I would have bought this, if they released this six months ago instead of the Macbooks. I remember feeling like a second class citizen for owning a Mac desktop back in the 90s. These past six months I've felt like a second class citizen from Apple's perspective for wanting to buy a Mac desktop.
There's no excuse for waiting this long. The real headline should be "Apple waits 19 months to make 6-month-old Macbook."
The mini continues to have no identity. It used to be a low-end Mac to snag value shoppers into the Mac experience. Now it's a mid-range underpowered desktop in which you pay more for laptop parts.
They really need to get something under the $500 price point again like they did with the original mini.
1) Get an AppleTV instead, unless you really want it to be a computer for your TV and not a media extender. Then you can just use a single HDMI cable.
2) Get a mDP or mDVI to HDMI or DVI connector (whatever your TV has) at Monoprice.com. As well as an optical audio cable, though a 3.5mm to RCA audio cable will work, too.
The mini continues to have no identity. It used to be a low-end Mac to snag value shoppers into the Mac experience. Now it's a mid-range underpowered desktop in which you pay more for laptop parts.
They really need to get something under the $500 price point again like they did with the original mini.
Do you own one? It's only midrange if you're looking at cheap PC. I like the mini, it's an ideal solution to someone like me that doesn't game and likes having a smaller desktop that doesn't sit on the floor constantly being kicked.
I have GigE ethernet and now I have 11n networking in addition to my choice of monitor. Until the iMac gets quad core I don't see it as a suitable value for my own particular needs. Until then I'll have a mini network with a network laser printer and NAS.
The Dual monitor support is going to yield some interesting setups.
Well i'm in the US so there's been no price hike and I will likely buy two minis over the next year.
Pluses
Dual Monitor capability
11n networking
1066Ghz FSB
Faster graphics
It's a solid deal. I've enjoyed my 1.66Ghz mini and the RAM upgrades weren't all that hard IMO. I'll be ready to build a small network with Snow Leopard macs. It should be fun.
Am I correct in understanding that I can remove the burner and install another HD in it's place? 2 internal drives sounds nice. Just pick up a external usb burner for $100 bucks.
No display adapters in the box? Wow that is beyond pathetic. This is their entry level desktop, do you know how many people will buy it get home with their first ma and find they can't use it, they've gotta go back out to the store and buy a $30 dongle? Do they think doing this will get more people to buy the 24"? Those dongles don't cost them more than a few dollars to make, just throw one in for pete's sake.
That said even though I have a current gen macbook I actually want the new one, just because the mac mini g4 I've not relegated to being used with my tv is still my favourite mac. The thing is I literally don't need it!
Am I correct in understanding that I can remove the burner and install another HD in it's place? 2 internal drives sounds nice. Just pick up a external usb burner for $100 bucks.
Only if they've made the optical drive SATA which would be welcomed in a big way. The little clips that hold the parallel cable going to the optical drive are a pain in the ass to deal with. I'll cry tears of joy if the new optical drive is a simple SATA connection...seriously.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ecking
No display adapters in the box? Wow that is beyond pathetic. This is their entry level desktop, do you know how many people will buy it get home with their first ma and find they can't use it, they've gotta go back out to the store and buy a $30 dongle? Do they think doing this will get more people to buy the 24"? Those dongles don't cost them more than a few dollars to make, just throw one in for pete's sake.
That said even though I have a current gen macbook I actually want the new one, just because the mac mini g4 I've not relegated to being used with my tv is still my favourite mac. The thing is I literally don't need it!
Do we know what type of cables are included? I think a MDVI to DVI should suffice for most people with relatively new (read non sucky) monitors.
You might be right, but I would definitely wait for benchmarks and see how much work is offloaded to the GPU. Also, things might change with Snow Leopard.
I'm not sure that a 13% increase in CPU speed, on the same memory bandwidth, will really change anything. I think the key here is how much work is done by the GPU.
