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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Farhad Manjoo: Steve Jobs' love slave or minion of Satan? Readers respond to "A Mac for the Masses."
Jan 18, 2005 | [Read the story.]
The Mac Mini is a brilliant piece of industrial design, no doubt about it. But for the life of me, I can't figure out why I would want one. By shopping around for a good sale, I just got a great new laptop for $600 with a much faster processor, a bigger hard drive, an equivalent DVD/CD-RW drive, and more memory. Not only that, but it came with an integrated keyboard and mouse as well as a built in 15.4-inch wide screen display. Sure, the Mac Mini is cute, but if you're going to get a small computer in a sealed case, you might as well get one that allows you to carry the whole thing around, not just the main CPU unit.
One possible exception would be if you wanted to hook it up to a TV and use it as a media center, but the Mac Mini doesn't have a TV tuner, a DVD burner, or other features you would want. And if you add them externally, you have a tiny, elegant box with a bunch of big, ugly doohickies hanging off of it.
It's nice that Apple is still out there producing alternatives to Windows and x86, but I still can't think of any way in which having one would benefit me.
-- Andrew Norris
Although I enjoyed Farhad Manjoo's article about the Mac Mini, I was hair-tearingly disappointed to see him propagate the biggest Mac myth of all: As he puts it, "the annoying one-button mouse thing".
Here, and for all time, is the magical solution to using a two-button mouse on a Mac:
Step 1 -- Buy a two-button mouse.
Step 2 -- Plug it in.
Step 3 -- There is no step 3.
It's that easy. Mac OS handles the problem very simply: If you have a two-button mouse, the OS works with right-clicking. If you have a one-button mouse, the OS works without right-clicking.
It's extremely elegant, it addresses the needs of both basic and advanced users, and it's been part of Mac OS for a long time. (I've used the same two-button mouse on my Windows and Mac machines for the last five years.)
Just because the computer doesn't ship with a two-button mouse doesn't mean you can't use one. If that is all that is standing in your way, then get thee hence and buy a Mac Mini.
-- Scott Dierdorf
I hate to be a knee-jerk reactionary but I am taking the bait and firing off an e-mail in response to Farhad Manjoo's characterization of Mac's minuscule market share. I've never lived in New York or San Francisco and in fact have lived in a minimum of four red states in my lifetime. As long as I've been using a computer -- about 20 years now -- it has always been a Mac. Like all of the relevant cultural producers in the world (musicians, visual artists, designers, writers, filmmakers) the Mac is the best machine to enable our creative expression. We do have strong emotional bonds with our Macs -- Macs are for people who feel for a living. And until Farhad lets go of his wonkish cost analysis and makes the switch to Mac, he will likely always be just a technical writer.
-- Daniel Jasper
I hope you got some good advertising revenue out of Farhad Manjoo's love letter to Steve Jobs. Reviewing the capabilities of a new system is journalism; this was more like a commercial. "Only $499!!!"
A quick perusal of the AppleStore link disclosed some interesting facts:
-- The G4 processor is nice, but the $600 model is still only 1.4 GHz. Although the Mac OS doesn't require as much raw processor speed as Windows, 1.4 GHz is still nothing to write home about. Most of the Mac notebooks have faster processors.
-- The base price gets you 256 megs of memory and a video card with all of 32 megs. Considering most of the Mac users I know are using a Mac for its facility in handling graphics, that amount of system and video memory seems pretty low. And there is no option to upgrade the video memory at all.
-- Your choices of hard drive are 40 gigs or 80 gigs. A graphic designer will use that much space in no time.
So, if you want a low-end Mac, you can spend $500. But if you want a Mac that has the power to do the things that Mac users want them to do, merely upgrading to 1 gig of system memory and getting the three-year warranty (as opposed to 90 days) brings the price up to over $1,100. Not only does that not include a monitor, you get to reuse your old mouse and keyboard (unless, of course, you have a standard PS2 keyboard, in which case you can add the Mac USB keyboard and mouse for a mere $58).
Oops, sticker shock.
-- Lee Cavett
