Mac Mini -- The New New Internet Computer

I have seen the future and its name is Mac mini. The mini is one seriously great little computer. I got one last week and have been singing its praises ever since. It is not the fastest computer. It is not the cheapest computer. It is not the smallest computer. But it is certainly the smallest cheap and fast computer out there. And the cheapest small and fast computer out there. And, yes you guessed it, the fastest cheap and small computer out there (my apologies to Apple, which advertises the mini as "Inexpensive, But Never Cheap" -- semantics -- at $500 it is darn cheap). Add the fact that the mini now ships with Tiger, as well as Apple's fantastic iLife software, and you can purchase one heck of a computer for under five hundred bucks.

This week I was visiting the new offices of a startup I recently funded. The company is in the process of pulling together the infrastructure necessary to support their business. After looking at their options, the guys decided to outfit the office with Mac minis. For a little over $600 it is possible to provide each of the company's telesales and customer service agents with all the computing power they need. This is particularly true because the company's sales and support functions are going to be run on web apps like saleforce.com and Five-9's. Thus, the only thing that those folks will really need in a desktop computer is a web browser and a reasonably fast pipe. In that respect the Mac mini is plug and play. All the company will need to do when it ads new reps is run across the street to the Apple store, buy a new mini and super cheap monitor, bring it back, plug it in, launch the browser and they are off to the races.

It strikes me as a bit ironic that Apple has managed to make good on Larry Ellison's network computer vision. Sure, it's more expensive than the couple hundred bucks once envisioned for a true dumb terminal. But it frankly isn't that much more expensive and delivers a whole lot more computing muscle than Ellison envisioned when he launched the New Internet Computer (NIC) Company.