I agree with you and do not know how much video decoding is currently off loaded to the gpu. I have a 2006 core 2 duo "ole whitey" imac with 2.16 ghz and a 256 mb ati video card. I have been using it to test plex and other htpc options. When playing a blueray rip of the incredible hulk I noticed some stuttering when the camera was panning up the hill of the shanty town. I do not know if that was from the way it was encoded or some other problem. My thinking is that a little extra processing power may be helpful and that 2.0ghz might be a little weak for htpc. My final test in the upcoming weeks is to order an external blue ray drive and using windows via bootcamp to fiddle around with blueray playback.
Am I correct in understanding that I can remove the burner and install another HD in it's place? 2 internal drives sounds nice. Just pick up a external usb burner for $100 bucks.
You can, but it would cheaper and garnish you more capacity to just use an external FW800 HDD. It would even be cheaper to buy one of those HDD that look like and fit under the Mac Mini. An internal HDD would have to 2.5" and then you'd have to buy an adapter to the plug and then an external housing or a new external optical drive. A FW800 HDD could be 3.5" and hold up to 2GB of additional storage.
No display adapters in the box? Wow that is beyond pathetic. This is their entry level desktop, do you know how many people will buy it get home with their first ma and find they can't use it, they've gotta go back out to the store and buy a $30 dongle? Do they think doing this will get more people to buy the 24"? Those dongles don't cost them more than a few dollars to make, just throw one in for pete's sake.
That said even though I have a current gen macbook I actually want the new one, just because the mac mini g4 I've not relegated to being used with my tv is still my favourite mac. The thing is I literally don't need it!
They haven't included extraneous adapters in most of their products for years. Better to have the few pay for them than have the many pay for an item they don't need.
If you are buying a Mac Mini at an Apple Store I guarantee that you will be asked about your monitor. The Mini also has a mDVI port, too, so the customers doesn't need to buy a 24" LED-CD. If you need a VGA adapter, go ahead and get a new monitor.
So much for the macmini pictures being fake! Who's laughing now
Actually, some of the photos were either fakes (where the person had seen one? or was an Apple mock-up) because the fan holes vary depending upon your source.
OK, I know I'll be labeled a hater, but it's overpriced for the minimal bump. This "bump" really just puts the thing where it should already have been by now more or less, or they need more attractive pricing. Ya see, there's this little thing called a recession going on now that makes anemic electronics less desirable, "it's the economy stupid."
To make it worth the price Apple should have sweetened the deal IMO. Right now, the high-end maxed out is only slightly less than the low-end iMac but with no monitor. If they really wanted to basically sell the same machine tweaked a little, they should have thrown in more.
If they're going to offer it with Front Row included (a good thing), they obviously want to further the idea of the mini used as a digital entertainment hub. They should lose Apple TV and let the mini cover both the entry computer and home entertainment markets with the production cost of a single unit. That means little without a built in HDMI port. I think it's performance limitations are a function of it's size. Keeping it small and quiet (which I'm guessing includes heat-related performance limits) make it attractive to put in an entertainment system. But they configure it so you have to buy an HDMI converter which isn't just another thing to buy, there's more to it than that. That won't get audio to your home theater set up so you have to ad another cable, probably with a Lft/Rt splitter to inputs on your A/V receiver. Just more wires in your cabinet.
The typical home theater enthusiast has at least the A/V receiver, cable box, game console, maybe a DVR. Anyone building a system or adding new things to it wants it as close to "future proof" as possible and as few cables as possible?that means HDMI. HT equipment without HDMI is simply outdated. The remote is necessary to make it useful as part of an HT system, that should be included standard for all models as well. As a computer alone it just isn't that impressive considering it's present cost structure. The low-end should have 2 gigs RAM standard at the current start price. The high-end should have 4 gigs and/or the larger HD standard at the current start price. Those things would make me want to buy one. As it is, not so much; I'm a little underwhelmed.
