

Apple releases newly designed Mac Mini  - lyime
http://www.apple.com/macmini/

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ukdm
And in the UK the price has gone up to £649 for the base model. The last
version was £510. That is ridiculous.

Mac mini was the cheapest option for iPhone and iPad app submission as fas as
I knew. Now it just got a lot more expensive to do so.

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dnsworks
The extra £139 is because it's prettier?

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ugh
I realize that’s sarcasm but why exactly would that not be a reason to
increase the price?

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bruceboughton
Absolutely, this is how most markets work. Take women's fashion, for example.

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sliverstorm
No, that's not how women's fashion works. Maybe once upon a time, but price no
longer corresponds even to prettiness.

Trust me, my ex was way into that stuff.

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feverishaaron
Looks like Apple has finally acknowledged what drives probably a very large
percentage of their mac mini sales: Techies who want a mac-based bittorrent
box hooked to their home theater. Now, if only it had Blu-Ray...

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altano
Mac Minis make terrible HTPCs. I replaced a Mac Mini + Drobo with a Windows
Home Server + External DVD drive and I've never looked back.

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MikeCapone
Could you elaborate on why they are "terrible"? I've been quite satisfied with
my Mini + Plex setup.

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e40
That's what I use, plus Vuze and FireFox (for Netflix watch instantly...
because it's currently broken for me in Plex).

The only issue I have is most of my files are on an external FW800 drive,
which isn't as quiet as the mini's drive. So, I put the drive enclosure into
the cabinet under the TV. Also, Mac OS X is aggressive about putting the
external drive to sleep, and because of this I had to set the cache seconds in
Plex to 15 just to make there are no pauses in playback.

EDIT: forgot to mention that the superdirve in the mini is so loud that it
can't really be used to watch a movie. Sounds like a 747 taking off. However,
this is not a big deal for me, because I rip the DVD's to get rid of the menus
and unskippable crap at the beginning of the disc.

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morphir
Here is the deal: \- 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU \- 2GB of RAM \- 320GB HD (no ssd
afaik) \- HDMI out (finally) \- SD-slot (which is also very "un-mac")

In terms of computing power, its overprized. But as a product that sits in
your livingroom, problably not making any noise and runs under 10W, then I
will actually call this a fair deal. May I add that its ridiculously small.

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pclark
How is the SD-slot"un-mac"? It's on almost every machine, and iPhoto comes
bundled on all computers?

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morphir
because the way I see apples products is not with a bunch of outputs and
memory card slots of all kind. They are very conservative in adding anything
in which they don't support all over their product-line. Apple got a very
holistic product profile so of speak.

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cstross
Apple intro'd built-in SD card slots with the last round of unibody Macbook
Pros. The secret sauce is that the SD card is bootable -- you can install OS/X
onto an 8Gb card, add some stuff like Techtool Pro, and use it as an emergency
boot device.

Use case: your laptop's hard drive fails so you yank it, shove in a new one,
boot off the SD card, and use your Time Machine backup -- you've got one,
right? You're one of the Saved, right? -- to restore onto the new drive. Total
elapsed downtime from hard disk crash to up-and-running again: 1-2 hours plus
however long it takes to source a replacement drive.

(The fact that you can get photos off your digital camera is an accidental
bonus. Because, hey, your camera is an iPhone in Apple-land ...)

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masklinn
> Apple intro'd built-in SD card slots with the last round of unibody Macbook
> Pros.

Previous, not last (last is mid 2010, SD slot appeared on mid 2009 machines)

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cheald
Speaking as someone not intimately familiar with Apple's desktop line, what's
"redesigned" about it? From the website, I gather that it now has an aluminum
casing rather than plastic, a less archaic GPU, and +$200 on the price tag?

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fragmede
Oh, and the power brick... what a monstrosity that was. Instead of an external
power brick that was roughly half the size of the mini itself, the power
supply is internal, which makes this mini much more conveniently portable.

