ThinkSecret discusses the possibility of a cheap, headless Mac, similar in scope and target to the one we wishfully thought all the past year.
Think Secret Predicts Sub-$500 Headless Mac
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I can see a lot of Windows users who purchased the iPod considering this Mac. iTunes on the PC is OK but the Mac version is better. A majority of people I know that have iPods are PC users.
People are also realizing that you don’t need Windows and all its security and virus issues to have a computing system and that their is more to audio than WiMP.
The timing for this product, if true would be perfect.
Yeah, you’re perfectly right. The time has ripen for a low-cost headless Mac for switchers. IT news and basicly the whole internet is full of security problems of Windows and IE. Everyone’s looking for security patches, firewalls and stuff like that, even the everyday users and that means everyone’s looking for a solution for the problem. We got the NYT Firefox ad, more and more looking at *INXs, so this trying to find the better solution is just in the air. Revolution, I tell ya
and BAM, Apple throws in a cheap mac for the hungry crowd 
.
I also think that being able to link these boxes together to build a cluster EASILY would also be a great idea. They could just call it the iBuildingBlocks or something
. You need more power? Get another cheap box, link them togther and you got power you need.
would be a great iLife/web/wordproccess/email machine. Capable of more, but designed to chew through that.
Its just the ram that hurts me. Really hurts me inside. Why do they shoot themselves like that?
windows tear …
Sounds like you don’t have 2d acceleration. Check to see if you have the real video drivers loaded. I have seen the kind of thing you describe but as soon as the drivers were loaded everything is snappy.
the ones right from nVidia’s site.
here are the facts… Windows Starves the apps by trying to retain as much memory as possible….. bad idea if you want a smooth environment… windows also leaves it up to the applications to worry about refreshing the content o the application window. bad idea again.
if someone wanted a GUI that remained smooth under system load they would do what OS X does…. give the running apps all the memory that it can and manage the window content via the display system. that is why a 400 MHz Mac running panther is smooth while a 1 GHz PC running XP is choppy as hell.
MS is suppose to fix the window management issue.. but I doubt they will be smart enough to think that an unused resource is a wasted resource (memory).
With such a feature and a low-spec this would really tie the box to iPod users.
Xgrid my friends, xgrid….
G4’s are great little processors… I think the impetus is to proliferate OS X. For the price of an iPod, you get all that cool software. At that price point, I’d be willing to switch over, however, I’ve already got a dual G4 powermac and a G4 500 laptop, love the damn things. Most of why Mac’s in the past have been so expensive is because of the software. It’s almost like Apple software tax. The hardware is mostly the same commodity parts like IDE ATA hard drives, DDR ram, AGP video card, etc. The G4’s are becoming cheaper to mass produce and it’s a great little chip with Silicon On Insulator (SOI) technology that keeps the chips cool and stable. G5 has forced the G4’s to be competitively priced, and now we’ve got a little gift. I love the G4 processor, my dual powermac 1.25 Ghz is a great machine, solid as a rock, fun to play with. Of course I don’t really play games like Doom3, just starcraft.
Linux on G4’s is exceptional, there’s Yellow Dog Linux, Gentoo, Debian, Suse, etc. If I were going for a nice linux box on a non-kludgy architecture, this would be the one. It’s time to build a god damn cluster. I’d have done it with the powermac cube, but those things were overpriced and not really stackable.
Too bad the European price will be a lot more, not sure if this makes sense over there.
Good Morning.
Me thinks you’ll see a lot of surprises this year.
First, IBM sells off it’s X86 division.
Second, this rumor of a sub $500.00 Mac.
Third, another rumor.
New PowerPC to Run Multiple Operating Systems.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=795
Fourth, Peter Mehring, former founder of Umax Corporation, is the new head of hardware engineering at Apple.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=797
Put them all together, and it looks like IBM and Apple are about to become serious players in the PC world, or at least shake it up a bit.
I am willing to bet, (two bucks), that this sub $500.00 Mac, is a stripped down, fully upgradeable and expandable computer, that the PC faithful claim they have been waiting for, and bigger and better things are coming in the near future, from Apple and IBM.
but I want one
Damn, I already have a desktop PC and an iBook G4, I really have no use for one of these…. but I’m going to have to try hard to stop myself from buying one
I reckon my Windows using friend who has been in love with his iPod will definitely be looking at one of these. I also have a number of other windows using friends with ipods who would like to get their feet wet in the Mac world.
