Apple Releases New Sandy Bridge Mac Minis and Thunderbolt Display

ri0ku said:
You kind of just answered that for me. The packaging of music is not important.. its the music that is.. the sound... plus discs just build up get scratched or damaged and clutter the place.
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Scratched up? Put them away in a cabinet after ripping. They stay as pristine as you like and if your hard drive crashes your entire music collection doesn't get wiped out. I've got CDs that are twenty years old and don't have a mark on them. Don't use them as a frisbee and you'll be amazed how long they stay in perfect condition.

Sound? If you care about the sound then why are you content with the castrated audio files you download?
 
Major design flaw on the new airs!

I notice how viciously people get thumbed down for noticing possible flaws with Apple products lol.

The thunderbolt port and magsafe port are on the opposite sides of the new airs. Design fail if you buy the new thunderbolt displays with an air. Otherwise they seem good.
 
Stunned that a desktop Mac lost the optical drive ... why? It's just sitting there - plenty of room for one.
 
Hmmm....
$599 US Dollars
£529 UK Pounds

Conversion here seems a little bit too much in Apples Favour. Allowing for VAT still brings the price out significantly cheaper than that....
 
paulro said:
Interesting that Apple pictures the mac mini with a 27" cinema display.

Why would you buy a mac mini and 27" cinema display though ? The UK prices are £599 for the lowest config mac mini and £899 for the display.

Surely you'd just buy a 27" iMac with keyboard and mouse/trackpad for less money ?

I've never really understood the value of a mac mini though. Ridiculously overpriced in my opinion.
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Because chip tech and display tech evolve at vastly different rates. Your initial investment is higher with the mini/display than the iMac. If you're upgrading on a 3-4 year cycle though, it makes zero financial sense to tie up such a huge amount of equity in a display that's going to have virtually zero functional degradation at the end of the cycle.
 
ArcaneDevice said:
Scratched up? Put them away in a cabinet after ripping. They stay as pristine as you like and if your hard drive crashes your entire music collection doesn't get wiped out. I've got CDs that are twenty years old and don't have a mark on them. Don't use them as a frisbee and you'll be amazed how long they stay in perfect condition.

Sound? If you care about the sound then why are you content with the castrated audio files you download?
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When I said sound I wasnt talking quality. I just ment music is sound.. not packaging. The quality difference between downloaded files and ripped music from a cd is not a big deal to me.... Its not that important to me neither is a CD. Having loads of cd's kept away is just clutter for me.

As for HDD's being wiped.... like all things.. you should make a backup. I do this regularly with external drives and cloud storage. We get no where if we want to continue using lame media.... just like floppy's etc everything has to move on and get better. CD's will eventually become pointless.

I can understand if your an older person with an entirely massive CD collection. I do not... I have around 20 cd's I stopped buying them a long time ago.

I do agree for quality freaks out there that a higher quality download should be made available but the difference for me matters little.
 
Disc media are a thing of the past people.

My current Windows 7 box doesn't have a disc drive either.

BTW, purchase an external usb optical drive for the rare chance of needing to use a disc.
 
InuNacho said:
Doesn't do any good if you want to let your friends borrow it. My $4 DVD of Alien is playable on every DVD player on the planet meanwhile the $10 iTunes version only works on 6 computers and isn't compatible with things like PS3s.
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Why should it be compatible with PS3's and everything under the sun? There's no prerequisite it's a nice to have, having no optical device isn't the end of the world. I haven't copied to DVD/CD media for a very long time, I just haven't had the need too however if you do then the Superdrive would be something you can purchase in addition :)
 
here's an idea Apple for the people who like physical media so they can lend to freinds. how about this incorporate a lend feature like kindle/nook do. you just transfer the DRM rights to the lendee for a few days he can watch it then after the 3 days are up rights return back to you and you can watch it and he can not.

ps i know apple will not read this.
 
mdriftmeyer said:
Then spend money for the external DVD+DL SuperDrive.
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It's not the money, it's the principle. It's another device. Another box taking up room on my desk, another USB port being used by something else, another cable. There's no reason this thing shouldn't have an optical drive built in.
 
Wildhorses said:
I notice how viciously people get thumbed down for noticing possible flaws with Apple products lol.

The thunderbolt port and magsafe port are on the opposite sides of the new airs. Design fail if you buy the new thunderbolt displays with an air. Otherwise they seem good.
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Completely agree. However I believe the cable can split to be used on both sides.

http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2011/07/dock.jpg

Looks like it's long enough to reach a 13" mba. I guess we'll see when people test it out.
 
Wireless Server

What would be really useful is if this Server MacMini could sit in our office with the printers and DSL modem and then we could have other Macs, iPhones, iPodTouches and iPads accessing it wirelessly to get internet connectivity, printer services, computing services, database, voicemail, phone, etc. With a very strong WiFi signal and even repeaters this could be very interesting.
 
KnightWRX said:
It has USB ports, just get a USB optical drive.

Seriously folks, not some big end of the world thing. A minor inconvenience if anything. I bought my MBA knowing full well I needed an optical drive for some stuff. 10 months later, I still haven't bothered going to BB to get it.
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But the MBA is a total different story. This thing should be ultra portable, as light and small as possible and with no moving parts. Totally get it to strip out the drive. It's basically an iPad with keyboard and Mac OSX.

The Mac Mini on the other hand is a desktop. Sure small and portable but a desktop nonetheless. And an almost perfect mediacenter for your TV. It just doesn't make sense (from my standpoint) to remove the drive. It didn't make it smaller, it didn't make it more usable.

Adding in a Blu-ray drive would have made sense but will never happen (I know). It's all about moving to the digital downloadable content age. Sure it's the future. I surely agree. Mac App Store is great. iTunes music, pretty good to, although audio lovers will agree that the quality is subpar. iTunes movies? Non existent in my country. iBooks? Same. And the quality is unsurpassed which is totally understandable given that a normal Blu-Ray movie is 35-45 gigs in size. Try to stream or store that. 15 movies and your HD is full. I'm a real movie lover and can fully enjoy the small details in sound and images you see in Blu-Ray that you'll miss in HD rips or compressed iTunes content.

And don't say you can't tell the difference. Anyone that I ever shown a compressed version of a HD movie (but still HD) and the BR disc saw the difference immediately. It's like a car. If you drive in your Ford it's great and gets you there smoothly. Make the same ride in a Mercedes and it still gets you there. But you will notice the difference even blindfolded .
 
Gemütlichkeit said:
BTW, purchase an external usb optical drive for the rare chance of needing to use a disc.
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So I should keep a external DVD drive hooked up to a Mini just so can watch DVDs? Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the Mini, a small compact box that stores everything.
 
Tulpa said:
The rending of garments over the optical drive here is mind-boggling. You can get a DVD drive on the net for $30 or less and have your mini + drive combination still take up less space than the original white plastic minis did. Plus the lack of an internal optical drive frees up room for other goodies inside the machine.

They lowered the price by $100 and removed something that costs $30 and many customers don't need. I count that as a win.
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You are 100 percent correct! Death to the optical drive...except for the bluray when it is needed like in a real bluray player or a PS3. A computer does not need a optical drive these days.
 
MattG said:
It's not the money, it's the principle. It's another device. Another box taking up room on my desk, another USB port being used by something else, another cable. There's no reason this thing shouldn't have an optical drive built in.
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You're not going to be burning to disc all the time, plug it in when you have to copy something to disc media which cannot be written for sharing to a USB pen drive, when you're done with the Superdrive pack it away,
 
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