Hubbub
Posted by unbrand on 14 January 2005 | 2 Comments
Apple’s Mac mini is about to rock the living room, hard. This thing can be a firewall, router, digital music player, hell, a digital music server, and on and on. For $500 USD.
Right now, I’m using Apple’s Airport Express to be a digital music player, and I’m using an old iBook to be the server. Here’s a picture:
The Mac mini could replace both the ibook (huxley) and the airport express (in the pic it looks like an airport base station). Well, almost. The problem in this case is that there’s a reason why the media server and the player are in different rooms. I don’t want the big hard drive and the printer in the living room. And I need digital audio output from the media player to plug into the stereo, over a short distance—0.5 meters.
So, yes the new Mac mini rocks, but in this case, it doesn’t quite fit because the usage model is such that much of what this thing to do I want hidden. Hmmm. That’s an interesting side effect. In my case, I need the Airport Express which is working quite well. And I need an audio server which is just a cheap Mac with a big hard drive, which is what I’ve got now.