Now this is interesting. It's exactly why I bought a Mac Mini for media use in the living room. Small, silent, discreet and reasonably powered. At that price point, they can change everything. Up until now, anything that looked like a serious competitor to the Mini on all fronts failed miserably on the price. But at $189 - wow.
The Atom processor is a little underpowered for anything serious like media transcoding, but I suspect that it will do just fine for media playback or as a NAS front end, although connectivity is rather limited. It's a step in the right direction from the X200 which has almost the same configuration as the Mini, but is bigger, uglier and more expensive.
How long before we see a version preloaded with MythTV?
There's also a serious market developing for thin client desktops combined with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure implementations, and this one's in the same price range as most of the dedicated thin client boxes. I think that they have a potential winner on their hands this time. Just have to wait and see how the Atom performs in the real world.
Atom-based Shuttle X27 priced at $189:
Shuttle's Atom-based X27 mini-PC is definitely pretty intriguing if you're looking to play around with getting a PC in the living room or even in your car, and it's just gotten the modder-friendly price of $189. That's almost impulse-purchase territory -- we're definitely looking forward to seeing what kind of trouble people get into with these when it hits next month.
