A few years ago, when the G4 was Apple’s processor for the flagship PowerMac line, the chip was a huge disappointment. This was Motorola’s fault, but Apple paid the price, with top-of-the-line hardware that stayed at the same MHz for an entire year, while the rest of industry continued to follow Moore’s Law. Now that the G4 has become Apple’s lower-power-consumption, lower-cost processor, however, the chip is serving Apple very well.

To achieve such low prices, corners needed to be cut. Most PC manufacturers cut corners inside the box, selling low-end PCs that generally lack such niceties as DVD-playing/CD-burning combo drives, FireWire, and high-speed networking ports. What Apple has done, rather ingeniously, is cut corners outside the box: no display, no keyboard, no mouse.

This is clever because many prospective Mac Mini purchasers really do have spare keyboards, mice, and displays. And if they don’t, they can be purchased cheaply. (Apple, in fact, quietly cut the prices of their own standard keyboards and mice to $29 each.) Plus, these are things anyone can easily plug in; as opposed to say, upgrading from a plain-jane CD-ROM to a combo drive, which is way beyond the ken of a typical user.