Yes, because not catering specifically for you is an epic fail.
Catering to those that have over 400 Mac Minis' in a rendering farm is a colossal failure, but it's my fault for no longer being at Apple to make that point.
I'll also remind people that University Engineering and Graphics departments [Architecture and more] would be more than happy to buy a bunch of these, connect them to nice monitors and do Numerical Analysis, FEM/FEA/CAD/CAM on these little boxes, versus buying Mac Pros for 50 lab spots.
Apparently the death of Firewire was greatly exaggerated.
Exactly! Only 2 macs do not have firewire of some sort! The macbook air and the aluminum macbook. Where are all the firewire is a pro feature apologists!? Even for the slimness they could have found a way to make it work on the current aluminum macbooks.
I agree with you and do not know how much video decoding is currently off loaded to the gpu. I have a 2006 core 2 duo "ole whitey" imac with 2.16 ghz and a 256 mb ati video card. I have been using it to test plex and other htpc options. When playing a blueray rip of the incredible hulk I noticed some stuttering when the camera was panning up the hill of the shanty town. I do not know if that was from the way it was encoded or some other problem. My thinking is that a little extra processing power may be helpful and that 2.0ghz might be a little weak for htpc. My final test in the upcoming weeks is to order an external blue ray drive and using windows via bootcamp to fiddle around with blueray playback.
I'm wondering if i just went ahead and pulled the trigger on the 599 model, upgraded ram (from 3rd party vendor), and perhaps cpu down the road (if i really wanted to. Once i go to 2 GB of ram, how do i allocate the vid card to use 256?
Only if they've made the optical drive SATA which would be welcomed in a big way. The little clips that hold the parallel cable going to the optical drive are a pain in the ass to deal with. I'll cry tears of joy if the new optical drive is a simple SATA connection...seriously.
Do we know what type of cables are included? I think a MDVI to DVI should suffice for most people with relatively new (read non sucky) monitors.
How would you support the second drive inside though?
And is looks like I overreacted so I'll apologize. The new macmini comes with mini dvi to dvi, the original appleinsider article has adapters sold separately which is why I flipped. My bad.
Comments
There's no excuse for waiting this long. The real headline should be "Apple waits 19 months to make 6-month-old Macbook."
They really need to get something under the $500 price point again like they did with the original mini.
What's the best way to hook this up to my HDTV??
1) Get an AppleTV instead, unless you really want it to be a computer for your TV and not a media extender. Then you can just use a single HDMI cable.
2) Get a mDP or mDVI to HDMI or DVI connector (whatever your TV has) at Monoprice.com. As well as an optical audio cable, though a 3.5mm to RCA audio cable will work, too.
Really? Apple didn't do something hinky in the OS to limit the $599 to 128MB? Cool...
I don't see why they would. Certainly nothing in the specs points to that.
But I don't have a new Mini to prove it.
The mini continues to have no identity. It used to be a low-end Mac to snag value shoppers into the Mac experience. Now it's a mid-range underpowered desktop in which you pay more for laptop parts.
They really need to get something under the $500 price point again like they did with the original mini.
Do you own one? It's only midrange if you're looking at cheap PC. I like the mini, it's an ideal solution to someone like me that doesn't game and likes having a smaller desktop that doesn't sit on the floor constantly being kicked.
I have GigE ethernet and now I have 11n networking in addition to my choice of monitor. Until the iMac gets quad core I don't see it as a suitable value for my own particular needs. Until then I'll have a mini network with a network laser printer and NAS.
The Dual monitor support is going to yield some interesting setups.
Put in the G110M and I've got OpenCL ready GPU.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product..._g110m_us.html
Add a secondary PCI-Express 2.0 GPU slot and I'd buy 2 and buy 2 GPUs to use OpenCL and OpenGL3.x.
They blew it.
Yes, because not catering specifically for you is an epic fail.
