Quote: Originally Posted by zzachattack2
I doubt it, the only reason people buy macs is because of OSX; do away with that and nobody is going to buy a windows machine that is twice as expensive just because it looks neat.
This myth won't die. For in car computing, the Mini is very competitive with similar form factor options. I own two car PC's, a Mini and an Epia M10000. By the time I outfitted it with 512mb of memory, a 2.5" laptop hard drive, a CD-ROM/DVD drive, a wireless card, and Windows XP, the price was identical. If I had purchased a case for the Epia, it would have been more than the Mini and the Mini sports bluetooth while the Epia doesn't.
In comparison, the Epia is about as fast as the service line at the department of motor vehicles, stutters on DVD playback, refuses to recognize a USB CD-Rom drive for 3-4 minutes, has issues if you unplug/replug certain USB devices and it's always fun to see if it can hibernate itself before the 45 second cutoff from the power supply. It's even more fun to try and watch it boot up when it doesn't make it.
Don't get me wrong, once you know all the landmines, it works okay but it's not an 'ideal' machine.
In contrast the Mini is the antithesis. For an identical price, I got a rock solid machine that is MUCH snappier, wakes from sleep in under 5 seconds, has silky smooth DVD playback, and in general, works like advertised. It came out of the box that way, without assembly. It's been in the car coming up on a year now and works great.
Now, the software. Well, the PC's got some of it and the rest of it is on the Mini. There's no front end and no GPS. Nobody in their right mind should buy a Mini unless they are interested in expermenting. Front Row is cool, but it's not a front end.
But a Mini that runs both Windows and OSX, has both line inputs/outputs and four USB ports on the back -now that's an interesting device! You can run Unix, OSX, or Windows. You've got everything in one box and if software compatibility was high on your list, you can essentially run nearly any program on any operating system (okay, it runs BSD Unix, not Linux but you can fix that TOO, if you want).
Long way around to say that although Apples are not everyone's cup of tea, the Mini is very competitively priced for car PC'ers and offers a lot of value.