Mac Mini--why I think it won't take off

Thinking about it, I don't think (at the current pricing) the Mac Mini will be that successful, in Australia at least... If it were at the AU$650 price as was rumoured, yes, it'd grab the market of home users upgrading from a sub-1GHz Wintel machine who don't have any real tie to the platform (not avid gamers, unable to keep their machines virus-free, etc.); it's what you'd expect to pay for an upgrade to a current Windows machine anyway. But with the actual retail price of AU$850... No, "I could by a P4 w/ Monitor and everything for that."

Having owned an iBook for a while, I just want to paraphrase Kurt's t-shirt and say "Commercial Unix still Sucks."

The most obvious reason is the /commercialization/ once again of the computer system types I've known and loved for the last 20 years. Who still remembers how _shitty_ commercial unix was (performance, software quality, support, corporate-hangers-on-trying-to-find-new-ways-to-make-money-for-a-ferrari, etc.) in the pre-GNU, pre-Linux era? (Xenix, AIX, christ--almost anything SysV-based..) ... OSX is unfortunately heralding back those Bad Old Days. Look at all those $35 shareware apps written for people whose minds are too precious to run a one-liner command on Terminal... Plus, don't mistake yourself into thinking that programs like iTunes, et.al., are any more special than, say, XMMS with an inbuilt paysite browser. A decent "gTunes" program written by the open source community would at least let you use more than one company's site--and have less chance of being worthless when the music distro setup dies.