Teardown of Apple's new Mac Mini reveals space for second hard drive - Page 2

I don't think it's that big of a deal now.

If that's what they needed to fit the target price, fine with me. I hope to get one to use as a small business server with an attached Drobo or two. Also, it's easier to get inside now. Something like 5 steps to the drive instead of 27 with the previous model. I have another Macs to read from on the occasion it needs to read an optical disc. Most of the software I use has long been available on my local network or an internet download.

I won't give up the drive on my main computer though. I find writing a disc is the most convenient way to hand a fair amount of data to someone, without giving away a USB stick (seriously, who remembers to return them?) or walking them through a computer-to-computer internet data transfer.

So your forever tied to the fantastic APP store and i-tunes.
I hated it too . Until all my old lost APPS came back to me on 4 different computers from the app store.
for free, They just down loaded by them self .

Its a fair trade off , but i have now have thousand of discs and getting them in good condition is hard.

Apple sells a external Disc drive and the Mac-Mini now has a secound drive . !!

Apple want's all your money .

So your forced to buy all your media and apps from Apple .

To me its a fair trade off .

9

For the Mac, that's only partly true. While you can only get Lion and first party apps from Apple's App Store, you can get a lot of apps from anywhere else you choose, direct from the developer or even on competing app stores, should anyone make one. MacUpdate is a repository for a lot of software. It's probably less convenient and not as well laid out, but that's very different from being forced to only use Apple's store for all your apps.

By the same token, you can get media elsewhere, it's just that Apple is the most convenient place to get it. You can get unencrypted music from anywhere else, and there are services that provide streaming music apps for iOS and Mac.

Sorry i was too strong on my talk .

Its so easy to use Apple Apps/i-tunes
But yes most of my stuff was from other places.
but now i am all Apple .

9

They explain it on their marketing page:

"Mac mini is designed without an optical disc drive. Because these days, you dont need one. Its easier than ever to download music and movies from the iTunes Store. And you can download apps from the Mac App Store with a click. So what did we do with all the extra space? We squeezed in more powerful processors, advanced graphics, and Thunderbolt technology. And removing the optical drive gave us room to do one more thing with Mac mini: lower its price. If you still want to burn discs, consider the external MacBook Air SuperDrive, which connects to Mac mini with a USB cable."

http://www.apple.com/macmini/design.html

This is pretty much what I and many others have been wanting to happen for years. Ditch the optical, lower the price by $100, get quad-cores and dedicated GPUs. If you need DVD, buy a $30 drive (you save $70); if you want Blu-Ray, get a $180 drive and you've upgraded to Blu-Ray for $80 compared to the previous model.

They didn't skimp on the GPU either. The VRAM could have been higher but 256MB is generally fine and the 6630M is pretty fast. Not quite at the level of the desktop 5770 like maybe the 6770M would be but enough to run any game out today at a good quality setting and great for compute performance (320M = 120GFLOPs, 6630M = 480GFLOPs).

The 5770 on OpenCL Luxmark scores 2222:

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMar...encl-gpus-only

6750M scores 1052 and I'd expect the 6630M to score about 850. The 320M and 9600M GT are close so around 250. It's interesting to see the MBP core i7 quad get over 2500 though. The latest processors from Intel outperform almost all of the mobile GPUs. It's not really a vs match of course as you use both together and get a 50-100% speed boost for free but interesting nonetheless. Even in the top iMac, the i7 outperforms the 6970M:

http://barefeats.com/imac11b.html

Anyway, think what we'll get in the Mini next year. Quad-cores, 8 threads across the board and we don't have to be stuck with Intel's crummy graphics. At the end of the year, AMD move from 40nm Whistler to 28nm Chelsea for their 7000M series and they expect double the performance.

What more do you even need with the current Mini? You get Thunderbolt for RAID storage, HDMI output, a dedicated GPU for a good gaming experience, dual-core i5/i7 processors (quad if you can live with Intel IGP) and fairly easy access to the HDD so you can replace it with SSD or add one on top. Hopefully, they will offer an mSATA port when SSD hits $1 per GB and then you can opt to have a 128GB boot disk along with the 500GB drive for storage.

In System Prefs you can set the drives to not spin down.


I use the DU in /Applications/Utilities to unmount an internal drive. Do it every day actually since my 2TB WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS drive makes a lot of noise, the desk even vibrates.

Oh no! First Apple, now Ford.

Goodbye CDs.

===========
Ford To Leave CD Player Out Of New Model

July 27, 2011
Ford has become the first major auto manufacturer to announce plans to ditch the CD player in favor of digital music access for drivers. According to reports, Ford's newest Focus model will leave out the CD player and instead include a USB port for digital music players to be plugged in.

Oh YES.


Good. Let it be the start of something big.

It would, but I also want to manage file access, do email hosting for the family, and possibly host a website at some point.

If you mean unchecking the option in Energy Saver that says "Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible," this does not help me either. Just yesterday I highlighted some image files, right-clicked, highlighted "open with..." and then waited a full four seconds for the menu to appear.

Maybe it's the fact that these are external? Or because they're Western Digital? I just want to know that, if I buy he dual drive option Mini, that I won't have to put up with this stuff. :/

Yep, THE Finder Will always startup all drives on a 'File Open...' or a 'Safe as...' action. I think you can only prevent that by either first create a file on the SSD and then save when needed or unmount the HDD first. But I agree that it is annoying and I don't have a good solution as well. Some software does have a default file location, maybe you can set that in the software prefs.