20 Reasons the Mac mini will Fail and Doom Apple

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)

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