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Thoughts on the Keynote
by - January 12th, 2004
"It's absurd, right on the face of it. Not once in its 70-year history has Apple ever been a 'Cram the retail channel full of cheap merchandise and score a win by sheer force of numbers' sort of company. They're the 'Make the highest-quality products imaginable and offset high profit margins with insanely high consumer demand' company. And while Mac users have been whining about cheap Macs ever since they evolved their way above the Gills and Fins rung of the techno-geek evolutionary ladder, has the Mac community ever shown any real enthusiasm for stripped-down hardware?"
So folks, that was the column I was going to write last week in advance of Steve's keynote. It was formulating in my mind for days. I would have tarted it up o'course, but that's the jist of it.
Gosh, now wouldn't that have worked out well. In my defense I was indeed quite insane with fever all last week. When it's Day Four of the flu and you pull the thermometer out of your mouth and you discover you have a temperature of 102.4 and that's good news because it means your fever is down nearly two whole degrees...well, you know you've had a real way-hey-hey of an evening.
Still, you know, I stand behind the column that I never wrote. I think it's nonsense to imagine that Apple will actually introduce a $499 cutthroat-cheap no-frills headless Mac yesterday. Despite -- I will manfully admit -- dramatic evidence to the contrary. It's part of the game we all play before every Steve Jobs keynote. The rumors swirl and some of them manage to congeal enough that they make it into serious play, until it almost seems impossible to imagine a future in which Apple has not introduced a new Bluetooth waffle iron that imprints each morning's pastry with up-to-date stock quotes and weather forecasts. But most rumors are fairly easy to smoke out because Apple does nothing at random and nothing simply because It's A Cool Idea.
Take the long-rumored Flash iPod. That was an easy one and last week I woulda greenlit that rumor as fact even if my only source for the info had been one of the many purple elves I spotted floating above my sickbed. "But Apple wouldn't taint the iPod brand with a filthy memory-based player, for heaven's sake!" my straw-man opponent would sniff. "Plus, it'd cannibalize sales for the 'real' iPods!"
Well, maybe. But the fact remains that if you want an iPod, the minimum buy-in is $250, which is not a trivial chunk of change for someone who just wants to listen to his Troggs albums while he works out on the Stairmaster. Plus, you gotta look at the iPod Shuffle as a portable wrapper for iTunes Music Store content. Up 'til now, the Store has enjoyed an almost reality-TV style exemption from elimination. Yup, it's hands-down the best digital music store out there, featuring both the largest inventory and the greatest online storefront system, but where was the real competition?
That all changes this year, with new digital music retailers selling selling tracks protected by Windows Media wrappers. The digital marketplace has been beaten into submission by the Beast, who inflicts his cloven-hooved fury upon the land not by laying waste to continents but by steadily lowering Humanity's standards and convincing us to keep settling for less. "Buy Windows Media content from our store," the Beast (wearing a blue Best Buy polo shirt) muses, "and you can play it on any music player from any number of different manufacturers. Buy it from iTunes Music Store, and you'll need a $399 iPod to do anything with it at all!"
(Yes, he's lying. He is the devil, after all. He gets terrific longterm results from the aforementioned Subtle Mediocrity plan, but still likes to screw with people, you know, just to keep his skills sharp.)
So even if the iPod Shuffle were a cheap-ass piece of crap instead of a clever and unexpectedly exciting player, it'd still be an important product for Apple. If there hadn't been an "Apple will announce a flash-based iPod that will sell for under a hundred bucks" rumor a few weeks ago, I would have felt obligated to go ahead and start one.
But "a stripped-down headless Mac for $499"? It just didn't smell right to me. Sure, Apple's been fighting the "Macs are nice, but they're not affordable" tag since the days of the Reagan Administration, but y'know, they've been doing all right for themselves, limiting their product line to midrange-and-higher machines. When you take your nighttime cold medication (which is sold as generic-brand whiskey under a different label) and think about this rumor, you find yourself asking "From Apple's perspective, what problem does such a machine solve?" and you come up blank. Then you imagine the sorry lot of an Apple Store employee who takes a customer to an underlit table ringed with exotic hardwood and says "For $499, you can have this iPod...or, um, this entire functioning Macintosh." Then you imagine that the employee has grown adorable plaid bat-wings and has started singing the bouncy song from this really old Warner Brothers cartoon, what was the name, all you know is that it was sung by these two characters and one was singing about how he hasn't got a hat and the other one sings "bom-bom-bom-bommm..."
