Apple
Wants Your Living Room
Apple
traditionally saves its best product announcements for January and
July when it holds its West and East cost MacWorld shows.
(Well, last year they didn’t sponsor the east coast show,
so maybe all the good announcements are happening at MacWorld in San
Francisco, just past.)
I’m
not sure I adore the $99 i-pod (I don’t understand the notion of
it playing songs in random order – but maybe the audience it’s
intended for likes that.
The
Mac Mini, however, is another story altogether. I find both its elegant design and its daring (for Apple)
price point a great combination.
This is Steve Jobs, marketing genius, at his best.
The Mac Mini seems headed for two audiences. For i-pod lovers, it’s an easy way to move from being a
Windows user to the Mac market.
It’s inexpensive and designed to work with existing Windows
peripherals.
Of
course, by the time I configured it, it didn’t cost $499 any more.
I wanted to boost the memory to 516MB or 1GB and up its hard
drive and then I wanted the Bluetooth option to support a wireless
keyboard and mouse, a decent (new) keyboard and mouse, and a USB hub
for more connections. And,
of course, I’d need some Mac software beyond the basics that come
with the base package. I’d
guess my real price would be more like $900 to $1,000.
But
I’d have that elegant, very small footprint – and I know where
it’s going, because I’m the other target audience – someone
who’d like a computer in my den or kitchen or living room, but not
some bulky PC. I can hide this one amid the stereo equipment in its armoire.
There’s
really a third audience – technical audiences who’d like to have
a Mac but can’t afford the price, given that they’ll still need
to keep a Windows machine. Think
developers, graphics artists, and the like.
Watch
Apple’s fortunes improve and its market share grow. It’s not going to shove Windows out of the market but it
will carve out a few more percentage points, at the very least.
The
easy place to see it all is Apple’s front page at www.apple.com
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