Minority Report: Mac Mini - a real nowhere machine

What could it have become with a little more love and attention?

Apple's Mac Mini could really have become the "most important Mac", as Steve Jobs once called it. Seb Janacek explains what happened instead.

As a Mac user it's not often I gaze admiringly at the product pages on Dell's website but this week was a notable exception.

The object of my desire wasn't one of the company's traditional high-powered, low-priced desktops featured in the kind of brochures that fall out of the weekend papers and frighten the cats on a Sunday morning.

What caught my eye was the small and shiny Dell Inspiron Zino HD - a machine marketed as a digital entertainment hub for the living room.

It follows the Mac Mini's form factor but with extra shiny and colourful bits. It has optional Blu-ray, HDMI output as standard and all sorts of configurable options. The prices stack up pretty quickly but it's a nice little beast.

Nice though it is, the little beast made me slightly cross. It wasn't so much that it looked like a Mac Mini. It was more that in many ways the Dell Inspiron Zino HD is exactly the kind of computer Apple's Mac Mini should have been.

This got me thinking about the launch of the Mac Mini back in January 2005.

At the launch event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs described the system as the "most important Mac". On the surface, this may sound like just another hyperbolic quote from Jobs but it had the potential to be true.

The Mac Mini was the perfect 'switcher' machine - for the average Windows users bathing in the light of the iPod halo effect and thinking about going Mac for their desktop. The Mini debuted at a time when the 'Get a Mac' switch campaign was kicking off, and the BYOKDM (Bring Your Own Keyboard, Display and Mouse) ethos was aimed at encouraging Mac-curious PC users to make a change.

The Mac Mini was a great idea and a brave move by a company for whom aesthetic design is a key tenet of products. The problem was the price. In the UK, the Mac Mini cost £339, which for a basic computer without any form of input or output was a fair whack. You'd need to be a damn committed switcher to go for it.

The price remains perplexing. I clearly remember buying a PowerBook G4 for £2,200 in 2005, handing over the credit card to the reseller and hoping he'd hurry up before I changed my mind about spending such an insane amount of money on a computer. Today, a comparable machine such as a 15-inch MacBook Pro costs around £1,200.

Compare this with the headless Mac. The basic version of the Mac Mini, the world's most exclusive entry-level computer, has actually increased since its launch.

True, the chips have evolved from G4s through to Intel 2 Core Duos. The RAM and hard drives have swelled and the graphics chips have become progressively quicker but still it remains essentially the same machine.

Had the Mini evolved differently, it might be in a better position. It could have become a perfect device for the digital living room. In some ways it is a compelling product for the so-called digital lifestyle although the Apple TV captures that slot and the Mac Mini isn't really marketed in that way. In truth it isn't really marketed at all.

You can't help but wonder what could have been for the Mac Mini had it been given a bit more love. Had Apple had a little more faith in it.

Since the 2005 launch we've had the now infamous quote from Steve Jobs who declared that it wasn't in Apple's DNA to create a $500 computer that wasn't a "piece of junk".

I can't but regret the Mac Mini wasn't given its chance to slip the bonds of Apple's high-margin ethos and take a few risks. Profits are more important to Apple than market share and rightly so but a low-price Mac could have brought about another halo effect which eventually drove users to higher end devices.

It's a shame the Mini was never given a chance at greatness as a genuine media hub. Even now, it seems like a computer that desperately wants to meld itself with an Apple TV and give both a sense of purpose.

As it is, it remains something of an anomaly. To misquote John Lennon, a real nowhere Mac.

It's enough to make anyone a bit cross. Or to make a dyed-in-the-wool Mac user gaze admiringly at the product pages of the Dell website. That really can't be healthy.