How to ruin a perfectly good Mac Mini...

via SlashDot comes a jerk from techTV who ruins a perfectly good Mac Mini by turing it into a "PC". This is supposed to prove something, but nobody is quite sure what. That you can turn a good Mac into a crappy PC?

Yes, I think it's cool that the Mac Mini is, well, mini. But to me, what makes it cool is the fact that it's a cheap way for people who want to try OSX out but don't want to spend $800 on an eMac or $1000 on an iBook to experience OSX. The fact that it's small is just a bonus.

What makes this really funny is that the mini pc he makes isn't even very good. He doesn't have room for any optical drives, so if you want to play a DVD or install software off a CDROM on his machine, you are going to need a big clunky external drive. And the processor he uses, a VIA C3, is not exactly blazing. I say this from experience, having built an HTPC with a slightly slower VIA processor (I got the processor and motherboard for $5 after rebate). It would take use up 100% of processor resources just to run XP's background services. Granted, the new processor has a newer core, but it's hard to imagine it's that much better.

Of course, it also makes me sad that this guy has taken a cool new mac that many people can't get their hands on and basically trashed it. I have a Mac Mini on order from Amazon and it's not slated to ship until late March. I bought it with the intent of reselling it - I had "won" a 25% off coupon from Amex's Christmas promo. So my motives may not be squeaky, but the fact that this fool has trashed one while mine is qaiting to ship annoys me.

I haven't watched TechTV in years. When I was in college, I worked for two summers for an insurance company that had a DirecTV dish in our breakroom. It only got about half a dozen channels, one of which was TechTV. I watched it back then and liked it, but I haven't watched it recently, and I've heard a lot of buzz on Slashdot ect that it kind of sucks now. With guys like this fool working for them, that seems accurate. It's hard to imagine the old-school tech tv folks - Leo Laport or the lovely Kate Botello doing something like this.