want to enrich your platform mix, go ahead and connect it to your current setup with a switch. As a person who's been using both PCs and Macs since the days of DOS trees and Apple IIe (gosh that was a long time ago), I think those of you who have never tried Mac before (or haven't in a long time) will find that any of those cross-platform incompatability issues you hear about aren't really true anymore, if they ever were. I transfer files daily between my G5 iMac and my Compac notebook. Old news. No problems.

What really excites me about this new Mini option is its size and weight. At just over 2 pounds, you could easily tuck it into your purse or backpack and go places. Why? Well, I know that I'm a grumpy bear when I'm in the middle of a big project and it would be nice to just pick up the lunchbox-sized mini and hook it up to a setup somewhere else when family, roommates, or office mates get in the way (translation: talk to me mid-sentence). The new iMac was light enough that I did just that when home became unworkable; I literally packed it in its box and carried it to campus on the bus. The mini would have solved earlier problems I had a couple of years ago with an office-provided setup that was too slow to use. I could have swapped out the box and used it in the office and then taken it back home for the summer. This is honestly new and as people start to play around with it, I'm sure more ideas will come up.

We've been discussing this unit over at Armchair. Apparently, most folks are complaining that it's still too expensive, and that the price will have to fall to $250 if they really expect to put the pressure on people to switch.

As far as I'm concerned, the Mac is just another non-free operating system and even more proprietary than the IBM-compatible. Why jump from a sinking cruise ship onto a small leaky dingy? If you're going to bother switching to anything, I'd suggest a GNU/Linux box.

Clarification: I think that the OS is open source now. It's the GUI that I know is not (and something I'm sure they intend to keep that way.

Speaking of proprietary, have you made the switch to openoffice? (dig) ;)

Uh...Well, I do have a second computer here with MEPIS and open office on it, yes. Now, have I started using it? Not yet. I will give it a good trial soon (I'll probably try out the Win 32 version on my main PC).

I doubt I'll ever make a Stallman manuever and purge my computers of all non-free software. I use way too much of it, and my interest in videogames would make such a thing impossible. I do try to promote free software as much as possible to make up for it.

Mac OSX with any word processor is less proprietary than Windows and MS Office :)

But I must admit I use Windows mostly at home, but with Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice. Linux in the office, though.

Actually, monitors are cheap as hell right now, to the point where I've got 2 CRTs that I'm having a hard time finding someone to give them to. Prices for new 17-inch CRTS at Nextag are under $80, and one colleague of mine picked up a nice Sony Trinitron on eBay for $15 plus $20 shipping (!). I'm just sayin'.

And, as pointed out below, many folks already have keyboards, mice, and monitors, and Macs have been using USB for input devices for a number of years now. Take the mini in conjunction with the iPod-for-everyone phenomeon, and it seems like Apple is once more trying the "let's get folks to switch" thing. It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

One thing's for sure, though: I'm really wishing I'd had the cash to buy some shares of AAPL a year and a half ago, when it was down under $15. A four hundred percent return ain't no joke.

--

Mike
http://www.vitia.org/

There's an interesting op-ed on this subject over at Newsforge The author has a good point. Sure, guys like Richard Stallman don't need proprietary software because there are wonderful free replacements for all of their needs. Other professionals don't always find that to be the case (the Photoshop vs. GIMP debate). I don't think this problem will go away. Why? Because if it's a program intended for programmers, they have the knowledge and skills to refine and improve it. If it's a program for graphics designers, they may only be able to offer advice from a user's perspective.

Thus, the best free software is tools that programmers use (operating systems, development tools, browsers, etc.) When you start getting into applications that aren't widely used by programmers, you hit a bump, and the proprietary version is vastly superior and will likely remain that way for some time to come.

Really, we ALL ought to learn C and be done with it. As far as I'm concerned, C ought to be taught in college right along with grammar and mathematics. If we *all* had those skills, we'd be set.

Thanks for the links to newegg. I just got done looking for a 4 port KVM, because at the moment I'm running a windows box & and linux box on a 2 port KVM switch at home. It would be a lot of fun to get the apple wired up too.

I've pretty much resigned myself to the necessary evil of being a MS manager for others at home. There are a few apps that I don't foresee my family ever leaving, even though I did wean my 14 year old off of that foulware AIM messenger program for gaim. This was done only under threats of death. And yes, we do run Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird (though I had to reload IE when I signed up to do SAT grading) on the Windows platforms.

Bringing apple back to the mix would be a lot of fun.

I don't think your conclusion quite follows from your premises, but FWIW, when I was at Carnegie Mellon, they had an across-the-board computing language requirement like other schools have across-the-board FYC requirements. Every student, whether they were in humanities, social sciences, technology, fine arts, business, or sciences, had to take at least one semester of intro-level Pascal, C, Perl, or whatever. At the time, the consensus was that the Pascal course was easiest, and hence most popular, but it was still C-minus doom for a lot of students. And -- speaking for myself -- I don't remember a single thing from that semester of LISP.
--
Mike
http://www.vitia.org/

"I don't remember a single thing from that semester of LISP"

I do. LISP was cool :)

However, LISP is hardly an introductory language. I think you got the raw deal there :)

I'll say. You'd think they would've stuck to BASIC. Still, LISP is one of the great classics. I've even heard programmers say (recently) that everyone aspiring to be a truly great programmer ought to master LISP.

LISP doesn't work like most programming languages, which is exactly why serious programmers should get experience in it, as opposed to only learning more traditional languages. I guess the more modern day equivalent would be PERL (although I'm not saying here that it is the same as LISP).