Back in the 80s IBM had a problem, they owned the business PC space but Apple clearly had the interest of the home buyer with a less expensive and much easier to use Apple II, the Commodore 64 was also in the market at an even lower price but most considered it to be a toy. IBM felt that they needed a box to compete with this low cost offering and created the PC Junior which was nicknamed the Peanut. A small form factor PC with the unique capability of being able to be upgraded without actually opening the case. Because monitors were very expensive a TV option could be used and this was the first PC to ship with a wireless, IR in this case, keyboard.

But, somewhere during the design process IBM got really worried that the product was too good and that businesses, upon seeing it, would prefer it over the much more expensive desktop offerings. So IBM insured that performance was limited, you couldn’t initially even get a hard drive, compatibility wasn’t very good, and the keyboard, to use a technical term, sucked.

IBM stuck with the product for about a year before pulling the plug, it retailed for $669 and came with a wireless keyboard but no disk drive and half of the memory it really needed. At $669 it really wasn’t usable at all.

This is called low-balling or bait and switch depending on what process is used to get you to the higher priced product, in this case the fully featured Peanut cost closer to $1,500 then it did to $500 and this, probably more than anything else, is what killed the offering. By the way, for perspective, the Printer adopter which was needed if you wanted to print cost $100 all by itself which is interesting since today you can buy decent printers for well under $100.

Mac Mini 2005 = Peanut 1985

Like the Peanut the Mac Mini is an appliance PC, it has limited upgrade options and it has an aggressive advertised price. Also, like the Peanut, at the entry price of $499 you don’t get a keyboard and mouse, you get about half of the memory you need for Tiger the next OS from Apple (and it is a single slot so you will not be able to just add memory but need to replace it), you get a very small 40GB drive (you can get a 40GB drive in an iPod), and a relatively low powered (for Apple) graphics subsystem.

You can’t order over a 80GB drive (the iMac, with a similar size constraint, goes to 250 GB), the iMac has a much faster video subsystem (which can’t be upgraded either), and the fastest processor you can get with the Mini is 1.42GHz while the slowest processor you can get on the now older iMac is 1.6GHz.

Now this really isn’t as bad as the Peanut, given that a lot of folks just want a simple PC the Mac Mini is much closer to a wining product then the Peanut was. I actually think, were I to buy a Mac (which is incredibly unlikely), it is the one I would choose. It will be more than adequate for pictures, simple movies, and music and it is more flexible then the iMac. Still, I’m not a fan of crippled products and Apple has a reputation for providing an excellent out of box experience which will be lost with this product. I think this truly should have been a headless iMac and the fact they crippled it to prevent iMac cannibalization reminds me way too much of the Peanut for me to be comfortable.

iPod Shuffle

No display or navigation wheel, this is an iPod that seems to fit Steve Job’s idea of what a flash player is and was his biggest justification for not coming out with one when he launched the hugely successful iPod mini. This probably suggests more that if you don’t believe in a category you probably shouldn’t launch a product because you’ll more likely prove yourself right. This thing seems to be devoid of anything that actually makes an iPod an iPod and folks don’t buy these things for iTunes.

Apple does have a very strong marketing program which mitigates some of this, but in the end, buyers often aren’t as ignorant as we often think and betting on that ignorance has never been, in my experience, a long term path to success.