Hilarious Mac Mini review

I’m pretty sure that Mac Mini: The Emperor’s New Computer, a review of Apple’s new machine, is a joke. Or, rather, I’m positive it’s a joke, but I think it is an intentional one. Check out these howlers:

While the hardware is about roughly equivalent to a Windows PC circa 1995, what got me interested were Apple’s claims about its size, weight and footprint.

I recently retired my 1995 machine which had been doing Linux fileserving duties most recently. It was a Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM. At this point, I thought the guy was just exaggerating. With the next sentence, I thought the guy wasn’t paying attention.

If you believe Apple’s marketing department, the new Mini is “smaller than most packs of gum” and weighs “less than four quarters”.

Having watched the MacWorld keynote, I recognized this as the description of the iPod Shuffle, not the Mac mini. To be sure, there’s a big difference in size between those two. The complaints that followed about the lack of serial ports, parallel ports and floppy drives started me down the track of thinking this article was out for laughs. I knew it for sure, though, here:

This is where the first noticeable problem with Apple design arises. While there is a Mac-style “donnnnggggg” when the Mini is first turned on, during normal operation the unit makes no sound whatsoever. This could make it very difficult for a novice user to know whether or not the computer is on.

Now that I was finally in on the joke, the article just gets funnier.

For example, there is no Outlook Express for email, but Apple includes a program called Mail, which is like a stripped-down email client that can’t execute scripts or open attachments without user intervention.

Gotta love that conclusion:

So is the mini a maxi value? For me, clearly, no. When I consider that a good deal of my time is spent running applications like Disk Defragmenter, Scandisk, Norton AV, Windows Update and Ad-Aware–none of which are available for the Mac platform–it doesn’t make sense for me to “switch” to a Mac at this time.

This review is actually a dig at Windows in the guise of a bad review of the Mac Mini! Good job! I wish I had thought of that.

I came to DivisionTwo by a direct link to the article above. Going in by the front page, you can see that they’re all about funny fake geek stories. I hadn’t been aware of that, which made the article that much more entertaining. But, now the surprise is ruined, alas…