News Apple's Mac mini vs. a VIA Mini-ITX System

Extremetech do an indepth head to head of the Mini and a similarly spec'd, similar costed Mini-ITX box, and the results make for interesting reading:

Even though the Mac mini has arrived a couple years after other small-form-factor PCs like the Shuttle XPC line, there's a case for Apple as the great-granddaddy of the small-form-factor PC: The original Macintosh, in addition to its revolutionary use of mouse, was ground-breakingly compact.
The mini's price, starting at $499, make Macs suddenly seem a lot more affordable. But as Loyd Case pointed out in a recent commentary on the Mac mini, looks can be deceiving. The base Mac mini underperforms, because too many corners were cut. At a minimum the Mac mini needs another 256MB of system memory to keep the RAM-hungry Max OS X fed and happy. So the real entry-level price tag for this CPU is closer to $575.

But wait there's more: You'll still need a display, keyboard, and mouse to get this Mac mini fully operational. If you have those lying around, you're all set. But if not, add those to the total acquisition cost. So the real cost of a truly complete system is closer to $800 to get you all the needed components.


We at ExtremeTech decided to look at how much tiny PC can you build for about $800, and pit it against the cute new Mac. We had some choices of similar-size machines, though more will be forthcoming when Pico-BTX motherboards arrive in earnest later this year. Does a Mac mini make sense on your home network or for a less technical friend? Or would a similarly priced and sized Windows machine be a better bet? Let's find out.

More (Much more!) here

It's nice to see a showdown like this, as it actually pits two very similar machines against one another, rather than the normal Mini vs LBBPCTCWKMMAFHC* that we've seen all over the 'net just recently. And I'm not just saying that because the

Spoiler

Mini got the upper hand - I'd be saying the same thing if the ITX system

won.

* Latest Bargin Bin PC That Comes With Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor And Fugly Huge Case

 

Thanks for the spoiler there

But I'll go read the article anyway

 

agreed

 

what an unfair review.
he obviously hates macs and is a bigger fan of pc's.

dont get me wrong, im more of a pc nut than a mac one, but give it some credit.

his review is totally siding with some piece of crap processor simply because "its a PC"

judging by what they come with, and what you want, the mac mini has most of it..serial ports? not many people use those today, and that along with the PC card i agree are nice options.
but the PC does not have wireless as an option, unless you consider a PCMCIA wireless card, but the mac will come with it built in, not taking up any usb, firewire, or other slots otherwise.

another thing that really bothers me, is why does he say that the mac mini isnt even a complete system, when the PC is no different? also, not a gaming machine? id use the mac mini over that via thing any day, twice the memory, and better video card even... he also says it's not upgradeable, but, i didnt see him say anywhere that the PC is, correct me if im over-seeing anything, here. and if you think the PCBUS makes it upgradeable, then i will argue on the MAC's side that its USB ports make it upgradeable too, as most anything you can buy today is now USB2.0, oh yea, that's another thing, no USB2.0 on the PC? pfft...

In fact, he doesnt have much to say about this PC at all in his conclusion, instead he focuses on other XPC SFF systems, and "what's to come" but he's not reviewing whats coming in the future, so why isnt he mentioning more about the product hes reviewing /now/ ?

the mac mini has a DVD player even, something the PC does not, and he complains that the software bundle for the mini is poor, yet he says something about having to install 3rd party software for winxp capability as winxp doesnt come with dvd playback software.

a con he mentions is "needs a minimum of 512MB of system RAM to perform well" ....wtf? his review model /came/ with 512mb, htf does he know how it runs on 256mb? unfair comparison

stupid review, stupid reviewer.
take your crappy reviews to somewhere else, or leave your personal feelings towards macs out of mac/pc reviews.


one of the biggest things when comparing macs to pcs is everyone has their own opinion as to which is better, and im the same way, but when you review crap like this you need to put that all aside and focus on the product, not what people tell you about it, but what it shows you.

i dont mean to nag and nag but this is the 3rd review comparason between MAC and PC SFF's i've seen, and also by far the most useless....

 

I dunno what you're talking about but he didn't take sides at all. Don't get me wrong - I've got a mini-ITX system and for what I do with it it's perfect (near identical to his config) but neither one will have the power of a "real" desktop.
And the PC had USB ports, two of them at least. I don't know why they're not listed as USB2.0 - mine are on my mini-ITX but you (^) are far more biased than anything that could have been indicated in the faceoff.

 

wow - you didn't like the review much did you bee?

I have to agree with you....

One of the things I found funny:

Uh - why didn't they just rip to MP3 on both platforms???? Who is this guy?

 

they arent 2.0 on the pc
you ahve a different pc, not that same one, you're confused.
im not being biased at all, i think that hes just slagging the mac and not saying anything about the PC because its crap compared...i dont own a mac, i own pcs..

 

i write reviews myself, and i have never read a review as biased as he has, so no i did not like it...
and yea, why he would rip them at totally different encoding schemes is beyond me, thanks for pointing out another unfair slip on his part, lol

 

There. I've put it in spoiler tags. Better?

