Now that Apple finally has announced some Intel-based products, and begun to take orders on it, I think a lot of people who currently has PowerPC-based Macintosh computers will be selling their “old” iBooks, PowerBooks on eBay and stuff like that.
Personally I like Apple’s hardware designs, not a fan of the proprietary nature of it though, looks really nice, but I’m not a fan of their operating system. Personally I love UNIX, Linux and BSD being the ones I use, and I think that if you keep an eye on eBay you might be able to find some good “old” Apple hardware to get some Linux and BSD stuff going. What I’m really looking forward to is when Apple ditches PowerPC on the Mac mini, because then a lot of people might be buying that new one so they can dual boot OS X and Windows (I don’t understand why you would load crappy software like Windows onto anything though), and sell the old PowerPC Mac mini on eBay, that’s gonna be really cool, because you can almost fit a Mac mini anywhere, so imagine going to eBay, picking up a cheap Mac mini, might be a lot of them so they’ll be cheap because of the sheer number of people wanting to sell theirs, loading Linux or BSD on it, and just placing it somewhere in the house to run a little handy file server, or placing it at the edge of your house to connect to your neighbors’ WiFis……. there’s lots of cool stuff you could do. 😛 😉
I’m hoping to be able to gather a nice little bundle of Mac mini, and loading Linux on them and just letting it sit around auto-bittorrenting stuff for me, like downloading podcasts and other neat stuff.
If you’re a real geek, you could even do a Beowulf cluster of Mac minis, wouldn’t that be cool?