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Mac Mini End Of Life?

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Eric S. said:
Dell moving into the mini market? Will Apple respond with a mini upgrade?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2326613,00.asp
Click to expand...

Just goes to show.....
There is a market out there for a Mini.
The Mini is a great price for what it is.
Apple designs make everything else look so lame.

Come on Apple just upgrade the processor and the graphics and lets all get on with our lives.

I cannot believe they are missing so many potential sales. It's criminal.:mad:
 
Eric S. said:
Dell moving into the mini market? Will Apple respond with a mini upgrade?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2326613,00.asp
Click to expand...

Yep. Lots of cheap, relatively underpowered little boxes coming out soon... Asus has its Eee PC mini-desktop, Shuttle has one, and several Intel Atom based systems are likely due before Christmas '08.

One kind of interesting mini-PC concepts is the $249 (US) CherryPal™, a PowerPC based mini system that reportedly uses only 2 watts of power. It works with the CherryPalCloud™, which allows users to run OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, iTunes, and some IM apps via the "cloud".

main_prod01.png


CherryPal is part of or somehow tied in with LimeFree (CherryPal is the US sales agent, or something like that)...

I don't suppose this is in anyway related to the old "CherryOS" controversy of some years back... :D
 
Eric S. said:
Dell moving into the mini market? Will Apple respond with a mini upgrade?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2326613,00.asp
Click to expand...

I'm surprised dell went with the GMA 965 chipset and X3100 graphics, since they are planning on offering a version with BD I would think the X4500MHD would have been a better choice.

Other than that the mini does hold up fairly well against it, the X3100 graphics and hdmi port give it a slight edge and it has more options, but the base price is for a celeron. Adding a core duo brings the price up pretty quickly, I can't imagine what they'll charge for the BD version.
 
Eidorian said:
How so?

I'll admit the I/O panel of the Dell isn't as clean as the Mac mini's but does that really matter?
Click to expand...

It does to style queens, I suppose. The Mini was a home run that could a been a grand slam. What a missed opportunity. A second generation mini intoduced earlier this year with some expandability and the latest desktop components for $600 would have sent Apples market share up to 20% by the end of the year. What might have been ? Sad, really. :(
 
Bubba Satori said:
It does to style queens, I suppose. The Mini was a home run that could a been a grand slam. What a missed opportunity. A second generation mini intoduced earlier this year with some expandability and the latest desktop components for $600 would have sent Apples market share up to 20% by the end of the year. What might have been ? Sad, really. :(
Click to expand...

How can you keep the current form factor and add expandability? :rolleyes: Have you not got that yet? The only expandable computer in Apple's line up is the Pro, and even there the choices are limited to a couple of high end cards... Why would anyone want an expandable Mini, for God's sake? The whole point is to keep it simple, not to make it a power house! It'll be enough to keep it up-to-date, with the latest laptop components to keep the form factor and power usage down, to have a 'grand slam'.
 
Bubba Satori said:
It does to style queens, I suppose. The Mini was a home run that could a been a grand slam. What a missed opportunity. A second generation mini intoduced earlier this year with some expandability and the latest desktop components for $600 would have sent Apples market share up to 20% by the end of the year. What might have been ? Sad, really. :(
Click to expand...
Yes for $600 that would have been a grand slam, unfortunately that is NEVER going to happen for $600. The idea of a mini was to make a simple, efficient, low cost computer - emphasis on low cost. That inherently means limited or no expandability and NO 'latest' desktop components. The Mini will always be at least a generation behind in components - if Apple wants to hold the price down. For all of you who think the Mini is going to get some huge upgrade in August/Sept. stop smoking the weed and get into reality. If that does happen then get prepared to pay $999+ for it and say goodbye to the Mini as we know it.

