On Sun, Oct 04, 2009 at 01:12:58PM -0400, Jefferson Kirkland wrote: > While I am sure the Mac Mini is a nice machine, I can still get more machine > for less. Take a look at this > machine<http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9170835&type=product&id=1218043607320>at > Best Buy. As you can see, It has more of a procecssor, twice the > ram, a slightly bigger hard drive and again, its less than half > the price of a base Mac Mini. If the didn't charge so much for > their proprietary hardware, they might outsell the competition and > beat them on price.
I'm hardly an Apple apologist (I don't even like MacOS, can't stand the interface restrictions), but lets please try to be realistic here. The linked machine isn't even remotely comparable to a mini. At 14.5x7.2x16.1, it is nearly 20 times the size of the mini. Personally, I'd prefer the mini's dual-core intel processor to the single core athlon in the linked machine. The emachine draws more power, so will cost more to run over the lifetime of the machine. The mini includes firewire, wifi and bluetooth, the emachine does not. OTOH, the emachine comes with a keyboard and mouse, and has a few available PCI-E slots, while the mini has none. > I agree with Joseph's comment that they should get out of the hardware > business and as a whole, concentrate on the OS and let people buy their own > machines. We, as consumers would certainly save some serious $$$ that way. They've tried that a couple times that I can remember, and it never worked out well. A big part of the value of the Mac is that the hardware and software are designed to work well together. Letting people build their own MacOS machines would lead either to the sort of driver compatability hell that Windows has, or to a HCL that basically boils down to "buy Apple hardware". The first would lose one of Apple's few real competitive advantages, the second isn't really any different than what we've got now, but would increase Apple's support costs. -- mike -- mwl+gnh...@alumni.unh.edu OpenPGP KeyID 0x57C3430B Holder of Past Knowledge CS, O- "As I walk in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I think to myself, 'This place obviously wasn't named by a real-estate developer.'" Doug Finney _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
