Ayaneo, known primarily for making handheld gaming consoles, has just been revealed in full. the new AM01 Retro Mini PC after making fun of him a few weeks ago. She says she plans to ship the AM01 before the end of the year, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted to buy one. The AM01 won’t win any benchmarking contests, but it will almost certainly be the best-looking computer you own.
Let’s state the obvious here: Ayaneo says is “paying homage” to the Macintosh, which is a nice way of saying, “We copied the product almost exactly.” This device is the spitting image of the ’80s-era Apple computer, right down to the floppy drive and rainbow sticker. (However, Ayaneo made the sticker shaped like a flag instead of an apple; you have to pay tribute and then pay legal fees, know what I mean?) It’s smaller than a Macintosh, but it’s beige and rectangular and it even has a black space where the old screen would have disappeared.
However, inside the AM01 is something very different. For an early bird price of $149 ($199 for everyone else), you get an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U, a nearly five-year-old chip, along with eight gigs of RAM and 256 gigs of storage. At the top of the line, for $379 up front or $459 retail, you get an AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor, which is almost three years old! – plus 32 gigs of RAM and a terabyte of storage. All memory is also expandable. It’s pretty cheap no matter how you look at it, but you can get a much more powerful mini PC for the price. It’s just that most of those mini PCs are ugly black boxes.
What the AM01 really has is extensibility. It has five USB ports (one USB-C and four USB-A), plus HDMI, DisplayPort, a headphone jack, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. You can get it with Windows 11 or buy the “basic” version and install Linux or SteamOS or whatever else you want. Some people will buy the AM01 and use it as a computer; most will set it up as a retro gaming console, Plex server, and more. Ayaneo even offers the AM01 in a bundle with NuPhy’s mechanical keyboards and 8BitDo’s wireless controllers.
Ayaneo is launching the AM01 on Indiegogo, which always requires caveats about which companies to trust your money to, but it has a track record of delivery and a track record of rapidly improving device quality. It also appears to have invested in the mini PC space: the company has also been provoking AM02, which borrows the original NES design to give it an even more gamer vibe. However, it is not yet known when it will be released.
The AM01’s numerous SKUs can now be pre-ordered, and Ayaneo says it plans to start shipping them in December. I may or may not have already started freeing up space on my desktop.