FullGaz said:
How can you keep the current form factor and add expandability? :rolleyes: Have you not got that yet? The only expandable computer in Apple's line up is the Pro, and even there the choices are limited to a couple of high end cards... Why would anyone want an expandable Mini, for God's sake? The whole point is to keep it simple, not to make it a power house! It'll be enough to keep it up-to-date, with the latest laptop components to keep the form factor and power usage down, to have a 'grand slam'.
Click to expand...
Agree with most of this except the 'latest desktop components'. Again, if you want a low cost computer you don't get the latest components.
Also, doesn't anyone remember the Mini was introduced at $499 and we are now at $599 for the base model? At what price point do you think Apple should draw the line? I think that is an interesting question.
 
CWallace said:
The Mini looks competitive as-is...
Click to expand...

No it's not. I want to pick up a Mac to replace my PC and don't need the Mac Pro since I don't want to spend that much and don't need an iMac because I have a 23" HDTV. The mini right now is...... horrible. It needs a major update now. I can wait to purchase it but it really does need an update badly.
 
Let's be honest. If Apple moved the Mac Mini to Santa Rosa to boost the CPU speed by 100MHz and add the X3100, people would still carp about it using a "PoS IGPU".

And you can increase the Mac Mini's internal HDD - heck, thanks to using 6-pin FW400 instead of the 4-pin the Dell uses, you can power an external HDD off of the FW port without the need for "shore power".

And it runs OS X natively - no hacks and jumping through hoops.
 
ihabime said:
...Other than that the mini does hold up fairly well against it, the X3100 graphics and hdmi port give it a slight edge and it has more options, but the base price is for a celeron. Adding a core duo brings the price up pretty quickly, I can't imagine what they'll charge for the BD version.
Click to expand...

You're right it isn't a Core 2 Duo, but Intel doesn't market the T2390 as a Celeron. It's marketed as a Pentium dual-core mobile processor.

The specs for T2390 can be found here.
 
snberk103 said:
Only to a point. I don't think the Air is the #1 seller..... but there are fair number of them showing up on the refurb pages. That tells me that there are enough sales that Apple isn't worried about refurb sales cannilbalizing the sales of new units. I think there are a whole lot of executives with their shiny new Mac Book Airs that are starting to wish there was a little bit more they could do with them.

For a certain segment of the market (my wife is one of them - we are waiting for her MBP to die or revision B of the Air, whichever comes first) that the Air is perfect for. What I also know is that our current semi-retired Mini (its currently working as a juke box in the living room) will be brought back into the business world as a type of file server for my wife. The Air is perfect for her to travel. It needs a bit more "heft" for her office work. She researches public policy, writes papers, shuffles emails. Occasionally she needs some computing "heft" to crunch numbers in a spreadsheet, SPSS, or a database. The Mini would do that very nicely. She doesn't need a tower to do this. She needs something that is quiet and small.

I consider my wife as a good example of the market Apple is aiming for. She likes the Air. She likes the Mini. You and I, we're not Apple's main market. For that matter, anyone who is posting here is not their main market.
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... Not my main market??? I like the Air... Lol I don't need a tower either. Towers are kinda noisy... A MBP would do.

Anyone? Lol.
 
not sure if this was said before (because I dont want to go through 72 pages)
buuut

iMac Air? Anyone? Haha
 
Oneness said:
Agree with most of this except the 'latest desktop components'. Again, if you want a low cost computer you don't get the latest components.
Also, doesn't anyone remember the Mini was introduced at $499 and we are now at $599 for the base model? At what price point do you think Apple should draw the line? I think that is an interesting question.
Click to expand...
Here in Sweden I think we are back to the introduction price, 4990 SEK. And that's including around 1000 SEK of sales tax.
Isn't it just that the US dollar has depreciated in value?
 
ralnar said:
Here in Sweden I think we are back to the introduction price, 4990 SEK. And that's including around 1000 SEK of sales tax.
Isn't it just that the US dollar has depreciated in value?
Click to expand...

Sort of, but not in the way that you mean. Apple trades in $$$, so in their currency of choice the unit still sells for $100 more than it used to. The depreciation of the dollar means that the price has come down in other countries because it allows apple to remain competitive in those markets without damaging revenue in its native currency. It also discourages ppl from trying to circumvent their local apple retail services (buying imports on ebay, bringing stuff back from NY city breaks, etc), which can cause a lot of headaches for their customer service dept. So, whilst the dollar shift means that you don't notice the price hike anymore, because the 2 cancelled one another out in your market, apple still feels its charging you the extra $100 that it justified with the inclusion of bluetooth, airport and the remote.
 