I reckon these are going to sell like crazy. For years people have been taunted by cool Mac hardware that was out of their price range. And now, they’ll finally be able to experience it for themselves.
A 1 ghz G4 would be ideal in a headless Mac. Of course, I’d love to see a G5 in one, but I figure Apple needs to differentiate the headless mac from the iMac. I’ve got a G3 700mhz iBook and it is not slow by any means other than when I used to try and edit video on it. In OS X, memory is what matters. If this headless Mac will support up to 1gb of memory, Apple has a winner. And they should still make the dvd burner an option.
I recently had to give up my G4 iBook and would love to have OS X back in my life without spending too much money. This would be perfect.
For the record, I consider myself a ‘power user’ and will be served quite well by a 1.25GHz G4.
We have waited for a headless, low-end Mac for the last 5 years.
The advent of USB and Firewire make this an ideal way to upgrade (replace the CPU every 2-3 years for <$500, save the rest of the package, including the monitor for long term).
Our new wish, external peripherals for everything running off FW800, USB, or Bluetooth. The headless Mac would be CPU, RAM, and multi-interface hub for all other external computer and AV components (including HD, Optical CD/DVD, Monitor, Input, etc.).
Apple has always been a good company to look at popular technology and figuring out a way to make it more usable (ex: MP3 devices already existed before the iPod but Apple made it easier to use).
Here’s an interesting idea that Apple could get on and easily make the rumored $500 box the must have device of 2005.
At MacWorld, Apple buys software developer El Gato and makes the $500 box into a Mac with PVR (TiVo) functionality. Low cost version would have a 30-60 GB HD but for those that want the full experience, you would be able to have a 300+ HD installed. S-video out or component out would be standard and there could be a DVI or HDMI version for HTPC enthusiasts.
Historically Apple has talked about making OS X into the hub of your home, this would be a great way to do it. Add in new functions for iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto and other iLife basics… Apple could make money by selling downloadable movies or basic subscriptions to the TV service. You could even have people share their home movies. It would be a major paradigm shift to the entire TV and movie industry… and Apple seems to love those major shifts.
You could also call me crazy.
Ronald you say it will hurt Apples i/emac range which would be true but do you think anyone in their right minds would go back to a Win-tel machine after seeing the sheer greatness of apple.
By hurting their i/emac range they loose out their, but gain a loyal fan base which will always come back to apple.
in other words bye bye 32-bit win-tel systems up yers micro$oft and billy-goat gates.
think about it. It makes sense.
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here are the facts… Windows Starves the apps by trying to retain as much memory as possible….. bad idea if you want a smooth environment… windows also leaves it up to the applications to worry about refreshing the content o the application window. bad idea again.
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9x had this problem but even with tweaks it is fixed. XP in fact maximizes use of memory available. I dont’ really grok what you mean by “Refresing content of app window”.
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that is why a 400 MHz Mac running panther is smooth while a 1 GHz PC running XP is choppy as hell.
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Wow, I have to call you on this one….though Panther will run on G3s, it is not a fun task, the beaach ball appears often. Additionally OSX takes up more memory than XP, I”m not certain how upgradeable G3s are in terma of memory. Though OSX may run through the video card, computations must still be exacted and a G3 is not powerful enough.
Adittionally, I run XP on P3s and P4s, and with drivers from ATI/.Nivdia, its perfect.
My old car was a 2cv (love ’em or hate ’em!) same ethic ….small engine,no thrills, just enough bits to keep it legal… tremendous fun (in the summer with the roof open!) … but wheres the modern car (or computer) that gets you from A to B in style with out all the added extras
Wow, I have to call you on this one….though Panther will run on G3s, it is not a fun task, the beaach ball appears often. Additionally OSX takes up more memory than XP, I”m not certain how upgradeable G3s are in terma of memory. Though OSX may run through the video card, computations must still be exacted and a G3 is not powerful enough.
I have a G3 350 with 256mb of RAM and 20gb HDD. It runs MacOS X 10.3.7 perfectly fine.
