Slashdotters Agree: No Competition for the Mini

Somewhat interesting question posed to (and answered by) the Slashdot crowd: is there PC Competition for the Mac mini? The submitter asks,

When my wife asks for the 'cute little Mac', what PC can I buy instead that will take up as little space and do as much for the same price (or less)?

His own research and the consensus of the responses agree: it can't really be done. One response in particular sums it up with aplomb:

"Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?

People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.

People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink."

And yet another reply gives the guy the marriage counseling smack he deserved in the first place.

My wife asked me for one thing, how can I give her something else entirely and act all pompous like I went out of my way for her? I like sleeping on the couch.