Oh for cryin' out loud, must there always be some sort of dagger in our psyche? It's been a full year since we first heard about some visigoth with a hacksaw who ripped the innards out of a Power Mac G5, cut extra holes in its aluminum case, and stuffed it full of green-glowing Wintel guts-- and despite knowing that the story was partially a hoax (only a Power Mac's enclosure got butchered, not a working Power Mac itself), we'd only just recovered from the horrifying mental image. And gee, just in time to be viscerally appalled by the senseless desecration of a Mac mini! Oh, the humanity... and oh, what a serious lack of class.

It's like this: faithful viewer David Poves alerted us to a blog post by one Kevin Rose of G4TechTV's The Screen Savers, in which he details the process by which he took a fully functional Mac mini and effected some grisly brute-force platform reassignment surgery. He popped open the mini, unscrewed and removed its original motherboard, slapped in a pre-release teensy Wintel motherboard made by VIA, hacked holes in the mini's enclosure to make room for the new motherboard's ports, stapled everything back together, and voilà: he's now got one of the most blindingly evil downgrades in the history of mod-dom.

See, it's not bad enough that Kevin took a beautifully designed, totally integrated, digital lifestyle-enhancing Mac and turned it into a pile of hacked-together x86-based junk, nor was he content with just letting his Frankensteinian "mini PC" wear the Mac's enclosure like Leatherface wearing the skinned face of one of his victims; the real kick in the teeth is that his conversion was disturbingly incomplete. For example, he kindasorta left out a CD-ROM drive, because fitting one in there "would be impossible... due to size restrictions." (Never mind that Apple made it work; guess that VIA motherboard isn't quite so teensy after all.) Instead of trying to retain even the slightest vestige of the Mac mini's original elegance, he just left the optical drive out entirely and recommends using an external drive in its place-- which largely negates the whole purpose of cramming a computer into a space as small as the mini in the first place, but hey, we said this whole thing was senseless, didn't we?

Furthermore, Kevin notes that there wasn't even enough space in the Mac mini's case for the VIA motherboard's processor heat sink, so he went with the obvious solution: he "used a metal handsaw to cut a 3/4-inch chunk from the side" of the thing. So how did he compensate for the processor's reduced cooling? Simple: he didn't. While he recommends "adding an additional fan to the inside lid to increase airflow," he didn't bother actually doing it or anything, so for all we know, his "mini PC" would burn itself out after ten minutes of operation. Not that we'd deny it the merciful release that death would bring, of course, but the fact remains that all Kevin did was take a perfectly happy Mac mini and butcher it to the point where 1) it would no longer run Mac OS X or iLife, 2) it could no longer read or write CDs, and 3) it might not actually run for long at all before it self-immolated due to either insufficient processor cooling or utter shame. (Take your pick.)

Reportedly the atrocity actually appeared on the air last week; while we're all for scoping out gory tumor resections on the All-Gross Surgery Channel, we give thanks to the gods of channel-surfing who mercifully spared us the sight of a mini being destroyed for a woefully incomplete conversion that wasn't even elegant by Wintel standards. We're sure that Kevin Rose is a perfectly nice guy and everything, but we can only imagine the tidal wave of bad karma that he's visited upon himself by perpetrating this abomination. What's he going to do for an encore, hollow out Michelangelo's David and fill it full of Twinkie cream?