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raganwald
That's a big deal when you're selling its design. I have the previous
generation Mac Mini sitting next to my flat screen TV, and the power supply
was a pain to hide. It's part of my living room. Design matters.

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lh
Cheapest new model in Finland (and many other european countries) is now 799€.
Previously you could get the cheapest one for 549€.

Apple seems to think that 150€ price raise won't affect the sales, but I think
it will hurt them.

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cake
You could even get a G4 at 499€ in 2005

There's been a steady increase in the price of the Mini, unlike the Macbook.
You had an iBook G4 for 999€ just like you can have a Macbook now for 999€.
The Mac Mini went from 499€ to 799€.

The Mac Mini's pricing strategy is weird.

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Kilimanjaro
As I've said before, drop the dvd drive and gimme a 3x2x2" aluminum soapbar
for $299 and it'll set the world on fire.

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padmanabhan01
I don't think it's the DVD drive that is making this bigger. All those parts
needed for a comp requires around 7 inches already and they may be just
decided to have a DVD drive too.

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Kilimanjaro
Parts can be shrunk (see iphone, ipad) but a dvd has a fixed size you can't
shrink so there you have the weakest link.

Btw, it was 3x2x1" what I meant. The perfect size.

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rythie
Why did they put the SD card slot on the back?

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evandavid
That was my first "wtf" reaction. Although they don't show it in the photos,
the back of a mac mini isn't exactly a fun place to have to poke around all
the time. Cables etc. Especially because (at least in older models) the cables
tended to get loose after a year or so and could be easily knocked out. I
wouldn't want to be reaching around there to pop the card in/out. It also
limits the places you can mount the computer relative to where you're using it
from. Seems stupid. They should've left it out. However, I guess it provides a
good utility for doing occasional tech support (boot from SD etc).

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mikecane
How often would you slide a disc into it? Thus, just have the back facing
front if you intend to access that part more. You'll need the back more too,
it seems, since that's where On/Off is too.

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evandavid
Fair comments, but I'm still not liking it... I've had my existing Mac Mini
for about 6 years and I don't really ever turn it off (it now mainly serves
media). I would leave the back facing the front, but then I might as well buy
a Dell.

I love Apple's visual and industrial design, but sometimes the focus on
aesthetics impacts the user experience, which I think is more important (and
generally something they completely nail). Example: the USB ports on my
macbook are too close together to support most flash drives sitting next to
any other USB peripheral. I think that this will prove to be another example.

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al_james
The inclusion of a HDMI port is interesting. Probably useless to most people
(who have existing monitors or will buy a normal computer display) but does
this suggest this might run the new Apple TV service?

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cstross
You're absolutely wrong about the "useless to most people bit", but right
about the Apple TV thing.

The point about HDMI and the 10w power consumption and the lack of a spare
power brick is that this device is being positioned as a living room device,
not a desktop machine. Add bluetooth keyboard and mouse, FrontRow, optionally
an Apple Remote, and a big TV set and you've got: DVD player, Apple TV
substitute for streaming movies/TV via iTunes, household iTunes streaming hub
(streaming video to iPads in other rooms, streaming music to Airport Express-
driven active speakers in other rooms -- controlled via Remote.app running on
your iPhone), and if you enable internet sharing and use Cat5e to your
DSL/cable modem you've got a servicable wifi hotspot as well.

This isn't being positioned as a desktop, it's being positioned as a
replacement for the Apple TV box.

And for those of us who're into getting stuff done rather than sacking out in
front of the telly, there's th slightly more expensive model with no DVD, more
hard disk (RAID 0 or RAID 1, anyone: OS/X has software support for RAID), and
a server-grade OS.

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paul9290
Im thinking Apple is not repositioning the Mac Mini to be an Apple TV
replacement. It's way too complicated to connect a Mac Mini to a LCD TV and
use a wireless mouse and keyboard to navigate when compared to the Cable TV
experience. Not many in this post seem to be using a Mac Mini for such purpose
(I am) and there is no way the avg PC/Internet user would ever think about
doing such as it's too complicated over clicking power button on and channel
up and down.

