Dan Knight
- 2005.01.13
Bill Palmer is right. The Mac
mini is the biggest blunder in Apple history. It's going to
eclipse the Apple III, Lisa, Newton, and Cube as the biggest fiasco in Apple's almost
30 year history.
Despite Apple's long list of consumer successes - the entire
Apple II line, the Mac
Classic, the LC, the Performas, and the CRT iMac among them - the mini just isn't
going to sell, and Apple will be forced to become a consumer
electronics company instead of a computer company.
If you thought Apple was beleaguered back in 1987, you ain't
seen nothin' yet.
Here are twenty reasons the Mac mini will fail and dooms Apple:
- Nobody will buy a computer that doesn't come with a mouse and
keyboard.
- Nobody will pay for Apple's mouse/keyboard bundle because real
people use multi-button mice with scroll wheels, so Apple will be
stuck with a warehouse full of white mice and keyboards.
- Nobody wants to use their old monitors with new computers, and
Apple doesn't offer an appropriately priced one to complement the
Mac mini.
- Mac mavens won't buy it because Apple doesn't make a matching
low-cost monitor. It's Apple or nothing.
- Current Mac owners have been conditioned by Steve Jobs to ask,
"Where's the built-in monitor?" and won't buy it.
- iPod owners won't buy it once they discover that the Mac mini
lacks a click-wheel.
- Windows users will never get used to the menu being at the top
of the screen instead of at the top of each window.
- Nobody will buy a 1.25 GHz computer. It doesn't have enough
Hertz, MIPS, or whatever number explains how much faster a low-end
2.8 GHz Pentium 4 is than a low-end 1.25 GHz G4.
- Following another Austin Powers trip through time to trademark
"mini" before the mini skirt is invented, Mike Meyers sues Apple
out of business over the iPod mini and Mac mini.
- Ditto for BMW, who also sues over product name confusion.
- PC geeks will never recommend the Mac mini because it doesn't
have enough drive bays, can't be overclocked and liquid cooled, and
is stuck with the built-in video.
- PC gamers will never recommend the Mac mini because the video
doesn't reach a high enough frame rate. (These are the people who
spend more on a video card than the price of the whole Mac
mini.)
- IT guys will never recommend the Mac mini because they only do
Windows.
- Parents will never buy the Mac mini because their children have
to use the same computer daddy uses at work - er, that their school
uses.
- Flower Power iMac owners
won't buy the Mac mini because it isn't pretty enough.
- Minorities and the politically correct crowd will refuse to buy
one until Apple offers the Mac mini in black, yellow, red, and
brown. These people have also been avoiding the snow iMacs, ice
iBooks, white iPods, and other white Apple products for years.
- Windows users will turn their backs on Mac OS X because there
just isn't as much of that free software that installs spyware on
their computers. And there aren't enough viruses, either. Or email
worms. Or spambots.
- Windows geeks will also complain that there aren't enough Mac
warez sites.
- Conditioned by years of pundits and flacks claiming that Macs
are too expensive, buyers won't believe that the Mac mini sells for
less than a Dell Dimension 3000 - even if they go to both websites
and do the configuration themselves.
- And last, but far from least, the stupid little thing still
doesn't have a floppy drive!
Well, that about sums it up. In short, Apple is going to lose
its shirt on this one and either go out of business completely or
just drop the Mac and become The iPod Company.
Read this article in Italian on Macity: Mac mini,
sarà il più grande flop della storia di Apple (e la
farà chiudere)
