About to buy a Mac Mini

I am in the final stages of choosing which new computer to buy. I am between a few, either a laptop or a Mini. The model I am considering is an i7 with the upgraded processor. I am considering the 1 tb fusion drive and 16 gb of ram.

One place I am seeing as the most likely to save money is the ram upgrade. I am seeing 16gb of ram online for under $100 but to upgrade it in the mac store its +$300. Does swapping out for 3rd party ram void your warranty? I see in the forums most people are talking about doing this themselves.

Any tricks to getting a better deal on these things ?

What about the fusion hard drive?

I am a fan of having the OS on a separate drive. I would consider the smaller SSD disk then look to upgrade but it seems to be like you get the same amount of SSD storage in the fusion drive + the extra storage $50 bucks cheaper than you could with just getting a ssd drive on its own. kind of odd pricing... sounds to me like they are really trying to push this new drive concept. I am thinking to just with the flow and try it. I have 1 tb external drive that would be perfect to pair with this and use as a backup and I think I would be fine with that.

z4x0n said:

it's 128GB SSD and 1 TB HDD , in total 1.12, i was thinking myself to get the High end Mac Mini or a High end MacBook Air. still confused you could get the HDD and replace it yourself to SSD, but get a fusion drive for the capacity. you could duplicate your OS using superduper on another external drive or simply use Time Machine

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Thanks for clearing that up. Yeah I am back and forth between those two systems myself.

z4x0n said:

If you have a laptop then get the mini, if you don't have then go for a laptop with a cheap monitor

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I agree.. have a laptop already. just went through with it and got the mini. Very excited!
2.6GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
4GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
1TB Fusion Drive
+SuperDrive +Magic Trackpad

All thats left is to find a workable stand/fan combo and order the ram upgrade.

!! !!

z4x0n said:

Congratulations

Edit: if you want to make it Portable then take a look at the Lenovo ThinkVision LT1421 14" portable monitor

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Thanks those look cool. like they might be a little underpowered for my needs. Im planning on going a little bigger.

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Also I am well aware of the heat concerns. I read up extensively in the mini forum before purchase. This thread and a few others is what convinced to be give the mini a shot - https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1519999/

thekev said:

This isn't mentioned often enough when ram upgrades come up. When you pick up the new ram, make sure you test it prior to use. Bad sticks come up at times, and it's simple enough to test, although I don't know if memtest works with ivy yet. That was a problem for a long time.

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The RAM is on the way. I went with OWC, I saw them come up a few times in the forums and liked how they were very clear about the memory being valid for the device I was buying for. Testing is important to me. I will probably make a separate post about that subject though in a different forum and see what the people say about testing tools.