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raganwald
I have this exact setup. I bought a cable to connect my previous generation
mini to the DVI input of my T. I have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the
times when I need to do something a little more complicated than use FrontRow.
iTunes has all my music and I have a 2GB TimeMachine with all of my video
content. It's fast enough to play even 1080p movies over the network.

The new model would be even better for this application.

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allertonm
+1: I'm doing almost exactly this with an old Macbook, with a good quality
outboard DAC to drive my amp/speakers.

So I appear to be target market for this product...

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cake
It looks really nice, I wonder how well it handles the overheating with its
smaller size.

No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.

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cstross
Why do you need an SSD in a machine targeted at the media player/home hub
market?

SSDs are good for boxes that are latency-bound or subject to vibration. For a
box that sits under a TV set and spends most of its active life throwing 1Gb
mpeg4 files down an HDMI cable, not so much.

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cake
Several reasons at random :

\- Less noise

\- Less heat

\- Smaller

\- Faster boot time

\- More bandwidth

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potatolicious
Cost/benefit doesn't work out in this use case:

\- Less noise true, but peg a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro's hard drive to max and
see if you can hear it from, oh, 5 feet away.

\- This isn't a mobile device, so heat with regards to user comfort is not an
issue. Until it presents a reliability problem, heat is a non-factor for a
desktop.

\- Smaller, and much more expensive per GB. _Much_ more. Shaving another
quarter inch off the enclosure also seems like a paltry gain for a much more
expensive storage device.

\- For a machine that reboots very rarely, this is moot. This is clearly meant
as an always-on device (hence the low power usage to begin with) sucking down
torrents all day or some such.

\- It's a media-centric device. It will download stuff, listen to music,
stream video... what kind of bandwidth does it need?

SSDs in a Mac Mini would be a Ferrari in a school zone - cool, and done purely
for the sake of style, but let's not pretend that there are significant
practical reasons for doing this.

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azim
For an always-on device you would actually fare better with an SSD than a 2.5"
laptop hard drive. Laptop hard drives are not meant to be always-on. The
bearings tend to wear out very fast unless they spend a fair amount of time
spun-down. 3.5" desktop hard drives, 2.5" server drives, and SSDs have much
better mechanical reliability in that respect.

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sgt
Where is the kensington lock thing? I have a Mac Mini (the previous generation
now) and one thing I absolutely need is a way to lock down my stuff. My last
laptop was stolen directly from my office because it wasn't locked down.

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illumin8
Sounds like you need a new job too.

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sgt
I'm in South Africa. I also carry a 9mm. But a 9mm doesn't work when I leave
my office for 5 minutes and somebody comes in and grabs my computer.

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ZeroGravitas
Their claim to be the most energy efficient desktop seems a bit unlikely,
since you can get computers that are basically Atom netbooks in desktop form.

They footnote it with "Claim based on energy efficiency categories and
products listed within the EPA ENERGY STAR 5.0 database as of June 2010" but I
don't really know what that means.

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evilduck
I'd measure efficiency as energy vs. work performed. Their C2D at 10w is going
to run circles around even the latest Atom processors.

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icefox
Drives me crazy, Apple is the _only_ company that sells a computer at 10w with
this performance. Not one big manufacture has something that competes. They
are all stuffing atoms and calling it a day. So I am going to buy a mini to
run linux on...

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fijter
I like it, the internal power supply is a great feature also worth mentioning
(the old one had a block attached almost as big as the device itself). What I
don't like is the pricing, why do I have to pay 799 EUR (=$975!) here in the
Netherlands when you can get the exact same device in the US for $699. That's
a $275 difference!

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dagw
The US price is without VAT while the Euro price is with VAT. Remove the VAT
from the Euro price and the difference is only about $120.

