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Thoughts on the Keynote
by - January 12th, 2004
"It's absurd, right on the face of it. Not once in its 70-year history has Apple ever been a 'Cram the retail channel full of cheap merchandise and score a win by sheer force of numbers' sort of company. They're the 'Make the highest-quality products imaginable and offset high profit margins with insanely high consumer demand' company. And while Mac users have been whining about cheap Macs ever since they evolved their way above the Gills and Fins rung of the techno-geek evolutionary ladder, has the Mac community ever shown any real enthusiasm for stripped-down hardware?"
So folks, that was the column I was going to write last week in advance of Steve's keynote. It was formulating in my mind for days. I would have tarted it up o'course, but that's the jist of it.
Gosh, now wouldn't that have worked out well. In my defense I was indeed quite insane with fever all last week. When it's Day Four of the flu and you pull the thermometer out of your mouth and you discover you have a temperature of 102.4 and that's good news because it means your fever is down nearly two whole degrees...well, you know you've had a real way-hey-hey of an evening.
Still, you know, I stand behind the column that I never wrote. I think it's nonsense to imagine that Apple will actually introduce a $499 cutthroat-cheap no-frills headless Mac yesterday. Despite -- I will manfully admit -- dramatic evidence to the contrary. It's part of the game we all play before every Steve Jobs keynote. The rumors swirl and some of them manage to congeal enough that they make it into serious play, until it almost seems impossible to imagine a future in which Apple has not introduced a new Bluetooth waffle iron that imprints each morning's pastry with up-to-date stock quotes and weather forecasts. But most rumors are fairly easy to smoke out because Apple does nothing at random and nothing simply because It's A Cool Idea.
Take the long-rumored Flash iPod. That was an easy one and last week I woulda greenlit that rumor as fact even if my only source for the info had been one of the many purple elves I spotted floating above my sickbed. "But Apple wouldn't taint the iPod brand with a filthy memory-based player, for heaven's sake!" my straw-man opponent would sniff. "Plus, it'd cannibalize sales for the 'real' iPods!"
Well, maybe. But the fact remains that if you want an iPod, the minimum buy-in is $250, which is not a trivial chunk of change for someone who just wants to listen to his Troggs albums while he works out on the Stairmaster. Plus, you gotta look at the iPod Shuffle as a portable wrapper for iTunes Music Store content. Up 'til now, the Store has enjoyed an almost reality-TV style exemption from elimination. Yup, it's hands-down the best digital music store out there, featuring both the largest inventory and the greatest online storefront system, but where was the real competition?
That all changes this year, with new digital music retailers selling selling tracks protected by Windows Media wrappers. The digital marketplace has been beaten into submission by the Beast, who inflicts his cloven-hooved fury upon the land not by laying waste to continents but by steadily lowering Humanity's standards and convincing us to keep settling for less. "Buy Windows Media content from our store," the Beast (wearing a blue Best Buy polo shirt) muses, "and you can play it on any music player from any number of different manufacturers. Buy it from iTunes Music Store, and you'll need a $399 iPod to do anything with it at all!"
(Yes, he's lying. He is the devil, after all. He gets terrific longterm results from the aforementioned Subtle Mediocrity plan, but still likes to screw with people, you know, just to keep his skills sharp.)
So even if the iPod Shuffle were a cheap-ass piece of crap instead of a clever and unexpectedly exciting player, it'd still be an important product for Apple. If there hadn't been an "Apple will announce a flash-based iPod that will sell for under a hundred bucks" rumor a few weeks ago, I would have felt obligated to go ahead and start one.
But "a stripped-down headless Mac for $499"? It just didn't smell right to me. Sure, Apple's been fighting the "Macs are nice, but they're not affordable" tag since the days of the Reagan Administration, but y'know, they've been doing all right for themselves, limiting their product line to midrange-and-higher machines. When you take your nighttime cold medication (which is sold as generic-brand whiskey under a different label) and think about this rumor, you find yourself asking "From Apple's perspective, what problem does such a machine solve?" and you come up blank. Then you imagine the sorry lot of an Apple Store employee who takes a customer to an underlit table ringed with exotic hardwood and says "For $499, you can have this iPod...or, um, this entire functioning Macintosh." Then you imagine that the employee has grown adorable plaid bat-wings and has started singing the bouncy song from this really old Warner Brothers cartoon, what was the name, all you know is that it was sung by these two characters and one was singing about how he hasn't got a hat and the other one sings "bom-bom-bom-bommm..."