(No, seriously, everyone: as of Saturday morning, I was going to cancel my trip to San Francisco. Fortunately, my head started to clear by the afternoon, and I was feeling nearly human again on Sunday.)
Two things -- again, apart from the raging fever that wracked my body and threatened to snuff my very life -- prevented me from writing a column dismissing the rumor of the cheap-o Mac. First, Apple sued ThinkSecret and other sites that reported on the rumor. It's one thing for Apple to hit the macro key on its keyboard that dumps the phrase "Apple does not comment on unreleased product" into an official statement, quite another for the company to get lawyers involved. It means that somebody has just said something that might screw with Apple's stock price, and when Apple takes that step, notice must be paid.
And just as importantly...Apple still has the limitless ability to surprise people. One of their greatest strengths as a company -- at least during the eras in which they've been led by Steve Jobs -- is that no other entity understands the company's purpose more than Apple itself. So yeah, Andy: you might not understand why a cheap-ass Mac makes sense, but rest assured that Apple does.
Sure enough, now that we can see the actual product, it makes perfect sense. The giveaway is the machine's style. When old-timers (read: old enough to think that when a movie theater runs commercials before the feature, the audience has the right to dunk paper napkins in ketchup and throw them at the screen) think "headless computer" they imagine a fairly stripped-down, practical, and wholly unexciting design. The Mac Mini is the epitome of Apple's modern design language: flash through simplicity. The Mini is, in fact, larger in person than it is in your mind's eye. I had a couple of hours between the end of the keynote and my one-on-one briefing, and I wanted to (but didn't) slip out to a McDonalds' on Market Street to buy a Quarter Pounder. I was sure that if I placed the box next to the Mini, the two would be about the same size.
Here's the brilliance of the Mini: it's the iPod, produced as a computer. Not in features, or appearance. I'm talking about marketing. The iPod was innovative in every possible way that nitpicky geeks with websites value innovation, as well as all of the ways that the geeks don't but should. Apple has to be lauded for the way they sell those devices. It wasn't the first digital music player with a hard drive, but the biggest contributor to its success was the fact that it was the first one sold as a piece of consumer-electronics instead of a computer accessory. Take it out of the box, plug in headphones, and go. No worries.
The Mac Mini is probably the first grand experiment in marketing a desktop computer as something that could (conceptually, at least) be blister-packed next to the cellphone headsets and off-brand CD players over at Wal-Mart. The thing is even packed like an iPod: open the lid of its lunchbox-style container and you see a styrofoam well containing a slim wallet of CDs, followed by a slick rounded box representing The Thing Itself, followed by a final well filled with coiled cables. Think back to the last time you bought a notebook, which is the most straightforward of all computers. Was it presented to you in anything close to such an offhanded format?
The Mini's a $499 piece of hardware, but still, I'm inclined to wonder if it'll be the first true Impulse Buy computer. I can easily imagine someone wandering into a mall Apple Store and thinking You know, we've been thinking of buying a second computer for the house... The Mini's packaging and presentation seems to shrug and say "Sure, why the hell not?"
It's mondo cool and I want one. And I'm amazed that I live in a world in which Apple is selling a $499 Macintosh. It's true what everyone always said: once the Red Sox win the World Series again it'll pull open the curtain on the biblical End of Days and in the intervening days before the Apocalypse, all things will become possible.
Still, let's look at this dispassionately. In the cold light of day, a Mac Mini isn't that much more attractive than an eMac. $499 for a Mini plus $100 for a keyboard and mouse plus $150 for a VGA monitor (one of the Mini's few includeds is a stubby VGA plug adapter) puts you in the same price/performance range as Apple's next-cheapest Mac.
I suppose we'll just have to wait and see how things shake out. It's for certain that in deciding to sell a Mac with absolutely no accessories, Apple is quite aware that most tech-savvy households have extra gear languishing in closets somewhere. Particularly with the popularity of LCD screens. The flat-panel lands on the desktop and the CRT winds up in the basement. If you threw yours away, just visit any community back home in Massachusetts on the night after trash day. Most of them have classified tubes as hazardous waste and the trash guys won't pick 'em up. So you can just drive around until you find exactly the size, make, and model you want, and then just haul it into your car from off of somebody's lawn.