It’s not slow at all…
Where do you come up with this stuff???
9x had this problem but even with tweaks it is fixed. XP in fact maximizes use of memory available. I dont’ really grok what you mean by “Refresing content of app window”.
NT/2K/XP has it as well, happens very frequently that the VM takes memory away from apps and uses it for the cache or whatnot instead, even when there’s plenty of available RAM and such a swapout is not actually necessary. This is one of the reasons you often get stutters and such in win apps as the app has to reload itself from swap. As for refreshing content of the app window, this means that any time the user does something such as move a window over another, the app is manually forced to do the appropriate redraw for the area in question. On OSX this is double buffered by the API, and thus such an operation needs nothing more than a bit blit from the appropriate back buffer. This is the reason OSX uses as much RAM as it does, because *everything* is double buffered in this manner, which results in smoother drawing in general.
NT/2K/XP has it as well, happens very frequently that the VM takes memory away from apps and uses it for the cache or whatnot instead, even when there’s plenty of available RAM and such a swapout is not actually necessary.
Depends on how your swap file is set and how the OS is configured to utilize RAM. Just because windows pages part of an app that dosen’t mean its paged it to disk. As a developer its actually quite hard to determine what windows pages to disk or keeps paged in RAM. Of course you usually don’t have to worry about it.
This is one of the reasons you often get stutters and such in win apps as the app has to reload itself from swap.
Yes but windows dosen’t always swap to the HD, VM may be in RAM or on the swap file. You can also turn off the disk VM feature if you have enough RAM.
On OSX this is double buffered by the API, and thus such an operation needs nothing more than a bit blit from the appropriate back buffer. This is the reason OSX uses as much RAM as it does, because *everything* is double buffered in this manner, which results in smoother drawing in general.
Actually as an application developer you can utilize the same technique with your applications in windows, but rarely anyone does and the OS does not handle it for you I agree.
smoother and slower on the mac unless you have the latest apple hardware and a shitload of RAM. My eMac is smooth at window moves/repaints but my 1Ghz. P3 throws the GUI in XP around a lot faster. The eMac only has 256 megs of RAM though and the P3 has a gig so that may explain most of it.
I really hope those <500$ beasts actually hit the streets. The idea of being forced to buy a screen tied to a low-end mac always rebuted me. I always wanted to try the new OS but G5 are a bit too much as a hobby machine (still got my 3ghz P4 for work).
I guess I won’t buy the box, not for me at least, being a new owner of an ibook G4 since last week 🙂 All I can say I am pretty satisfied with it. The only thing I’d really need more power for would be games but that’s not my priority. OS X (10.3.7) feels really fast and smooth in every aspect. And that’s on the entry level machine (12″ ibook, 1.25 ghz, increased ram to 768mb ram). It was a dream to “install”. Everything just worked like it had to. From the 802.11g connection to the wireless mouse. For some reason on my windows PC the I had to pair the mouse every time I rebooted… it works everytime on the mac, god knows why.
It takes some time to get used to a new OS (haven’t really worked with a mac since the sucky 7.x, 8.x days) but once you fiddle a bit with the default settings it’s very nice. The preference panel is nicely organized and simple and you don’t get bloody wizards everytime you wish to change a thing.
Things like Exposé, though simple, are just the kind of advances I like to see. Efficient, elegant. That’s a simple innovation at the OS level that really changes the way you work. I found freeware for most of my uses. NeoOffice instead of openoffice, cyberduck as ftp client, fire for icq/aim/yahoo. Firefox of course for browsing. VLC and Mplayer are here for my video needs. And the usual java tools (eclipse, mpowerplayer … ) they just run quite well. And on the commercial side this thing runs photoshop natively. What else would I need?
If the 500$ mac comes out I’d certainly recommend it to my friends and family.
As long as its got one AGP and PCI slot I’ll probably get one. Not that Macs have alot of games, but as a game-developer interested in cross-platform development they’re its necesarry for me to be able to test various graphics cards and keep up with new offerings.
Holding my breath though. Apple’s not big on expansion in their lower end line.
I hope a DVD burner comes standard. We all know, it will be the least upgradable machine in Apple’s history. This is what the cube should have been. They have never made a true LC mac.
Now is the time to do it Apple. Everyone wants one!