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January 12, 2005
new ipod, new small form factor mac
I think this is really important news - so we've got 2 apple gear posts in as many days. Sorry kids. It's very early days yet, with no-one getting their hands on these to test them, but I think this will be the future for Apple to really get into the desktop market in a big way. But for us audio lovin folks - I think these will be viable little audio boxes, cheap and easy to expand. Can't wait to find out more about these. They'll be shipping in the states by January 20th apparently (!) and hopefully not long before we see them here. Apple Mac mini Update: Apple.com.au listing starting price as $799 & $949 for the 80gb here in Aus
And as if that wasn't enough Gizmodo has a stack of pictures of the Mac Mini here
This my friends is the ipod shuffle. Its a teeny tiny flash based mp3 player that will come out in 512mb & 1gb configuration. Really simple design, and has no screen. (!) Be interesting to see how the ipod branding pushes this little unit along in sales. The player has a standard USB plug on the end allowing really easy access to upload stuff onto it - but it does come with a cap for the end. I suspect Apple will do a roaring trade in replacement caps for these! There will be plenty of people buying these as a second audio player. And plenty of hapless shoppers buying them instead of normal ipods, and casually saying - yeah I've got an ipod... SHAM! Heh. It also can automagically fill itself from the itunes library with a random selection of music - quite a nice feature and really simple idea too... Ipod Shuffle
So it looks like some very nice stuff is on the way from Apple and being a long time mac user (for work etc), but highly disparaging of the outrageous price for their hardware I can certainly see a change in the wind for me.
"Inside its petite 2-inch tall, 6.5-inch square anodized aluminum enclosure, Mac mini houses a 1.25 or 1.42GHz G4 processor, 40 or 80GB hard drive, a slot-loading CD-R/DVD-ROM optical drive, 256MB DDR SDRAM and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics chip with 32MB dedicated DDR SDRAM — all whisper-quiet."
I'll be buying a mac mini to use as a test box for my design work, and as a really simple audio system as well I think. Processor power is there for synth work, and hdd storage is there for well.. storage. And firewire for external devices. I hope these sell like hotcakes for Apple, I think they've got everything right with these. Good on em!
Posted by funnelbc at January 12, 2005 07:12 AM
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