Still and all, what makes the Mini different from the eMac isn't the form factor or the features. It's the fact that they'll be sold the way Apple sells iPods, not the way that they sell computers. There's a reason why Apple didn't call this the iMac Mini. The motivation is plain to anyone who attended Tuesday's keynote and learned that Apple sold 8.2 million iPods in 2004.
digs the Mac, and has been writing about the Mac for longer than most of us could tell the difference between a bite of Apple Sauce from a byte of Apple code. You can read his monthly column at Macworld magazine, and his blog at the Colossal Waste of Bandwidth.
Andy's latest book is The Mac OS X Tiger Book (US$16.49 - Amazon).
You can send your comments directly to Andy, or you can also post your comments below.
Most Recent Columns From Andy Ihnatko
- You Can't Spell 'Speculate' without 'Peas' - February 22nd
- So: It's A Video iPod. Sweet! - October 13th
- How to Stuff a Wild iPod - October 13th
Andy Ihnatko's Archives
Observer Comments
Try $50, an Apple Wired Keyboard is $29, an Apple Wired Mouse is also $29, but who wans a one button Apple mouse anyway. Go to apple's online store and you can find a Microsoft S+ark mouse (in a nice complementary silver for $19.95 (I have seen this one on the sleves at a real world apple store). There are other mouses for less and I'm sure a little looking could find a keyboard for less as well.
Wed Jan 12, 2005 2:51 pm Subject: TRULY Headless Mac
I've been thinking about this thing since yesterday, and I can see many many reasons why I would want one right now.
I currently have a Cube (the absolute perfect Mac, I must say), and a PowerBook. Both work great and I really don't need another computer, but damn, I'm still thinking about this. But as a truly headless media center/set top box--no monitor, no keyboard or mouse.
How do I control it? Apple Remote Desktop, of course! It's the perfect adjunct to my stereo/TV. Have the thing run EyeTV to capture shows and play them back through the S-Video out. Use it as a dvd player too. Run iTunes through my stereo--15 gigs of music at my fingertips w/o an iPod.
Since my cable internet comes into the house right by my TV, the Mini replaces my graphite Airport Base Station.
All of that and more in a tiny little box hiding in my TV cabinet. And I use my Cube or PB as the keyboard and monitor with Apple Remote Desktop.
Hmm. I think I'll place my order today!
R
"It's the fact that they'll be sold the way Apple sells iPods"
Good observation, it is called the Mac Minni, but it is really
the "Halo Mac".
It will be very interesting to see how this strategy works.
Perhaps Apple needs to intoduce drive-through windows at their
retail stores.
"Can I take your order?"
"Yes, I'll Have two iPod Suffles, one Mac Minni, and a $25 iTunes gift certificate".
"Would you like to supersize the RAM on the Minni?"
"Ahh, yah o.k.".
"Please drive ahead to the next window".
"Not once in its 70-year history has Apple ever been a 'Cram the retail channel full of cheap merchandise and score a win by sheer force of numbers' sort of company."
Uh...Andy? Think back... I'll give you one word to jog the ol' memory cells...
"Performa"
In fact, Apple got into a little trouble back in the 90s, as I remember, being accused of "Channel Stuffing" (ie, dump the inventory to distributors in one quarter, show lots of sales, and then take it all back throughout the next few quarters when it doesn't sell and hope nobody notices it in the financial reports).
Oh yeah, and "70 year history?"
> Great Article. Very Funny. Nice to see a little humour is left in the Mac web. Wait till they start advertising it. The headlines are endless, but only one is appropriate.
> Finally A Computer For The Rest of Us.
More like, "Finally, A Computer For the Wallet of the Rest of Us."
Its about time. And Winblows users who might want to switch now have almost nothing to cry about... the price is right, and the design is still 100x sweeter than any Dull-made beige box. This thing is gonna sell.
I use a dual G5, 2ghz with 2.5 gigs ram.
I don't need one, but I had to fight myself not to buy one. I would have used it as an appliance and set it by the phone in the kitchen or near the TV.
The miss on this is, it needs firewire 800 for the TV appliance or at least an svideo connection and decent PVR on the graphics card (a $50 option in the future?) or, for the appliance, a Aiport Xtreme built in. Those two things keep it from doing so much more.
