A $499 Mac!

I’m very impressed. The Mac Mini comes with 40G HD and 256 MB DDR SDRAM, and a
Combo (cd-r/dvd-rom) drive! And it’s miniscule! You can use it to just
watch DVDs at home. Since it has a firewire Port, you can use it to
transfer video from your videocam (and edit using iMovie). And the price
is right! Best of all, I don’t have to pay the absurd P13T price for Win XP. We’re seriously considering buying these Macs once our Wintel
boxes expire. We may even use these as Unix servers (at DotPH), if some
of our Linux applications work fine on BSD. This is Apple’s cheapest
Mac to date, and they’re going for the mainstream. We may yet see Apple’s
3% market share jump into the low teens. Steve Jobs claims (in his
MacExpo Jan 2005 speech) that iPod now owns 65% of the mp3 player market.
That’s quite a surprise to me (as I don’t see too many iPods being sold
here), but it’s interesting that Apple may have lost the PC market, yet it
now dominates the mp3 player market.