Steve

@DoctarPeppar Because there's no such thing as courier delivery to ensure that review units arrive on day of release.. oh, wait.

As for the Mac Mini itself: love the design, the spec's pretty good and easy access to the memory is a very nice touch indeed. If Apple hadn't decided to put an additional 10% on the price over in the UK on top of their usual 7% markup (which I have no problem with btw, it costs more to do business here than in the US so fair enough) I'd have this at the top of my list right now. As it is it's ridiculously overpriced here in Blighty and I really hope Apple come to their senses soon. Hell, even on education discount it's almost £600, the server version is a far better deal.

@Khattab That's not expensive... THIS is expensive:

£649 (2.4 GHz C2D, 2GB Ram, 320 HDD)

Now I'm usually understanding of why Apple charges a little more in the UK but come on, this is just silly. A quick bit of maths here using today's exchange rate:

£649 = $956
$699 + 17.5% tax (UK VAT) = $821

Where the bloody hell has the extra $140 come from? Granted there's usually about a 7% increase for cost of doing business in the UK but that'd only give $878 leaving a big, big gulf between US and UK prices.

@ninetynine99 For one thing it can display external video albeit via VGA. But really that's beside the point. The iPad is what it is in this generation and Nvidia are saying that Apple should have gone with Tegra2 because of the lack of Flash and no 1080p output. Apple have made their position on Flash very clear (and judging by the initial FroYo results they may have had a point) and the iPad screen is 720p only with no interest in providing a HDMI port. In that circumstance it's not 'justifying the iPads shortcoming' it's pointing out that as it is designed there's no point in having that feature whatsoever.

Umm, Apple aimed low yet every single review I've seen praises the performance of the iPad? How does that work? Personally I'd rather have slightly less performance and fewer headline grabbing features I'm NEVER going to use (1080p output on a device with 16Gb of storage and a 720p screen.... yeeeeeeeees) and an extra hour of battery life.

@futurerheza With all due respect... what win exactly?

I've been thinking about this ever since it was announced and I just can't see the need for this at all. Bringing web content to a TV is nice enough... I guess... but what's out there that you REALLY want to watch on your TV? More to the point, how is this going to deliver an experience that non-nerds will be happy with and not only be able to use but want to use?

You've also got all the usual problems that you can experience with a HTPC right now: web content doesn't scale well, Plasma TV's and web pages aren't a particularly good mix, who the heck wants a keyboard in their already remote-heavy living room and, most importantly, how do you unify your TV package, Home Theatre kit, web content, pay-for content AND existing media into one nice neat all-encompassing package that anyone in the family can pick up and use?

Sorry folks, I know it's a cool geeky thing to do but I just don't see where the market is supposed to be for this. Now if the cable / satellite providers get on-board and start building it into the next gen of PVR's that might change the game a wee bit but until then this just strikes me as a dead end.

@CommentsTroll Uh, no, you don't need 4Gb of RAM, most users will never hit 2Gb. I really wish people would remember that not all computers are bought by geeks or professionals opening massive photoshop files. For the target market of the Macbook 2Gb would be absolutely fine.

On another Apple note, interesting that Engadget haven't commented on the full details of the search warrant in the iPhone / Gizmodo debacle being released yesterday. Couldn't have anything at all to do with it showing Gizmodo to be both criminally liable AND ethically questionable of course...

@Anatidae Umm, sorry, but you were going to put the Adobe suite on a device with an Atom processor, Intel GPU, 1024 x 600 screen and, most importantly, 1Gb of memory? The instant that spec hit it was obvious Slate wasn't going to meet expectations for a lot of people and that, quite frankly, it wasn't likely to be a particularly nice user experience for anyone.

@macmann That's going to be the big question isn't it, can Adobe deliver a Flash environment for a portable device that a) doesn't reduce the battery life to seconds rather than hours, b) gives acceptable performance, c) doesn't introduce any attack vectors and d) actually works with applications that expect a mouse and the ability to hover over interface elements... If they can, then good on them but I have my doubts.

@MetalGearMaster 5 years ahead of anything MICROSOFT made at the time it was announced, not the rest of the industry. It's incredibly rare for a company to make such a quantum leap forward in both hardware and software design over their existing product line and this always looked way too good to be true. Quite apart from anything else, a device like this needs enough battery life to last through a full day and it always seemed very unlikely that MS could get enough space out of this design to fit a large enough battery to power two screens and a modern processor, storage, wi-fi etc and still get ten hours out of it.

@1 Infinite Loop Cupertino CA : wouldn't be at all surprised to see that happen. WP7 always strikes me as an OS that'll work better on the big screen of a tablet than a mobile phone anyway and with Apple, Android and now Palm heading for that space at a rate of knots they can't afford to delay it for long and have any chance of getting decent market share.