Apple is doing market research on Mac mini

If you didnt say a word about its poor Ati 9200 you should be shot executed and buried. Just kidding a little but i wish they would call me. The 9200 is the only thing holding DOWN the MacMini. It needs the lackluster 5200. The 9200 doesnt cut it at all. Nanosaur looks horrible compared to my 3 year old Geforce 3. Apple should spend the 5 Bucks that would make this a excellent consumer machine.

Digital audio would be sweet for media center applications.

Well its good to see Apple is entertaining the idea of better base standards.

Faster and bigger HDD, more base ram (or 2 slors), better graphics card are all logical advances for this machine.

Wonder if Apple have woken up to the fact they need to put back the 17" LCD on the market yet with a 4 port USB hub just for the mini and screen spanning laptop users....

I applaud Apple for making the Mac Mini. They did a great job at designing it and trying to aim for a lower audience. I intend on buying one as my first ever Mac. However, they made a few mistakes. In their attempts to “shock” the market by making it so small, they overshot the size. If they would have made it just a third larger, they could have done so much more. Faster Hard drive, more ram slots, more USB ports, ect…. I imagine that Revision B will be slightly larger with more stuff. I think they under anticipated what consumers might want. I expect Rev B to be slightly larger.

AtHomeBoy_2000 said:

I applaud Apple for making the Mac Mini. They did a great job at designing it and trying to aim for a lower audience. I intend on buying one as my first ever Mac. However, they made a few mistakes. In their attempts to “shock” the market by making it so small, they overshot the size. If they would have made it just a third larger, they could have done so much more. Faster Hard drive, more ram slots, more USB ports, ect…. I imagine that Revision B will be slightly larger with more stuff. I think they under anticipated what consumers might want. I expect Rev B to be slightly larger.

Click to expand...

somehow i don't think apple will change the size... it's just not like them. however i do hope that they will get more standard ram into it and maybe a 5400RPM HDD. the space for the rumored missing ipod dock could be used for something else. and i do believe it should be possible to cram two more usb ports into it.

but remember people that the mac mini is meant to be low end. it would be great if apple could, once they sell more macs, introduce a middle class tower which would have more room for upgrades though.

It's fine

wow, I'm so surprised to see all the requests people are asking of the mini. I think it is perfect the way it is. It's supposed to be budget and basic, exactly what it is. At the same time, I think it is more than that. Even having the option for a Superdrive and up to 1 gig of RAM is pretty good for a small budget computer. I couldn't ask anymore, especially for the size.

Dont Hurt Me said:

If you didnt say a word about its poor Ati 9200 you should be shot executed and buried. Just kidding a little but i wish they would call me. The 9200 is the only thing holding DOWN the MacMini. It needs the lackluster 5200. The 9200 doesnt cut it at all. Nanosaur looks horrible compared to my 3 year old Geforce 3. Apple should spend the 5 Bucks that would make this a excellent consumer machine.

Click to expand...

Agree that is what held me back the most was the video card, number 2 was the slow hard disk. Also, maybe I was just really waiting for Tiger. Anyway, even in it's present form, the Mac Mini looks like a winner.

Brian

Last night i had a little phone call and had the same survey, it must had taken at least 25 minutes to do but i was able to voice my view of Apple using weak graphics everywhere also praised the mini's quality and silent operation. Glad they called me. something i cant say about telemarketers 95% of the time.

Apple doesn't need to spend all this money on a marketing rersearch firm, they just have to read MR for all the info. It's pretty gay to have a 9200, 1 RAM slot, and a laptop drive in their consumer machine. I mean, if they made the case an inch larger around, they could have upgraded the HD to 7200RPM and potential capacities of 400GB.

Apple should just make what we want instead of the games of one Mac vs another. In the end they are competing with their own products instead of product lines complimenting other lines. Instead of Powermac vs imac vs Macmini they need to allow options to each line and let the market do the rest. Macmini& fx5200 would make for a great little machine and would make this a home run success. At the moment the 9200 is holding down the mini with Tiger and a fx5200 Mini could be playing Doom3

I just got a Mac mini something like three days ago. Interesting that they're surveying people.

Definitely the biggest thing holding it back is the lack of standard RAM. I already ordered an extra 1 GB module that I will install myself once it gets to me on Monday, but until then I have to put up with 256 MB. Basically it means I can't run more than two applications at once. It's not as bad as running OS X with 128 MB (which I have done before), but I can just imagine all the new Mac users buying minis who don't know why it's so slow. This poor thing stutters all the time from lack of RAM. RAM prices just fell to about $50 for a 512 MB module, so this is an inexpensive way for Apple to make all those mini-buying switchers actually like the Mac instead of lumping it with all the other slow, crappy computers they've used over the years.

Second biggest is the video, I think. I would have liked something a little nicer than the Radeon 9200... even a Radeon 9550SE, which runs at the same clock speed as the Radeon 9200 but supports new features like Pixel Shader 2.0 and such, and would probably be fully supported for CoreImage under Tiger. But just as important as the GPU is how much VRAM it has. For general use, 32 MB is not very good. It works, but if you have a lot of windows open, Exposé will stutter. 64 MB would have been much better. In fact, it's very difficult to even find a 32 MB graphics card nowadays. Just putting 64 MB on the existing Radeon 9200 would have made me much happier, because hampering a video card like that with only 32 MB is definitely holding it back. You have to remember that although the 9200 isn't very fast by today's standards, it's still very similar to the Radeon 8500, which originally came with 64 MB of VRAM.

And finally there's the hard drive. This isn't a huge concern for me, because I have a Firewire case with a 250 GB hard drive, as well as a 5400 RPM internal drive (it shipped with one). But I think it would have been nice if they had made it a little bigger to fit a full-size hard drive. Then I could put my 250 GB drive internally instead of having to use a bulky Firewire case.