(No, seriously, everyone: as of Saturday morning, I was going to cancel my trip to San Francisco. Fortunately, my head started to clear by the afternoon, and I was feeling nearly human again on Sunday.)
Two things -- again, apart from the raging fever that wracked my body and threatened to snuff my very life -- prevented me from writing a column dismissing the rumor of the cheap-o Mac. First, Apple sued ThinkSecret and other sites that reported on the rumor. It's one thing for Apple to hit the macro key on its keyboard that dumps the phrase "Apple does not comment on unreleased product" into an official statement, quite another for the company to get lawyers involved. It means that somebody has just said something that might screw with Apple's stock price, and when Apple takes that step, notice must be paid.
And just as importantly...Apple still has the limitless ability to surprise people. One of their greatest strengths as a company -- at least during the eras in which they've been led by Steve Jobs -- is that no other entity understands the company's purpose more than Apple itself. So yeah, Andy: you might not understand why a cheap-ass Mac makes sense, but rest assured that Apple does.
Sure enough, now that we can see the actual product, it makes perfect sense. The giveaway is the machine's style. When old-timers (read: old enough to think that when a movie theater runs commercials before the feature, the audience has the right to dunk paper napkins in ketchup and throw them at the screen) think "headless computer" they imagine a fairly stripped-down, practical, and wholly unexciting design. The Mac Mini is the epitome of Apple's modern design language: flash through simplicity. The Mini is, in fact, larger in person than it is in your mind's eye. I had a couple of hours between the end of the keynote and my one-on-one briefing, and I wanted to (but didn't) slip out to a McDonalds' on Market Street to buy a Quarter Pounder. I was sure that if I placed the box next to the Mini, the two would be about the same size.
Here's the brilliance of the Mini: it's the iPod, produced as a computer. Not in features, or appearance. I'm talking about marketing. The iPod was innovative in every possible way that nitpicky geeks with websites value innovation, as well as all of the ways that the geeks don't but should. Apple has to be lauded for the way they sell those devices. It wasn't the first digital music player with a hard drive, but the biggest contributor to its success was the fact that it was the first one sold as a piece of consumer-electronics instead of a computer accessory. Take it out of the box, plug in headphones, and go. No worries.
The Mac Mini is probably the first grand experiment in marketing a desktop computer as something that could (conceptually, at least) be blister-packed next to the cellphone headsets and off-brand CD players over at Wal-Mart. The thing is even packed like an iPod: open the lid of its lunchbox-style container and you see a styrofoam well containing a slim wallet of CDs, followed by a slick rounded box representing The Thing Itself, followed by a final well filled with coiled cables. Think back to the last time you bought a notebook, which is the most straightforward of all computers. Was it presented to you in anything close to such an offhanded format?
The Mini's a $499 piece of hardware, but still, I'm inclined to wonder if it'll be the first true Impulse Buy computer. I can easily imagine someone wandering into a mall Apple Store and thinking You know, we've been thinking of buying a second computer for the house... The Mini's packaging and presentation seems to shrug and say "Sure, why the hell not?"
It's mondo cool and I want one. And I'm amazed that I live in a world in which Apple is selling a $499 Macintosh. It's true what everyone always said: once the Red Sox win the World Series again it'll pull open the curtain on the biblical End of Days and in the intervening days before the Apocalypse, all things will become possible.
Still, let's look at this dispassionately. In the cold light of day, a Mac Mini isn't that much more attractive than an eMac. $499 for a Mini plus $100 for a keyboard and mouse plus $150 for a VGA monitor (one of the Mini's few includeds is a stubby VGA plug adapter) puts you in the same price/performance range as Apple's next-cheapest Mac.
I suppose we'll just have to wait and see how things shake out. It's for certain that in deciding to sell a Mac with absolutely no accessories, Apple is quite aware that most tech-savvy households have extra gear languishing in closets somewhere. Particularly with the popularity of LCD screens. The flat-panel lands on the desktop and the CRT winds up in the basement. If you threw yours away, just visit any community back home in Massachusetts on the night after trash day. Most of them have classified tubes as hazardous waste and the trash guys won't pick 'em up. So you can just drive around until you find exactly the size, make, and model you want, and then just haul it into your car from off of somebody's lawn.
