Recently I was listening to a Sunday talk radio station in Toronto, that is when they are required by law in Canada to do their “serious” broadcasting – roughly equivalent to the Sunday morning news programs on US TV. Small blessings for granting some parties a extremely profitable monopoly on the airwaves. But I digress.
The really interesting thing they were talking about on the radio program was a recent poll on trust afforded by the public to various professions. Pastors ranked on top nosing out judges. Pharmacists outranked doctors while the dregs, the pits, the bottom of the barrel dwellers with lowest rankings for trust were respectively politicians, lawyers and car salesmen.
Now I mention this because the guys in the family (I have 5 brothers and too many of them are Macphiles – dont ask me for the details) were recently discussing the newApple Mac Mini. And the consensus among even the Macphiles was that the Apple Mac Mini was that old used car saleman extraordinaire, Steve Jobs, doing his thing – filching from the pockets of his loyal supporters yet again.
Yikes – Steve Jobs! It seems the EsteamedandPressed One ranks right down there with politicians and ambulance-chasers and Worm-tonguedCarriageTraders. The problem is now they have me curious as to who is lowest in DistrustHell – HardballLarry, Bill-the-Redmond-Cat, TheEsteamedOne, or YalemantheBornAgainDraftDodgingDeserter . But I digress.
Here are the problems that the guys have uncovered regarding the Apple Mac Mini – remember this machine is being touted as a ” rich media” machine:
-no mice, keyboard, monitor – this combo alone can add $200-300 to the price
-low memory may handle eMail, word processing but not rich media add $100 for 500MB
-ditto with the CPU and Bus speed combo – fork over $200 more for rich media performance
-only 2 USB ports are eaten up by mouse and keyboard so add $25 for 4way USB splitter
-iDVD rendered useless because DVD is ROM – for RW capability add $100
-Pages , keynote2 and FinalCut Express, the new and richmedia savvy software, plus $500
-no firewall or router front-end, add $40
-even the 80GB drive is low for richmedia, add $100 for 250GB and hope it works in Mini
In sum, you do have to add a tidy sum to the $499 Mac Mini price to get the machine anything close to rich media usage.Think about double the advertised price; and suddenly the Apple Mac Mini sounds more like a car salesmans deal . But not having to pay Bill-the-Redmond-Cats $300 OS fee and avoiding countless hours of security patches and woes – Priceless! But I digress.
(c)JBSurveyer 2005