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Wednesday, January 19, 2005

Move Over Mac Mini: Cappuccino PCs are Fanless and Super Customizable
True, the Mac Mini is turning heads but it's not the only small kid on the block. Cappuccino PC has a whole line of tiny machines and you can customize them. Many start at $245 and you can rack mount them or create your own front and back panel of connectors and slots. Beware: add in all the features you are lusting for and the price tag is not going to be small: more like $1,000+.

Check Out These Specs:

-- Pentium IV System Up to 2.0 GHz
-- Compact Size : 5.7” x 9.8” x 1.65”
-- Fits into Standard PC case “PC-in-a-PC”
-- Heavy Duty Aluminum casing and ragged designing
-- CD/DVD/ CDRW-DVD exchangeable for multi-media and Data
-- PC104 slot for easy customizing and upgrading
(Compact Flash, 4 LAN, 4 Serial Ports and more……)
-- 12Volt DC power input that fit into automobiles boats and etc…
-- Easy mounting for all industrial and home applications
(Back of LCD Display, wall and under-desk)
-- Ideal for Kiosk, POS, Educational, Data Center …or .Personal Desktop….
-- Support Windows XP, 2K, 9X, NT, Linux

UPDATED by Alice

# Permalink Posted at 10:03 AM 5 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

ok.......

i've been reading some of the stuff alice has said about the mac mini, but this was bad enough i had to say something. i typically don't troll, and ive certainly made some positive posts around here before, and love what you guys have to say in general, but it's almost like your taking the release of this machine personally.

i certainly wouldn't consider myself a mac fanboy. maybe an open source fanboy, but i keep a fairly even view on apple. i have a blog at this link and ive posted some thoughts on the mac mini. the short and simple of this though is there there isn't a pc product like this right now. you can custom make something, or you can pay a specialty vendor to make one for 3 times more than the mac mini. but the cappacino pc is not in the same league. its for geeks like us to put into a 5.25 bay as a second pc. i looked that the cheapest one ($245 for a barebone) and to get one anywhere near the specs of the mac mini is well over $800. thats with a 1ghz celeron, intel video, and a 5400 rpm hdd. and its not much smaller.

i don't want to flame, but i really think you should give the mac mini a better look before totally dismissing it. everyone is entitled to their own opinion, and i certainly can understand someone not liking the apple way.

to me the mac mini is a cheap box that i can use with my existing monitor and logitech wireless keyboard/mouse. its user friendly enough for my girlfriend, there are a decent number of good games for osx, and im just a click away from a bash command line. i honestly use windows more than anything else now, but i have gone totally linux for about 6 months, and done the same thing with macintosh. with enough work i can do just about as much and get just about as much stability out of any of them. the thing that has held me off of osx in the past is the cost.

# posted by Laydros 11:54 AM

I confess. I am one of those making fun of the mini mac. Unlike an unnamed fearless leader, I will acknowledge where I was wrong and where I was not forthcoming.

The mini mac case is a nice form factor. It is not too overpriced for a prebuilt system. I like the built in DVD/CDRW. A firewire port is nice on a case that has no expandability. While the os is based on a free OS, I'm told it's got some decent apps bundled with it.

My problem is with Apple. They foist themselves on us as being revolutionary when they are selling stuff that's got serious design deficiencies (non-replaceable ipod batteries, non-upgradeable imac screens) or is something somebody's already done (nanode-sized computer, ipod). The mini mac may be nice, but it's not particularly cheap for what you get and the form factor isn't particularly new.

That's why I tend to mock the stuff that apple sells, but only that which deserves it. Apple's biggest innovation was selling the iMac in grape.

(The cube was a neat idea; small form factor and silent, the only silly part was to make it from clear plastic rather than something that looks fine when you dent it).

# posted by James 1:06 PM

If you actually look, both of these systems come to $1100+ when configured with a processor, memory, hard disk, optical drive, and operating system roughly equivalent to the Mac Mini! Those totals don't include equivalents for the high quality multimedia and office software bundled with the Mini. If you look at the $400 Dell in a big ugly box and include the drive and inferior software upgrades to bring it in line feature wise with a Mini with an equivalent 17" crt, keyboard and mouse, you will find that they both price out in the $750 to $800 range.

The my point of view (and I know Windows well enought to have managed planning for a Windows 2k rollout in a Fortune 100 company) the Mac Mini represents a price/value breakthrough in appliance computing. I fully expect that consumers will respond very positively.

# posted by Anonymous 6:03 PM

"...-- Heavy Duty Aluminum casing and ragged designing..."

Gee, it doesn't seem that ragged, Alice.

# posted by SomeDumbGuy 7:33 AM

I don't see what the big deal is. There have been plenty of embedded PCs around going back 10 years now. Looks like they are starting to go mainstream due to the drop in hardware prices, advancements in technology reducing the size and the fact people want to deploy them into a multitude of applications with space restrictions. i.e. Point of Sale, Kiosks, mobile etc
Its all about size baby!
Another site I found googling with similar stuff. www.littlepc.com

J. Greene

# posted by Anonymous 9:29 AM

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