So, I helped assuage my impulse by buying the $99 iPod Shuttle for my wife, which I will give her as a present with flowers and something sparkley--as an affectionate impulse buy. This really is the ipod for the exercise crowd, and I could see the same person having an iPod and a shuttle.
But the shuttles real target is the 90% of the non-US market that has little money and mostly uses flash-based mp3 players.
Apple might have not made enough, because I expect these Shuttles to be given away by banks as courtesy gifts when you open a new account.
--Look, I'm hardly ever wrong --I know, it's a curse.
Plus--who's betting that the first mac mini sales incentive at comp usa will be a free generic usb mouse and keyboard?
it's a pretty shrewd move on apple's part not to include the keyboard/mouse, because 1) most consumers will get it either for free or minimal price (no penalty to them) or direct from apple (no problem there). Plus, apple saves significant money since the keyboard would necessitate a bigger box and higher shipping/storage costs, which helps preserve margins while introducing the product at a low price point.
Great article. I think you're right to see this as a tidy way to get a computer. What's really interesting now, I think, is the end of the Megahertz wars. Sure, a revved up G5 would be nice, but, for the vast majority of uses and users, a 1.25 GHz G4 is more than enough. Yeah, people have argued similar things before, but, really, it takes some pretty heavy duty work to choke the G4. Sure, games and Steve's HD world will demand more. But non-gamers with no time for full length movie production work (that's MOST of us), are happy as clams with G4s. Apple is quietly admitting that a computer (like a handheld digital music device) is all about portability, flexibility, style, and cost. Power is just less important now.
I want one, too - or maybe even a pair of 'em!
(Or should that be 'iWant' one?)
Heck, it's more than double the power of my little old iMac SE 700 in every respect, and at less than half what I paid for it...
You could pick up a low-end LCD PC monitor for roughly $100-$120 (or a cheap used CRT display, if you wanted) and a MacAlly keyboard and mouse for $30.00-$40.00 (even a Windows USB keyboard will work). I would upgrade the memory to 512 MB, which runs $75 and voilа...
You have a nicely-featured Mac for under or about $750.00.
I think this is potentially a huge move for Apple. A lot of WinTel people who have bought iPods and have thought about going with a Mac as their next purchase, have been put off by the price. This will solve that problem - and they can keep all their peripherals, too.
Also, a lot of Mac users who would like a second computer have a cheap option now.
And then there are people like me - the bottom end of the Mac Universe - who would love to upgrade but just haven't been able to afford it. Now they're finally getting down within my price-range!
So there are many markets - mostly untapped - to which this Mac Mini is well-suited. That's why I think they're finally set to grab up a little market share. Think about it - it's not a whole lot more expensive than what people are paying for top-end DVD players and sound systems and such. I think you could justify using this thing as the hub of a digital entertainment set-up - hooked to your TV and surround-sound system - it plays CDs, DVDs, stores your music, and makes a great docking station for your iPod, digital camera, digital camcorder - you can use it to sync up your PDA, and now Motorola's coming out with iTunes-aware cell phones and plan to add more features over the next year.
I think this is where they're going with it. Just wait - soon there will be all sorts of peripherals available that will integrate your whole 'digital lifestyle' (whatever the hell that is - pardon the marketing-speak) together around this little pod-like computer.
I think Jobs & company are being careful, and cautious - but I think they have a great Master Plan to leapfrog everybody else out there. We're just seeing one piece of the puzzle coming out at a time, and by the time the whole picture is revealed, Microsoft et. al. will be scrambling harder than ever to play catch-up.
Of course, that's just my opinion - I could be wrong.
(Apologies to Dennis Miller.)
7
This is just a ploy to sell more Apple Displays and eventually Powermacs. They buy a display, a 20 or 23, then a few years later they want to upgrade and keep the display. They could get another mini, but want a perfomance jump. They won't get an iMac because they don't want to waste the display. So they go ahead and get a Powermac.
One of my friends uses a B&W G3 and has been wanting a new Mac for a long time now - but she's currently doing the unemployed-grad-student thing and can't afford a $1000 computer. She can just swap the G3 right out for the Mac mini and be ready to go, using her old monitor, keyboard, etc. That's one order placed.
Another friend of mine has been telling me for *years* that he'd like to get a Mac, but he's not all that financially well off, and now he has a young son at home. He's been swapping parts in and out of his old crappy PC for AGES. And of course, nothing ever works right. Swap in the mini. That's two orders placed.