Well i'm in the US so there's been no price hike and I will likely buy two minis over the next year.
Pluses
Dual Monitor capability
11n networking
1066Ghz FSB
Faster graphics
It's a solid deal. I've enjoyed my 1.66Ghz mini and the RAM upgrades weren't all that hard IMO. I'll be ready to build a small network with Snow Leopard macs. It should be fun.
Am I correct in understanding that I can remove the burner and install another HD in it's place? 2 internal drives sounds nice. Just pick up a external usb burner for $100 bucks.
That said even though I have a current gen macbook I actually want the new one, just because the mac mini g4 I've not relegated to being used with my tv is still my favourite mac. The thing is I literally don't need it!
Am I correct in understanding that I can remove the burner and install another HD in it's place? 2 internal drives sounds nice. Just pick up a external usb burner for $100 bucks.
Only if they've made the optical drive SATA which would be welcomed in a big way. The little clips that hold the parallel cable going to the optical drive are a pain in the ass to deal with. I'll cry tears of joy if the new optical drive is a simple SATA connection...seriously.
No display adapters in the box? Wow that is beyond pathetic. This is their entry level desktop, do you know how many people will buy it get home with their first ma and find they can't use it, they've gotta go back out to the store and buy a $30 dongle? Do they think doing this will get more people to buy the 24"? Those dongles don't cost them more than a few dollars to make, just throw one in for pete's sake.
That said even though I have a current gen macbook I actually want the new one, just because the mac mini g4 I've not relegated to being used with my tv is still my favourite mac. The thing is I literally don't need it!
Do we know what type of cables are included? I think a MDVI to DVI should suffice for most people with relatively new (read non sucky) monitors.
You might be right, but I would definitely wait for benchmarks and see how much work is offloaded to the GPU. Also, things might change with Snow Leopard.
I'm not sure that a 13% increase in CPU speed, on the same memory bandwidth, will really change anything. I think the key here is how much work is done by the GPU.
I agree with you and do not know how much video decoding is currently off loaded to the gpu. I have a 2006 core 2 duo "ole whitey" imac with 2.16 ghz and a 256 mb ati video card. I have been using it to test plex and other htpc options. When playing a blueray rip of the incredible hulk I noticed some stuttering when the camera was panning up the hill of the shanty town. I do not know if that was from the way it was encoded or some other problem. My thinking is that a little extra processing power may be helpful and that 2.0ghz might be a little weak for htpc. My final test in the upcoming weeks is to order an external blue ray drive and using windows via bootcamp to fiddle around with blueray playback.
Am I correct in understanding that I can remove the burner and install another HD in it's place? 2 internal drives sounds nice. Just pick up a external usb burner for $100 bucks.
You can, but it would cheaper and garnish you more capacity to just use an external FW800 HDD. It would even be cheaper to buy one of those HDD that look like and fit under the Mac Mini. An internal HDD would have to 2.5" and then you'd have to buy an adapter to the plug and then an external housing or a new external optical drive. A FW800 HDD could be 3.5" and hold up to 2GB of additional storage.
No display adapters in the box? Wow that is beyond pathetic. This is their entry level desktop, do you know how many people will buy it get home with their first ma and find they can't use it, they've gotta go back out to the store and buy a $30 dongle? Do they think doing this will get more people to buy the 24"? Those dongles don't cost them more than a few dollars to make, just throw one in for pete's sake.
That said even though I have a current gen macbook I actually want the new one, just because the mac mini g4 I've not relegated to being used with my tv is still my favourite mac. The thing is I literally don't need it!
They haven't included extraneous adapters in most of their products for years. Better to have the few pay for them than have the many pay for an item they don't need.
If you are buying a Mac Mini at an Apple Store I guarantee that you will be asked about your monitor. The Mini also has a mDVI port, too, so the customers doesn't need to buy a 24" LED-CD. If you need a VGA adapter, go ahead and get a new monitor.
