Five hundred dollar piece of junk
Apple released their adorable Mac mini a few days ago. A release like this invariably results in our little circle of friends trading URLs around and marveling at the shiny new toy. One of them, a piece at MacCentral, finished with an indirect quote of an Apple exec:
It was, to paraphrase one Apple executive, to solve the problem of how to make a $499 computer without it being a piece of junk.
That got me wondering. Say you don’t happen to actually run Apple software (I don’t). Say you’re willing to forgo the off-white polycarbonate (no problem). Say you’re able to spend an afternoon dodging bullets and jumping through hoops assembling PC hardware (I actually enjoy this crap; send help). How much junk can you wrestle together for $500?
Quite a bit, it turns out. I had a hard time chosing interesting parts on newegg while keeping it under $500. I eventually reached a local minimum at $530:
$104.50 ANTEC Glossy Piano Black ATX Desktop Case
$69.00 AOpen "AK86-L" K8T800 Chipset Motherboard
$69.99 ROSEWILL ATI RADEON 9600 Video Card, 128MB DDR
$127.00 AMD Athlon 64 2800+, 512KB L2 Cache
$60.00 WINTEC AMPO 184-pin 512MB DDR PC-3200
$72.00 Seagate 80 GB Barracuda 7200RPM SATA
$31.00 Rosewill 52x32x52x16 CD-RW Black Combo Drive
---
$533.49
$530 doesn’t seem so unreasonable given that the upgrade to an insignificantly faster processor and 80G drive brings the Mac mini to $600 list. This thing would definitely be noiser and bulkier but at least it’s not a hulking beige monster. It’s also missing firewire and wireless.
For your trouble, though, you get more punch than the stock mini brings to the party. Should you happen to care for such things.
After throwing this together I noticed that Deb had done almost the exact same thing. Great minds, and all that. I was aiming for the vanishing fraction of the market that I happen to occupy while Deb was doing the calculation for the vast majority of users out there. Good times.
graydon wrote:
imac minis cost $649 canadian. my local white box guy sells a machine with the same storage and memory capacity, a faster cpu, faster memory, plus keyboard, mouse, and speakers, for $349 canadian.
if apple is competing on price with anyone, perhaps it’s dell; but they both charge a 100% premium over the white box market. maybe it’s worth it for the industrial design. their machines are much nicer looking than dell machines, and I like “small and quiet” in general. but the psychological threshold of “sub thousand dollar” machine which apple has now passed was passed 7 years ago in the white box market.
Posted on 14-Jan-05 at 12:11 pm | Permalink
zab wrote:
The Tech Report posted a build, again from newegg, where they aligned the capability rather than the cost. http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/7857
I wonder how much of the hardware premium is subsidising software and support. It would be interesting to see if one could get a Mac mini without any software and with no promises for support, save maybe RMA agreements for DOA hardware.
Posted on 15-Jan-05 at 2:44 pm | Permalink
K!P wrote:
arent you forgetting a LEGAL copy of windows xp? and perhaps some software to replace the ilfe suit? i think the macmini is cheap, for a mac, sure there are cheaper contraptions available; but than you have to settle with windows…and noise
Posted on 18-Jan-05 at 4:40 am | Permalink
zab wrote:
No, and maybe I should have made that more clear. Due to a host of historical accidents I’m most effective in front of a Linux box. That’s the point; if I’m going to be a dork and just put Linux on this nice Mini mac, how much Linux could I get by buying different hardware?
That’s the difference between Deb’s comparison and mine. She’s operating in the market that the Mini mac is intended for. I’m judging it in an environment that it wasn’t positioned for.
Posted on 18-Jan-05 at 9:37 am | Permalink
Tyson wrote:
I couldn’t agree with you more Zab … why can’t they dress up a POS mini-Mac-me instead of leaving it crappy beige? Plus no firewire OR wireless? Whatup with that?
Posted on 24-Apr-05 at 9:55 pm | Permalink