short answer: yes... but they would be ugly

and have worse components than the Mac mini

TRO

Look to the original iMac for a history lesson.

I think PC vendors will copy the look and size of the Mac mini...and they will fail. The original iMac was copied, both blatantly (think eMachines and a Taiwanese manufacture, both of whom Apple sued) and in concept (as in the CRT-based all-in-ones from Gateway and others). And these were horrible failures in the market place.

The reason is simple: Style is both hard to grasp, and it does increase cost. As inexpensive as the mini is, Apple could have priced it even lower had they made it cheap (in terms of quality and appearance, as well as price). But that's not Apple's way.

Buyer's of Apple products have shown themselves willing to pay a premium for a stylish product while PC buyers have not in any significant volume (although niche products do exist). Part of this has to do with priorities; style is a higher priority to Apple buyers and Wintel buyers (if style mattered all that much, would they really use Windows XP?).

Part of it is due to alternatives. Apple could sell the eMac for $800, and there was, until now, no less expensive alternative that is still a Mac (set aside refurbs, education discounts, etc.; my point stands). Now, Apple sells a $500 mini, and there is no less expensive alternative Mac.

But Gateway could sell a stylish 'mini' PC for $500 (in theory, that is; Gateway probably doesn't really have a sense of style to do so). While $500 might be a small price, there'll still be an alternative, a $300 Dell or "white box" computer in an unattractive, large, plastic and sheet metal box. Gateway itself would also sell a cheaper computer in a similar box devoid of style.

But none of this will stop Wintel vendors from trying. We'll see multiple vendors release small, stylish, low-end computers at a slight premium--and they'll each pull them from the market within months. It'll be the PC world's Cube.

Now don't freak out on me. IF I were to buy a wintel machine right now, I would likely look at Shuttle (www.shuttle.com) They offer some very small, pretty powerful, KIND OF stylish small Wintel boxes. They sell them at Sam's Club too. Alas, none of their offerings are in the neighborhood of price or "cool-factor" of the Mini, but it's the closest thing I have seen on the wintel side of things.

Marketing, engineering, accounting and design (if they have a design department) all get together and start working on their own mini.

Engineering: OK, can we get by with one RAM stick?

Marketing: No way - PC users want to upgrade so we need at least 2 and 4 would be better.

Engineering: What about the HD? Use the cheapest or go with one from one of our laptops?

Accounting: The cheapest we can get - we gotta make money on this Dude.

Marketing: As long as we can get a cheap one with over a 100 gigs no one will care and we'll blow Apple out of the water.

Accounting: How much would 100 gigs cost?

Engineering: If we use the motherboard with integrated graphics and shared memory then we would be able to offset the cost of the HD.

Marketing: We need to keep it fairly small. How about using an external power brick lime the Mac mini?

Accounting: If we can get a lower price by leveraging our buying power on the notebooks I'll go along with that, but I want a smaller fan to cool the system so we can save money to off set the price of the HD. Can we get by with 81 gigs? That's still larger than the mini can have.

Engineering: I don't think you can find an 81 gig HD.

Accounting: What's the next size up from the 80 gig and how much does it cost.

Marketing: We're going to sell millions of these so the price would be the same as the 80 gig.

Engineering: What about the optical drive?

Marketing: SuperDrive would be super - we'd sell millions!

Accounting: A straight CD drive would be better - we'd make millions!

Engineering: OK, we gotta figure out some form factor so I can get my guys on it. Should we target the Mac mini size?

Accounting: Too expensive. We gotta have normal size parts to avoid cost overruns.

Marketing: As long as we cut the height of the tower in half we should be OK, but it really needs to be shorter than the mini towers on the market.

Engineering: If we use an external power brick we can probably save 2" on height. We'll save even more height if we only have one CD drive slot and get rid of the floppy drive.

Accounting: Good idea! How much does that save, cost wise?

Engineering: Then there is the serial port, saves $3.

Accounting: What about the parallel port - can we get rid of that too?

Engineering: Might be a hard sell.

Marketing: No problem! We'll just say that we're leading the industry in innovation!

Accounting: Do it.

Marketing: We gotta consider the case. How about brushed aluminum?

Accounting: Forget it. I personally like dark grey plastic.

Engineering: I can work with the Design Department on something.

Marketing: Do we have a design department?

Engineering: We got this guy working part time while going to design school. Well, actually he's taking a correspondence course he learned about from a match book . . .

Accounting: First check out the parts bin and see what's getting out of date. No use buying new stuff that costs too much.

CEO (walking in): Have you guys got this mini thingy worked out? We need to get in the market before Apple catches up on their backorders.

Engineering: Yes Sir!

Marketing: Yes Sir! We'll sell millions!

Accounting: Yes Sir! We'll make millions!

And why not, they're copiers not inovators!
Look what they did to the iPod!

ROFLMAO

wow. you hit the nail right on the head.

A Wintel builder could never build a machine to be a small as a mini. A Celeron or Pentium would be to big to fit along with the space needed for a huge fan or fans. A G4 is less hot then any of the wintel processors. It could also never be a quiet either. Also the power requirment of Wintel processors are higher too, make the use of a much bigger power block then the minis.

How about Sonoma?