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jasongullickson
It looks like the old Mini mated with an AppleTV; could this be a sign that
Apple may be giving up on the AppleTV "hobby"?

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mortenjorck
It's probably safe to say the x86-based, Front Row-displaying AppleTV is over.

As for an ultra-thin, A4 ARM-based AppleTV running iOS... I'd watch that
space.

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astrodust
It's amazing what they're doing. Just as the Newton has come back to beat
Microsoft at their own game, maybe the Pippin will rise from the ashes of
obscurity!

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ilikejam
Still no ECC RAM on the server version, I see. Shame.

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jbarham
Intel only supports ECC RAM w/ its Xeon chips, in contrast to AMD where almost
all of its chips support ECC (w/ the appropriate motherboard of course).

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pclark
One reason the Mac Mini might not have i3/i5 has a very poor integrated
graphics chip. Macs are often hurt by their poor video performance, so that
may be the reason we haven't seen the i3/i5 on Macs that don't have an
additional graphic card.

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Andys
But.. this Core2duo mac mini isn't using an integrated graphics card anyway?
It has an embedded nvidia geforce.

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pclark
yes, but its better.

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krugrj
So in order to have dual monitors on this new design one would have to have
both a miniport to DVI and a HDMI to DVI adapter I take it?

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dagw
Or monitors that have miniport and HDMI ports.

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warp
It's interesting that they ship a version with Snow Leopard Server, that
wasn't available at this price point before, was it?

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p0ppe
They released the server model in late 2009, with an extra harddrive instead
of the superdrive and OS X Server.

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telemachos
Yup, and they've consistently marketed it on the website as a server option
for small business. (That is, places that don't want to buy or support a full
Apple Xserve.) From the site, "Mac mini means business. Small business."

I wonder what their numbers are for it. I see zero advertising for this
option, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. And the mention on the
Apple site is clear, but not exactly huge. I imagine it's a niche market, but
I wonder.

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jcl
Hmm... Looks like they made the memory easier to upgrade, but the hard drive
more difficult.

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andymoe
I dont think they made it harder. In the old model it took a putty knife to
open - now you just have two screws.

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jcl
So those two hex screws they show in the circular access panel are the only
things preventing the guts of the mini from being removed through the back?
That sounds pretty slick, actually.

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empire29
HDMI .. about time! now i can replace my Dell Zino HD with this for my HTPC.

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jrockway
Ah, so this is why there was a line outside the Apple Store today. I didn't
think iPads were still that popular.

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tdmackey
iPhone preorders are why there are a line apparently, not this.

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ciupicri
> And even though Mac mini is ultracompact, there’s no shortage of ports.

I don't see any eSATA ports.

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ChRoss
I need to fork out another $100 to upgrade from 320GB to 500GB?? for 5400 rpm
hard drive?

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jolan
Welcome to Apple. If you upgrade the CPU and RAM too you'll be at $1049 in
which case you might as well get the $999 model.

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pclark
the biggest benefit of this upgrade is you can now (hopefully) drive 2
monitors.

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czhiddy
AFAIK, you could already do this (mini-DVI out and displayport).

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sgt
That's correct, I'm using the previous model of Mac Mini (2.53GHz 4GB 320GB)
and two great 20" samsung widescreens. I have to say it's a really awesome way
to work!

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Luyt
Hmmm, I tried putting 4GB in my Mac Mini, but it wouldn't boot (now running
with 2GB). Did you have to do anything special to make it work?

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sliverstorm
Finally, they changed the case! It is annoying having to support minis because
you can't easily tell any of the different ones apart! at least this one can
be easily differentiated.

All the same... nifty, but an extra $200 for an update they should have
delivered years ago for no price boost? Not digging it.

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wmf
Keep in mind that they'll use this case for the next four revisions...

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CoachRufus87
that is 1 sexy looking machine. it'll go nice in the entertainment center

