It’s obviously not by having anything insightful to say.

Robert Scoble has quite possibly the most “I just don’t get it” response to Jobs’ MacWorld keynote so far.

Let’s work this slowly so that even he can understand:

• The Mac mini is the cheapest Macintosh ever released. It costs about the same as an iPod Photo. Even without keyboard/monitor/mouse, it’s an inexpensive machine.
• It’s not the cheapest machine you can buy, just like the iPod isn’t the cheapest music player you can buy, or iTunes isn’t the cheapest music store you can use. Still, Apple managed to sell 4.5 million iPods in the last quarter, so perhaps more than just raw price enters into people’s buying decisions.
• The Mac mini is sexy. Very sexy. It’s tiny. It’s quiet. And it does lots of stuff because it comes with iLife, it does lots of stuff that people would like to do with their computer.
• Most people really don’t need a Windows PC. They have a Playstation 2/Xbox/Gamecube for games, and the Mac mini can do 95% of everything else. Running Virtual PC? Is there ever any reason to? Presumably if you want to do that, it’s because you already had a PC in the past. Chances are, you still have that PC (unless of course it has been rendered inoperable by the virus du jour).

I’ve had one Mac in my house in the past decade, and it is powered off at the moment, but I think what Apple has done is really amazing. Not perfect. Not without flaws, but amazing. They are making cool products that people want to buy, and I bet they are gonna sell a ton of ’em. To say “it’s not as cheap as it seems” seems like the wimpiest complaint imagineable, especially for a company which still charges $180 for their baseline operating system.