And, there's me. I have a eMac 1.25GHz Superdrive at home which I think works just wonderfully. I also have to use a P.O.S. Dell at work - and I'm always **this close** to taking the damn thing outside and smashing it with a hammer. I'm ordering a Mac mini on payday. Why? Because even if I'm spending my own money, $500 is well worth it to spend my work days using a REAL computer instead of this Winblows P.O.S.! I've been thinking about getting an iBook, but I'm not really the sort of guy to cart stuff around with me every day. I can bring the mini into work, set it on top of my Dull computer, plug everything in, and no one will ever notice the difference (unless someone walks by my desk and says "wow! your screen looks nifty!")
You, as a PC user, bring home your new Mac Mini and try it out with your existing monitor, keyboard and mouse. You really enjoy exploring this thing for a week or so and you suddenly have to go back to the PC for whatever reason. So…unplug cables, slide out the PC, grab your reading glasses to find the right way to plug the wires in, heave it back in place, fire-up and go. Windows now looks like crap after a week on the Mac. You do what you have to on the old PC, shut it down and switch wires again. After a few cycles of this you genuinely dread going back to the PC.
1. If the Mac Mini came with it’s own peripherals, it would be much easier to switch back to the PC.
2. When PC users are forced to supply their own mouse, it will most likely be a two button, scroll wheel mouse. They will be happy. If Apple supplied the mouse, it would be one button and there would be complaints.
Dollars aside, there is some diabolical genius in the whole scheme of weaning users from their PCs.
Wanna read a fun one? http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/002023.html
I think what has really cemented the iPod, is the large selection of after-market add-ons and doodads available for the thing. When people see all the stuff that supports the device they feel more secure with their purchase, and even enjoy thinking about some of those gadgets for their iPod.
Now translate this custom add-on market to the Mac Mini. Make no mistake that there will be hundreds of add-ons targeting purchasers of this device. And the more people see the supporting products, the more willing they will be to buy it. And maybe the holy grail of Mac software on the shelves will take hold, to run on their little cute Mac Mini.
I'm buying two.
QuoteMace wrote:
I have a feeling that Mac mini is also targeted subtly at existing Mac OS 8/9 users who have yet to upgrade to Mac OS X.
How so? What's your reasoning behind this.
Being a Mac user with both OS X and OS 9.2.2 (and I'm not talking about Classic, which I do NOT use) installed on my Mac I so not currently have much use for OS X. Almost all of the apps I use don't require it, and the only website I know of which requires an OS X-level browser are Google groups and Google mail.
And as far as functionality goes, so far I don't see any big advantage of OS X over OS 9.2.2. OS X has tons of bells and whistles and geegaws, but it also has some serious drawbacks in that it lacks at least one feature which is key to the way in which I do use my Mac
Hi, Guest above, you are hard to please. Since you have Mac OS X, I consider you are a Mac OS X. There are many guys with earlier G3 machines installed with Mac OS 8/9 that have not migrated to Mac OS X. That number is estimated to be around 6-10 million. With $499, there is no excuse. 
If the mini is the first step in the commoditization, there are some interesting implications for Apple. There's more than I can easily enter into the comments here, so if you don't mind my flogging my blog, I've written some thoughts here: http://globalocal.blogspot.com/2005/01/mac-mini-and-future-of-apple.html
Nice. but i personally prefer the analogy of Chinese food better than fast food. Your full, but you still want another (fill in the macfood of your choice) in an hour.
I admit to having an un-natural and somewhat obsessive attraction to ipods..i have 3 at the moment. In my defense they all have different purposes, but one could argue that they are after all...extremely portable...oh well never mind, only i have to know that little secret.
Anyway I just wanted to thank Andy for, well being Andy.
Thanks!
Switch... It is defiantly worth it. If only we could get the software makers to come around to the mac mini way of thinking...the new lap top that replaced my blue G3, even fully loaded by far was the cheapest part of my "re-purchase" a mere 3,000.00 compared to the almost 10,000 in replacing all my software. Still i was happy to do so when it became obvious that by doing so would increase my value to prospective clients (pc based) who were "mac people" shy. Now they never need to know that it was a "mac" that created that dazzling new website.
Do it you will not regret.
Do it you will not regret.
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