 

Mostly on topic (the reviewer complained about needing 512mb in the mac to do anything...)
Apple is planning to ship 512mb as the minimum starting in June.

Details here:http://appleinsider.com/article.php?id=945

 

that could be the last bit of news from appleinsider if Apple get their way...

I didn't think he was that biased but I have to say I've found extremetech to be poor at reviewing and biased before, but that's just my opinion. Not a great comparison there but still interesting. The results are not at all shocking though.

 

Apple really needs to lose the lawsuite against thinksecret and the others - it flys in the face of the first ammendment and of journalism.....

I think apples power in this should be limited to finding the employees who link information USING INTERNAL METHODS and dealing with them - not forcing a journalist to name sources....

 

Yeah the lawsuits will darken their blindingly white marketing scheme a bit. So iPod White will end up iPod Grey.

bee, he said the PC had a cardbus (PCMCIA) and CF slot. Only the Epia MII series boards have those, which is what I have. I'm a reviewer too so don't go thinking you're special and start flaming me.

If he's so biased against the mac, why did it

Spoiler

win

? (as if you couldn't guess what that said) Yes his ripping method was just plain idiotic, but it still wasn't biased. Not a fair comparison is a different story.

 

im not flaming you
if i wanted to flame you id say [SNIP BY GOO - even if it not said in malice, lets not go there, OK. ]
so maybe he didnt include that its usb2.0, even more reason that its a flawed comparison, and i didnt ask for special privledges because i write reviews, now your being stupid and i will soon start to flame you for saying that. i simply stated that i write reviews and know other people who do and hes the only one i've seen so write something so completey crappy...

its useless, i mean the only good thing about it are his pictures, showing the size comparison...maybe he should stick to photography and leave the writing and opinions to other people...like bit tech

 

Bee, I really must protest. The author of that article is no more biased than you are, just in the opposite direction. Personally (although this is quite skewed by my PC bias), I'd say it was close to an accurate review. The guy's definatley biased towards the PC, but he still wrote a mostly accurate review. For that matter, he admited that the Mac Mini won, and won quite handily.

As for the CD ripping thing... Wouldn't it make sense to rip to the OS's default music filetype? I do believe that's what he did. Obviously you'd get a better idea of how well the hardware worked if he ripped both to .mp3s, but the way he did it gives a more accurate real-world test.

Just my $0.02...

 

wth, im not being biased, he accurately pointed out most capabilities of the pc, but hes missing lots of **** about the mac, and hes trying to say thing about the mac are horrible when the pc is no different. but he fails to mention that
i dont care who he chose as the "winner" of the review, therefor i dont see how you think im being biased
they are almost equal but i think the mac only wins by a little ammount.
hes mac bashing and in a review like that i dont agree with it. hes trying to make the pc look better by talking about things that are to come in the future that will make it totally pwn the mac. way to spread rumours, but tbh if he wants to write a review of whats to come he should keep it in a separate article

-i am not being biased-

i have nothing to say about the pc, hes said everything
but hes covering **** up and trying to make the mac look bad

read a dictionary.

and how can you say its an accurate review?, read this thread instead of reading a few lines in my post and think that sums it up.

you do not rip a media file that the os is native to, you rip something fair like mp3, its not mac or apple
thats like taking a realplayer .ram video and a divx and saying "well, the .ram is much smaller, so its better, although the divx it a little bigger the quality is 1290872395324 times better...
i know its stupid
windows wma vs. apples audio format...thats comparing formats now, which is not what his review is about, hes reviewing 2 platforms, so you should rip the same thing on both to keep it equal...why can't you understand that?

im sorry but my laymens terms and explainations have been exhausted, i dont know how better to explain that to you.

 

is anyone really surprised the mac won? the g4 CPU is, well to be frank, a totally kickass CPU. much, much MUCH better than anything the EPIA boards can offer

i guess i can remove the spoiler tags now..

 

All anyone was saying was that the review was poorly written, that it apeared that the author was not impartial, and that his testing methods were questionable or bad.


There are many items in the article linked in Goos original post that support the above statements.

 

Bee2643: I understand you don't like the article. I understand that you think it was unfair and whatnot. I would be quite happy to discuss the article more. However, I find your personal attacks quite offensive. I don't intend to start a flame war here: I fully expect this to be my last post in this thread.

I believe I explained my position on the CD ripping point. It's really more of a test between Windows XP and Mac OSX, instead of the PC-based mini computer and the Mac Mini. While it isn't an accurate hardware-only test, it gives more of a real-life benchmark of system (and OS, and media player, and everything else) performance.

 

No it doesn't. iTunes is a free (and very good) audio player software available for either platform (mac-os or windows). It is a free download and it can encode *.aac or *.mp3 for free.
WiMP is a (not very good - sorry, I am biased, and I will admit it.) free audio player software that is available for both MacOS-X and Windows that can endode WMA or MP3 for free.

you don't get the same 'experience' listening to wma as you do from listening to aac - a real life benchmark would have done the same thing on both boxes. He could have even done AAC and WMA on both boxes. That would have been a:

(For the record - aac is NOT apples audio format - it is Dolby's audio format. Apple bought a license.)