Because it’s unnecessary given that 100% of Mac owners also own .... wait for it ..... a phone!
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iBook Turns 20: Watch Steve Jobs Unveil the World's First Notebook With Wireless Internet
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Because it’s unnecessary given that 100% of Mac owners also own .... wait for it ..... a phone!
Indeed, why? For that reason I for the first time just bought an ipad without cellular, after years of buying them with cellular. Connection sharing is so smooth now with iphone that there is little point to spending the extra dough on the cellular connection.
The mini should’t exist at its existing price. It’s the best apple desktop for most users. Unfortunately it has soldered storage.
We don’t do the same things, and software is exponentially more complex than it was 20 years ago. A website that might have been 100 lines of code to display simple text and images is well over 100,000 lines now and displays animations and video. Games are so complex it takes hundreds of people multiple years to develop them.
But if by “same things” you mean check email, play video games, and surf the web, then yeah we do the “same things”
The main problem I have with the Mac Mini is the lack of a proper GPU. I want a consumer level mac that has a good GPU without having to buy an expensive iMac. Make it taller and put the iMac's RX 580 in there.
A 6-core i5 is great, but it's only really useful for someone who needs alot of CPU power and CPU alone. If you don't need the CPU power, you're better off just buying a MacBook and docking it especially if you're considering the $1099 Mac Mini.
The 3.2GB hard drive back then goes to show how much cheaper storage has gotten in 20 years. Now a 4k movie file would be larger than that entire hard drive.
Which is why Apple included it in a second and presumably third generation of iPhones, and brought it to the iPad Pro, right?
Some would find it useful but I doubt we see any move to incorporating a modem until 5G becomes widespread.
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Going by Steve’s boxes at the time, it shouldn’t exist at all, though. At ANY price. And, the best computing device for most users is more than likely some iOS device
most users really don’t need the power of a mini. And, as far as desktops go, I don’t think I would recommend a mini for most users, but that’s mainly because most users just want to walk out of the store with a thing that works. Which keyboard? Which monitor? Which mouse? Those are ALL good questions, but most people just want the answer one question “Can this do my Facebook?” Out of the box, the mini can’t do their Facebook And, again, for that matter, so can any iOS device.
Except of course, you have no idea what the access point is doing with your data between the receipt and transmission; or even if you are actually connected to the hotspot or someone who is intercepting data and passing it on to the hotspot so it appears you are connected.
Paranooid? Perhaps but that doesn't mean they aren't out to get you either.
Like your response, should of pointed out to that person
LTE is not in every country but WiFi is.
Well.. that was part of the strategy
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Tim doesn’t have that reality distortion field
Oh, how I loved my indigo clamshell. It was my first laptop, and it will always be at the top of my list of my top five favorite Apple products—and certainly my fave of their laptops. Yes, it was heavy and all that, but it was smooth, a lovely color, and it just made me smile every time I used it.
Are these the same consumers that willingly give over their personal details to whatever website requests it, then wants to know how they got hacked? The reason why Android and iOS have taken off is because they take training wheels to the extreme. Some folks became computer savvy, some folks were “just savvy enough” to get by, but once something simpler came along, they jumped at the chance.
This was the main purpose of the mini. It was never “We’re taking off the training wheels and letting you make ALL the decisions”. It was more like “You’ve made decisions in the past and you like your keyboard, monitor, mouse... if you’re in the mood for a switch, you can plug all your old stuff into this new thing!” Once enough people were aware of what macOS is and what it does (plus all the stores that popped up), the mini wasn’t required as a “thing to replace your old thing” anymore. Because what most folks really want is just a thing-that-works.
I don’t think the mini is targeted at consumers anymore as consumers are going to mobile devices 80% of the time (MacBooks or MacBook Pro’s)... or to iOS. So, it’s no longer meant to be a cheap way into macOS.
Sure the name was discontinued in 2006, but the entry level laptop line stuck around. iBook certainly proved to be an important product for Apple, far from irrelevant.
I think the chart just shows that, at the time it didn’t have a place. It was created for a specific purpose, to lower the “switcher” barrier to entry. However, since now people know about macOS, it’s just part of a decision you make when buying a new computer. And, since most folks are buying mobile systems, that takes the mini out of the running right out of the gate.
Understanding this is the key to understanding where macOS is headed. It’s my assessment that at some point in the future, there won’t be consumer macOS devices because the only folks interested in them will be the ones that make money using them (and a few well heeled enthusiasts, I’d guess). Sales will drop to the low millions, but they’ll still be making a profit on them, so they’ll keep them around... maybe switching to a 100% BTO model so there’s low inventory?
The pond is definitely going to shrink and there are those that will be uncomfortable watching that happen (as the base system price continues to increase).
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Wholeheartedly agree, this was a simpler time when the portable market assumed you were giving up a significant amount of power. I remember the first time I had a friend put an Intel MacBook and a Dual G5 in a Handbrake compression race and the MacBook finished WELL ahead of the Dual G5. Once that level of power (and greater) was available in a mobile system, it just makes sense that having that with you all the time would be better than leaving it at home.
I was just taking a stab at replicating it using today’s systems and it ended up not being quite as hard to do as I’d assumed.
I remember the RAM could be dislodged from the clamshell ones in the rude ways of the shipping process... my tangerine ibook arrived playing dead, but the RAM was readily reseated. After that the thing worked like a charm and got handed off twice in my family. I got a key lime one when I agreed to hand down my tangerine original.
Can't remember why I let the key lime clamshell ibook out of my sight. It had to have landed with someone in the family who ended up short a functional machine... so I let them have it and went back to Apple's well yet again for myself. That's what happens when you try to keep a spare around... I have always ended up back in the market for another Apple notebook before I thought I would, and not because the machines were no good.
By that logic, why is LTE needed on iPhones or iPads? There's plenty of free wifi out there.
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I don’t think the mini really fits the idea of what we’ve come to accept as “portable”. I think it COULD be said to still be an entry Mac, but at the price, some of the other systems may be a better value. iMac Pro should be right on that line, though. Maybe I’ll look for the chart where Steve introduced the mini (were they still using a version of the chart by those days)?
Don't you maybe 1) maybe want to conserve the battery on your iOS device or 2) use it for something else? If there's LTE on an skinny iPad, what possible justification could there be for not having it on a Mac?