Comment Re:My thoughts as well... (Score 1) 197
Simulate it in the dev kit, or inside Dashboard? The latter worries me a bit on my PPC machine... I have my doubts about the performance when emulating anything... =]
Simulate it in the dev kit, or inside Dashboard? The latter worries me a bit on my PPC machine... I have my doubts about the performance when emulating anything... =]
I didn't say I needed room for '346 PCI cards'. If it had been, say, twice the volume of the existing mini, it would've been large enough to use regular DIMMs instead of SO-DIMMs, and large enough to use a regular 3.5" HD instead of a laptop HD. Right there, they would've saved enough money to probably make it $100 cheaper.
True, even though my mini is a PPC one which takes "normal" DIMMs. I'd love a speedier grown-up harddisk though, and yes, they would've saved money.
Make it just a smidge longer, and you could've put in a discrete graphics card - maybe just a low-profile one, but certainly the option for something much more powerful than the one included in the chipset. Even with these size increases, it would still be waaaay smaller than a Mac Pro or iMac.
That's somewhat debatable -- the iMac isn't bigger than a mini with a 20" flatscreen. In fact, it's smaller. True for the Mac Pro, but that's a completely different class of machine altogether.
Plus it would've allowed them to sell more upgrades, etc, and more importantly, provided a machine that people have been wanting for _years_. What kind of business flat-out ignored what their user base wants? If they had a cheap upgradeable Mac, they could almost certainly grow their userbase substantially, and thus sell more stuff from the iTunes store, which seems to be their real business model.
And would the average tinkerer (the kind of guy that would want an expandable machine you just outlined) really be the iTunes-shopping crowd?
I think the most important thing for Apple is the Great User Experience(TM), and by offering a machine that can't be screwed up by some uneducated end user plugging in some cheap-ass hardware is NOT going to help that goal one bit. I'm going to guess that the majority of buyers falls firmly into the uneducated end user category, so this "Mac mini tower" that lots of geeks have been wishing for is not going to materialize anytime soon. Sad, but true.
Of course, there's always the OSx86 project for the DIY people, but apart from that the userbase that wants expansion isn't really substantial enough for Apple.
Ah, I didn't know that. Interesting, and all in all not very surprising either, really.
That does make the "iPhone apps on the Dashboard" even more far-fetched, unless iPhone apps are going to be shipped as "fat binaries", which is unlikely due to storage requirements.
With the increased size, they'd more than likely find a way to fit in a proper SSD drive (or even harddisk) and a larger battery to keep it running for some time.
That, and the Aero interface in Vista. Sure, XP could use a face-lift (I never liked the blue Fisher-Price look), but instead of doing a evolutionary upgrade, they decided to toss in a whole new look and feel, moving stuff around, for no good reason at all. When moving from XP to KDE is *less* of a learning curve than XP to Vista, you know you're doing it wrong.
XP did this too, actually, to a lesser extent. Users coming from Win2K could find their way around it, but the hordes of Win98/WinME folks had to relearn way too much stuff to be able to use their computers.
Sure, change stuff, but only if it really improves the interface, and even then be very conservative about it. The last thing you want is to alienate your users. This is something Apple understands more than Microsoft.
Please mod parent into the stratosphere of insightfulness. Thank you.
Appstore items are binaries for the ARM architecture that runs the iPhone/iPod Touch. Dashboard widgets are HTML(like)/Javascript contraptions running on PPC and x86 machines.
Apple already has a central repository for Dashboard widgets, so why would they move all that to iTunes?
OTOH, if they limited iPhone-apps-on-Dashboard support to recent Macbooks, they'd only have one architecture (x86) to worry about, for which they already have the ARM emulation software running (iPhone dev kit), the touchpads already do multitouch, and AFAIK those machines also have an accelerometer on board.
It's a stretch, though, and a large one at that.
Jobs hears people cry out for the 'xMac', and we get the Mac mini, way too small to be what people wanted (ridiculous expansion, so small in requires more expensive laptop-class components, etc.)
I rather like my mini, though. Sure, it has less oomph than a "full size" machine, but it's not too expensive, it has a small desk footprint, and it runs silent. I don't care about not being able to cram in 346 PCI cards, USB works for an increasing range of products nowadays.
Part of the charm of Apple is that they don't follow the market. The fact that every computer maker is making underpowered netbooks nowadays doesn't mean Apple will do the same, unless they can find a way to get it right. They're not gonna run off and build anything that some people are asking for, and why would they.
I'm with you on the 12" Macbook though, the Air is no replacement for that and it'd be great if they re-introduced a small laptop. Dunno if that's possible without severely underpowering the thing, though.
Knowing Apple, it's not going to be cheaper than the iLiad. It would probably have a colour screen and the iPhone OS -- cramming a full-blown OS X into a small and not-too-powerful machine is going to degrade the experience too much to be a serious option for Apple.
For the UI, they'd probably upscale the existing UI. That would be a lot easier for the existing apps, and you'd still have most of the screen available for browsing, viewing videos etc. That's what the machine would be for, not as a netbook replacement.
They might add some stuff that's not on the iPhone now (PDF support?), but not that much else. Flash kinda depends on Adobe, really, but it seems to be coming to the platform "any day now". I think they might include handwriting recognition (it's already in the system now for Asian languages), but I don't know if they'd enable you to annotate PDF files, since that would require a new PDF reader app.
I'm not that sure of a tablet Mac emerging anytime soon, though. I'm sure they're researching it, but it won't come to market until Apple is totally happy with it. That might take a while.
Ahhh, Liberia...
"We use the System of Metric"
"It's called Metric System"
"Thank you... but I prefer it my way."
I, for one, welcome our new Anti-Religion Flaming Horse-riding overlords.
Cheap, I know, but I couldn't resist.
Anyone can make an omelet with eggs. The trick is to make one with none.
