The Mac Mini platform

So it took me some time to fig­ure out what the Mac mini is about. Not so much what it is but what it’s impact in the long run may be and why and how it matters.

Size mat­ters

My first thought, when I read the specs, was about the size of the device. My Shut­tle com­puter, is 6 inches high by 8 inches wide and 12 inches long (yes, I had to pull out the ruler on that one). By com­par­i­son, the Mac mini comes in at 6.5 inches square and 2 inches high. Some­thing tells me that there is more to the dimen­sions that pure aes­thetic design. For comparison’s sake, I decided to take a quick look at my enter­tain­ment cen­ter: 2 inches hap­pens to be about the height of my VCR (yes, I still have one) and my DVD player is taller than that.

I then decided to look around the web. Tivo 2 boxes come in at over 3 inches in height; The small­est Win­dows Media Cen­ter edi­tion machine (from Hush Tech­nol­ogy) comes in at 3.9 inches in height. In fact, I could find very few items that would come in at the same size. Some­how, I don’t think it’s a total coin­ci­dence or has much to do with design.

It seems to me that the play here is for the liv­ing room and not just the liv­ing room but right there under the TV. I would not be sur­prised if a future ver­sion comes in slightly larger but with things like a TV tuner built in or what not.

But the enter­tain­ment cen­ter is just the first place where a Mac mini would fit. It seems per­fect for a car too. Apple has been court­ing a lot of car com­pa­nies about inte­gra­tion with the iPod. What if the play is larger than that? Some­how I don’t think BMW, Mini Cooper, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, Nis­san, Alfa Romeo and Fer­rari are only inter­ested in the iPod. What if Apple has showed them some­thing more? Some­thing like a Mac mini as in-car enter­tain­ment cen­ter. The power input seems to be exter­nal to the mini itself, some­thing that not only save space but is also unnec­es­sary if you already have a power con­verter (as cars do).

Since Apple is cur­rently play­ing the con­sumer card (hence the iPod strat­egy), why not take it all the way. The size seems to point to more than just the desk (so we can already assume the enter­tain­ment cen­ter). The car part­ner­ships have one thing in com­mon: gen­er­ally higher end (lux­ury) cars. These are the types of cars that usu­ally sport in-car enter­tain­ment cen­ters (DVD player, tele­vi­sion, GPS nav­i­ga­tion, inte­gra­tion with cell-phone, etc…) so it seems that it’s a solid high end con­sumer market.

Price point

Which makes the price point all the more inter­est­ing. It’s a small com­puter so you’d expect to pay a pre­mium but no. Apple has decided that this is their new entry point price, sell­ing the machine at under $500. Why? Well, for starters, it makes it easy to go after the switcher mar­ket (they have mon­i­tors, key­boards, mouse, etc… already) so Apple plans to cap­ture peo­ple that have bought iPods (or lust after one) and get them to check out the Mac. Cool… and obvious.

Less obvi­ous, how­ever, is the price to retail­ers. If you think that the aver­age price on an in-car mul­ti­me­dia is around $500–800, then it starts to makes sense. About $400 for the machine, throw in another $150–200 for LCD screens and GPS nav­i­ga­tion and you’ve got a good car sys­tem. All it needs is an interface.

The Inter­face Conundrum

So the iPod is nice but its inter­face is very text-centric, a bad thing if you’re sit­ting across a room. How­ever, it’s sim­ple and Apple has learned a lot about how con­sumer use elec­tronic devices in the process. They are now learn­ing about the mobile phone mar­ket, observ­ing through their part­ner­ship with Motorola. With all this expe­ri­ence, they’re refin­ing. I remem­ber talk­ing to the WebTV man­age­ment team when they were get­ting started. One thing that always stuck with me was that they had all worked for Apple at one time and that they had all worked on set-top boxes. It means that, for almost a decade now, Apple has been play­ing around with the con­cept of enter­tain­ment centers.

The sim­plic­ity of the iPod inter­face was largely due to the fact that it was designed out­side of Apple. How­ever, the sim­plic­ity les­son may be one they learned. Look at the Shuf­fle and real­ize that they have seen how to “sim­plify” inter­faces to the point where they become ubiquitous.

Ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing or Apple as con­sumer elec­tronic giant

Ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing has long been a dream but Apple may be work­ing on it. Notice how they tend to look at the PC world: ugly boxes, bad design, etc… The only com­pany that seems to scare them a lit­tle is Sony. Why Sony?

Well, because Sony is a con­sumer elec­tronic giant and that’s where Apple wants to play. At the end of the day, Steve Jobs real­izes that the days of Apple as a com­puter com­pany are num­bered. How­ever, the com­pany can rein­vent itself as a con­sumer elec­tron­ics giant.

This is where the mini goes. It’s not really a com­puter but it may be the sec­ond front in the bat­tle for con­sumer elec­tronic supremacy.

I can already hear nay-sayers going “But Steve always says that there is no play for Video…”

If that’s truly the case, explain the work on Quick­time? Explain why the com­pany con­tin­ues to invest in prod­ucts like iLife and Final Cut (and its express version)?

The truth is that up until last week, Steve Jobs was on the record poo-pooing the flash MP3 player mar­ket (that is, until he intro­duced an Apple branded one.)

At the end of the day, what he’s build­ing with the mini is a plat­form, not just offer­ing a new product.

Apple vs. Microsoft

When talk­ing about Apple, the ele­phant in the room is always Microsoft. This is where it gets inter­est­ing. Apple and Microsoft are going after the same mar­ket but look­ing at it from dif­fer­ent stand­point. In a way, Apple is the rev­o­lu­tion­ary storm­ing the cas­tle, offer­ing a view of the world that is shaped around cre­at­ing and shar­ing dig­i­tal con­tent (hence the iLife prod­ucts and their higher end coun­ter­parts). Microsoft is about receiv­ing con­tent that has been cre­ated by oth­ers (hence the Win­dows envi­ron­ment, where the focus is on being able to record tele­vi­sion, buy music, etc…) That’s the com­monly expressed view, anyway.

How­ever, upon closer inspec­tion, Apple is try­ing to lock more down. Their strat­egy is an end-to-end one: we have the soft­ware, the music store, and the devices to play the music on. Microsoft is more egal­i­tar­ian in its approach: we build the envi­ron­ment, what peo­ple do with it is up to them and we hope some good soft­ware will help us sell more.

Both com­pa­nies offer DRM but with a dif­fer­ence. Apple keeps its DRM to itself. Microsoft sees their DRM offer­ings as respect­ing bound­aries. I’m not sure I fully buy into the Microsoft argu­ment or the Apple one but I know that I will be writ­ing more on all this soon.