Not quite ripe

Apple surpised nobody with their new Mac Mini (or mini Mac, if you will).

As you know, I'm a long-term Mac moonie, but I can hear the complaints about it already.

So it's got a UK base price of £339 inc VAT, but with that you only get 256MB RAM, which is not enough, I'm afraid, to run OS X in a realistic way. So replace that with a minimum of 512MB RAM: another £150 (Kingston, natch). And Apple have done that thing where they hit the price point by shaving off features - in this case, the keyboard and mouse. So assuming you don't already have a USB keyboard and mouse, and you want to buy nice Apple ones: £70. And, for the sake of argument, you need a display, Mitsubishi and Sony have stopped making CRT displays, so the future is clearly in flat screen. Anyway, it would spoil it to add some shitty CRT. Let's say you're going to add a half-decent 17-inch TFT display (you'd go blind if not): £200.

With that basic set-up, you're looking to spend around £760 - and that's before you consider Bluetooth and Airport, your printer, digital camera etc.

Or you could get an eMac, with 512MB extra RAM, for around £660 - and the keyboard, mouse, and display are included. And an entry-level iMac proper (without the RAM) for £899.

These headline cheap prices don't cut it with me. Let's not forget, too, that the hugely disappointing thing about the neat and beautiful Apple Cube was that you had to put up with a huge lump of an external power supply: that's how they were able to leave out the cooling fans. Ditto the Mac Mini: external power supply, not attractive.