So much for the macmini pictures being fake!
Actually, some of the photos were either fakes (where the person had seen one? or was an Apple mock-up) because the fan holes vary depending upon your source.
http://images.apple.com/macmini/imag...ts20090303.jpg
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....-09macmini.jpg
Strange...
To make it worth the price Apple should have sweetened the deal IMO. Right now, the high-end maxed out is only slightly less than the low-end iMac but with no monitor. If they really wanted to basically sell the same machine tweaked a little, they should have thrown in more.
If they're going to offer it with Front Row included (a good thing), they obviously want to further the idea of the mini used as a digital entertainment hub. They should lose Apple TV and let the mini cover both the entry computer and home entertainment markets with the production cost of a single unit. That means little without a built in HDMI port. I think it's performance limitations are a function of it's size. Keeping it small and quiet (which I'm guessing includes heat-related performance limits) make it attractive to put in an entertainment system. But they configure it so you have to buy an HDMI converter which isn't just another thing to buy, there's more to it than that. That won't get audio to your home theater set up so you have to ad another cable, probably with a Lft/Rt splitter to inputs on your A/V receiver. Just more wires in your cabinet.
The typical home theater enthusiast has at least the A/V receiver, cable box, game console, maybe a DVR. Anyone building a system or adding new things to it wants it as close to "future proof" as possible and as few cables as possible?that means HDMI. HT equipment without HDMI is simply outdated. The remote is necessary to make it useful as part of an HT system, that should be included standard for all models as well. As a computer alone it just isn't that impressive considering it's present cost structure. The low-end should have 2 gigs RAM standard at the current start price. The high-end should have 4 gigs and/or the larger HD standard at the current start price. Those things would make me want to buy one. As it is, not so much; I'm a little underwhelmed.
Yes, because not catering specifically for you is an epic fail.
Catering to those that have over 400 Mac Minis' in a rendering farm is a colossal failure, but it's my fault for no longer being at Apple to make that point.
I'll also remind people that University Engineering and Graphics departments [Architecture and more] would be more than happy to buy a bunch of these, connect them to nice monitors and do Numerical Analysis, FEM/FEA/CAD/CAM on these little boxes, versus buying Mac Pros for 50 lab spots.
Apparently the death of Firewire was greatly exaggerated.
Exactly! Only 2 macs do not have firewire of some sort! The macbook air and the aluminum macbook. Where are all the firewire is a pro feature apologists!? Even for the slimness they could have found a way to make it work on the current aluminum macbooks.
I agree with you and do not know how much video decoding is currently off loaded to the gpu. I have a 2006 core 2 duo "ole whitey" imac with 2.16 ghz and a 256 mb ati video card. I have been using it to test plex and other htpc options. When playing a blueray rip of the incredible hulk I noticed some stuttering when the camera was panning up the hill of the shanty town. I do not know if that was from the way it was encoded or some other problem. My thinking is that a little extra processing power may be helpful and that 2.0ghz might be a little weak for htpc. My final test in the upcoming weeks is to order an external blue ray drive and using windows via bootcamp to fiddle around with blueray playback.
I'm wondering if i just went ahead and pulled the trigger on the 599 model, upgraded ram (from 3rd party vendor), and perhaps cpu down the road (if i really wanted to. Once i go to 2 GB of ram, how do i allocate the vid card to use 256?
Only if they've made the optical drive SATA which would be welcomed in a big way. The little clips that hold the parallel cable going to the optical drive are a pain in the ass to deal with. I'll cry tears of joy if the new optical drive is a simple SATA connection...seriously.
Do we know what type of cables are included? I think a MDVI to DVI should suffice for most people with relatively new (read non sucky) monitors.
How would you support the second drive inside though?
And is looks like I overreacted so I'll apologize. The new macmini comes with mini dvi to dvi, the original appleinsider article has adapters sold separately which is why I flipped. My bad.