Still and all, what makes the Mini different from the eMac isn't the form factor or the features. It's the fact that they'll be sold the way Apple sells iPods, not the way that they sell computers. There's a reason why Apple didn't call this the iMac Mini. The motivation is plain to anyone who attended Tuesday's keynote and learned that Apple sold 8.2 million iPods in 2004.
digs the Mac, and has been writing about the Mac for longer than most of us could tell the difference between a bite of Apple Sauce from a byte of Apple code. You can read his monthly column at Macworld magazine, and his blog at the Colossal Waste of Bandwidth.
Andy's latest book is The Mac OS X Tiger Book (US$16.49 - Amazon).
You can send your comments directly to Andy, or you can also post your comments below.
Most Recent Columns From Andy Ihnatko
- You Can't Spell 'Speculate' without 'Peas' - February 22nd
- So: It's A Video iPod. Sweet! - October 13th
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Andy Ihnatko's Archives
Observer Comments
Wed Jan 12, 2005 2:51 pm Subject: TRULY Headless Mac
I've been thinking about this thing since yesterday, and I can see many many reasons why I would want one right now.
I currently have a Cube (the absolute perfect Mac, I must say), and a PowerBook. Both work great and I really don't need another computer, but damn, I'm still thinking about this. But as a truly headless media center/set top box--no monitor, no keyboard or mouse.
How do I control it? Apple Remote Desktop, of course! It's the perfect adjunct to my stereo/TV. Have the thing run EyeTV to capture shows and play them back through the S-Video out. Use it as a dvd player too. Run iTunes through my stereo--15 gigs of music at my fingertips w/o an iPod.
Since my cable internet comes into the house right by my TV, the Mini replaces my graphite Airport Base Station.
All of that and more in a tiny little box hiding in my TV cabinet. And I use my Cube or PB as the keyboard and monitor with Apple Remote Desktop.
Hmm. I think I'll place my order today!
R
I want one, too - or maybe even a pair of 'em!
(Or should that be 'iWant' one?)
Heck, it's more than double the power of my little old iMac SE 700 in every respect, and at less than half what I paid for it...
You could pick up a low-end LCD PC monitor for roughly $100-$120 (or a cheap used CRT display, if you wanted) and a MacAlly keyboard and mouse for $30.00-$40.00 (even a Windows USB keyboard will work). I would upgrade the memory to 512 MB, which runs $75 and voilà...
You have a nicely-featured Mac for under or about $750.00.
I think this is potentially a huge move for Apple. A lot of WinTel people who have bought iPods and have thought about going with a Mac as their next purchase, have been put off by the price. This will solve that problem - and they can keep all their peripherals, too.
Also, a lot of Mac users who would like a second computer have a cheap option now.
And then there are people like me - the bottom end of the Mac Universe - who would love to upgrade but just haven't been able to afford it. Now they're finally getting down within my price-range!
So there are many markets - mostly untapped - to which this Mac Mini is well-suited. That's why I think they're finally set to grab up a little market share. Think about it - it's not a whole lot more expensive than what people are paying for top-end DVD players and sound systems and such. I think you could justify using this thing as the hub of a digital entertainment set-up - hooked to your TV and surround-sound system - it plays CDs, DVDs, stores your music, and makes a great docking station for your iPod, digital camera, digital camcorder - you can use it to sync up your PDA, and now Motorola's coming out with iTunes-aware cell phones and plan to add more features over the next year.
I think this is where they're going with it. Just wait - soon there will be all sorts of peripherals available that will integrate your whole 'digital lifestyle' (whatever the hell that is - pardon the marketing-speak) together around this little pod-like computer.
I think Jobs & company are being careful, and cautious - but I think they have a great Master Plan to leapfrog everybody else out there. We're just seeing one piece of the puzzle coming out at a time, and by the time the whole picture is revealed, Microsoft et. al. will be scrambling harder than ever to play catch-up.
Of course, that's just my opinion - I could be wrong.
(Apologies to Dennis Miller.)
7
Hi, Guest above, you are hard to please. Since you have Mac OS X, I consider you are a Mac OS X. There are many guys with earlier G3 machines installed with Mac OS 8/9 that have not migrated to Mac OS X. That number is estimated to be around 6-10 million. With $499, there is no excuse. 
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