William H. Magill on 24 Feb 2005 19:19:03 -0000


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: [PLUG] OSX "middleware"?


On 24 Feb, 2005, at 09:53, Rebecca Ore wrote:
Apple seems to have changed their mind about allowing user installation of memory. It's a one chip machine so you buy the biggest chip you can afford and are down one chip you can't use if you upgrade the memory after you buy it.

No mind change -- it is a price-point and physical size issue.

It takes physical real estate (i.e. board space) to put an empty memory socket in place. That real estate plus the additional component costs, including the board design and memory controllers, adds to the cost of a system.

As systems get cheaper, issues of "Pennies" become a big deal.

The Mac-mini is a "price point" machine... not a feature oriented machine. It was designed to sell for a specific price, NOT sold for a price to cover the cost of the design. That's a big difference. It is what differentiated Dell from Compaq and IBM.

This means that the machine has a defined "gross profit margin" per unit and therefore a specific manufacturing cost. So for a $600 machine with a 10% "gross profit margin" (probably high by anybody's standards but Apple's) you have $60 to spend on sales, marketing, support, and adding to the Corporations bottom line (net profit margin).

The Mac-mini is cute and cheap, but it is an "entry point" machine. It is also a "black box," not meant to be modified. What you see is what you get. It really is only one step above an embedded system, just barely a "general purpose" computer.

All of this proves once again that Digital had it right long, long ago. The name of the game is NOT processor capabilities, but rather the capabilities of the SYSTEM, and a system has to be balanced across all its components, CPU, Memory, I/O, etc.

At first blush, the Mac-mini is a very interesting and powerful system. But it is not really a "general purpose" computer system. It's clearly a "tweener" product -- too expensive to buy a "half dozen" so that you can dedicate each one to a specific application, but at the same time much more powerful than you would contemplate dedicating to a specific application.
But, as Rebecca points out, you can't expand it, or modify its configuration easily. It is clearly a system intended to be sold on price, not functionality. As the saying goes, "it all depends on your application(s)." I've already seen "Mac-mini clusters" for use by ISPs that need LOTS of cheap, independent, processors and situations where "crunch power" can be obtained by harnessing them together with Apple's Grid software.


But the really interesting aspect of it is that it is truly the first "component" of a component oriented "home computer system," ... a MacMini, a couple of Porche (laCie) FireWire 800 drives exist today. "Next week" week we can look forward to a "Cell" based Graphics Module that will allow some really neat home VR capabilities. Hmmm... the mini doesn't have an infini-band port or FW800 ... in this model, but in six months?


T.T.F.N. William H. Magill # Beige G3 [Rev A motherboard - 300 MHz 768 Meg] OS X 10.2.8 # Flat-panel iMac (2.1) [800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg] OS X 10.3.7 # PWS433a [Alpha 21164 Rev 7.2 (EV56)- 64 Meg] Tru64 5.1a # XP1000 [Alpha 21264-3 (EV6) - 256 meg] FreeBSD 5.3 # XP1000 [Alpha 21264-A (EV 6.7) - 384 meg] FreeBSD 5.3 magill@mcgillsociety.org magill@acm.org magill@mac.com whmagill@gmail.com

___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug