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Mac mini add-ons: image mockups
- Thread starter dejo
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I lov3 this thread
The point is that 2 years ago people were freakin' out because an ipod cost 400 bucks and who would spend that much for a music player blah blah
Well I bought my 40g for 500. now there is a huge industry for ipod 3rd party addons, and people buy them. from 50 cases (i've seen some for 200) to 300 dollar bose add-ons. I hope 3rd party people are creative, and if the mini is succesful we should have a dirge of accesories that will benifit everyone, hopefully useful things for my powerbook like an affordably priced fw tv-tuner!
The point is that 2 years ago people were freakin' out because an ipod cost 400 bucks and who would spend that much for a music player blah blah
Well I bought my 40g for 500. now there is a huge industry for ipod 3rd party addons, and people buy them. from 50 cases (i've seen some for 200) to 300 dollar bose add-ons. I hope 3rd party people are creative, and if the mini is succesful we should have a dirge of accesories that will benifit everyone, hopefully useful things for my powerbook like an affordably priced fw tv-tuner!
Cool. I was considering mocking up a toaster/oven add-on as a lark. Yunno, for heating up that single slice of pizza. 
I think there would be a market for a hub (with the lack of usb/firewire) and hard disk. Many people will buy the mini with only a 40 gb disk, which is also pretty slow. As it is targeted to iPod users, many customers will have 20-40 GB capacity for tunes alone. Of course not everyone fills their iPod, but even so... And with a review on Maccentral stating, i think, that the software on the mini takes over 13 GB, there already isn' much room to play around with and space would run out fast, creating a quite healthy market for an apple branded hd component.
Apple has possibly made the design like a flat slab on purpose, to make it like a new size of stackable components that will replace a hi-fi stack in the living room. The mini already has a dvd player, Apple could quite easily make an iPod station, which has high quality audio circuits in and sinks with a iPod and works as a music player in its own right. connecting it to an mac mini will allow the user to be able to download songs from the itms onto it. Asteroid already looks like it is designed to stack with the mac mini, although the ports on the top would have to move, unless it was the top unit of a second stack, such as how them mini separate systems are often stacked in two stacks of two. I wouldn't be surprised if Airport is redesigned in the mac mini style, so that if you have multiple computers it could be stacked under the mac mini closest to the broadband ethernet jack or just match it's style anyway. The current airport looks kinda dated now most new white apple products include aluminium as well except the iPod, and the current design has been around a while.
To me it makes marketing sense to make add-ons that match the mini. Users are more likely to buy the apple styled add ons than third party if they don't cost too much more, the mini is a low margin product so selling accessories is a way to maximise profits (as they have learnt with the iPod and its ecosystem) and it could even push users of other macs to buy a mini if they already have a mini styled airport, breakout box (asteriod) for garageband and a hub for their existing mac..well because its only $500 and it would fit in with the rest of the stuff and it would always come in useful for something.
Apple has possibly made the design like a flat slab on purpose, to make it like a new size of stackable components that will replace a hi-fi stack in the living room. The mini already has a dvd player, Apple could quite easily make an iPod station, which has high quality audio circuits in and sinks with a iPod and works as a music player in its own right. connecting it to an mac mini will allow the user to be able to download songs from the itms onto it. Asteroid already looks like it is designed to stack with the mac mini, although the ports on the top would have to move, unless it was the top unit of a second stack, such as how them mini separate systems are often stacked in two stacks of two. I wouldn't be surprised if Airport is redesigned in the mac mini style, so that if you have multiple computers it could be stacked under the mac mini closest to the broadband ethernet jack or just match it's style anyway. The current airport looks kinda dated now most new white apple products include aluminium as well except the iPod, and the current design has been around a while.
To me it makes marketing sense to make add-ons that match the mini. Users are more likely to buy the apple styled add ons than third party if they don't cost too much more, the mini is a low margin product so selling accessories is a way to maximise profits (as they have learnt with the iPod and its ecosystem) and it could even push users of other macs to buy a mini if they already have a mini styled airport, breakout box (asteriod) for garageband and a hub for their existing mac..well because its only $500 and it would fit in with the rest of the stuff and it would always come in useful for something.
You're assuming that to function, the video needs to fully saturate the AGP bandwidth, which is not the case. Otherwise, how would PCI video cards have ever worked? Or Timbuktu screen mirroring over 10BaseT for that matter? Bandwidth requirements are resolution, colour depth and refresh rate dependant. You can put 800 x 600 pixel 24 bit colour through USB2.0.Yvan256 said:Even if they did, the Mac mini only has a FireWire 400 port.
And even if they tried, it wouldn't be possible: FireWire 800 = 800mbits/sec. That's 100MB/sec. The new GeForce 6800 video card has a memory bandwidth of 22.4 GB/sec.
Even if the Radeon 9200 is 100 times slower than the GeForce 6800, that's still 224MB/sec.
Edit: ok, I compared the GPU/VRAM bandwidth vs what should've been the AGP bus... But still, the original AGP 1x specification ran at 66 MHz and provided 266 MB/s of bandwidth, that's still more than twice the maximum of FireWire 800.
So, FireWire 800 might be great, but videocards are in a league of their own.
Thanks
Trevor
Problem with all the mock ups I've seen -- the output ports are displayed, but where are the interconnect ports to actually hook the peripheral to the Mini...?Cosmo_ said:i think i'll mail
![mediadock.jpg]()
to griffin
CanadaRAM said:
My interconnect ports are all on the back side and left to the imagination of the viewer...
(Okay, I was just to lazy to photoshop a back panel as well.)