Well I for one just picked up a 1.86 MHz mini from Apple and I am very happy with it.

I've got a fairly recent AMD based PC with 4GB, NVidia Graphics, RAID 0, etc... and though it is much faster than the Mini I rarely ever exploit the additional horse power.

I do think it would be nice if Apple offered a dual-core tower that fell somewhere between the Pro and the Mini. Though I will say the Mini's form factor is hard to beat. The weakness is obviously the integrated video fro gaming and high def video.

If Dell can stuff a decent NVidia video card in my Latitude notebook I see no reason ('cept heat maybe) why Apple can't do the same with the Mini.

Penryn Mini's with discrete graphics @ today's price point would be an ideal successor to the current Minis.

Though considering the Mini has been rumoured to be EOL for almost a year now - I still believe buying a current Mini is the way to go if you want a Mini since waiting for the successor you might get nothing.
 
price goes up, price comes down???

I've been contemplating a Mac Mini or hackintosh and keep finding the same basic math. If I try to build something cheap, I'm stuck with worrying about patches and such and to get up to the level of a Core 2, it's going to cost close to what a Mini does anyway. Yes, if you want to go up to quad core, that's a different story. So why not just buy the Mini and be done?

Here's the real question: how long until Intel's lowest end chip is as fast as the 1.83 Core 2 it currently has? That's as low as I want to go in performance, but would be good enough. I think we're going to see a price drop. Low end Core 2's are already getting close to the $100 mark.

Price drop across entire Mac lineup with no Mini update?? With no rumors of drop in Mini supply line; sounds possible.
 
I bought a 1.83 about 1 month ago. In the end I couldn't find anything that small and quiet to go as my HTPC. Yes, I did upgrade it to 2.33 Ghz, 4GB ram and a faster drive so in the end I ended up at around $800, but I now have a quiet pc that runs both Mac OSX and Wxp and can play any file I want without issues. I previously had built a small box to do this, but with fan noise and just the size of it, my wife was giving me odd looks, so $800 was well worth it for me.
 
Guess it's just with all the buzz of other manufactures getting into this market, Apple might try to compete a little on price. Particularly interesting is this tidbit of a cheap Core 2 for US$84.

"In addition, Intel plans to launch in the third quarter of new low-end dual-core processor Core 2 Duo E5000 series, is to replace the existing Core 2 Duo E2000 family, the first model for the Core 2 Duo E5200, using 45-nanometer Wolfdale core, the core Clock to 2.5 GHz, FSB must maintain a speed 800 MHz, but L2 Cache behalf by the capacity of 1 MB up to 2 MB, to further improve the price per unit price of about 1,000 84 U.S. dollars."

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhkepc.com%2F%3Fid%3D1306%26fs%3Dsbar&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=zh-CN&tl=en

Yes, it's translated from Chinese, and yes it's for a desktop chip, but they could underclock it, and it's only 65W as is. Chips at this performance level are getting cheap.

p.s. I liked the translated comments after the article.
 
Oneness said:
Yes for $600 that would have been a grand slam, unfortunately that is NEVER going to happen for $600. The idea of a mini was to make a simple, efficient, low cost computer - emphasis on low cost. That inherently means limited or no expandability and NO 'latest' desktop components. The Mini will always be at least a generation behind in components - if Apple wants to hold the price down. For all of you who think the Mini is going to get some huge upgrade in August/Sept. stop smoking the weed and get into reality. If that does happen then get prepared to pay $999+ for it and say goodbye to the Mini as we know it.


Agree with most of this except the 'latest desktop components'. Again, if you want a low cost computer you don't get the latest components.
Also, doesn't anyone remember the Mini was introduced at $499 and we are now at $599 for the base model? At what price point do you think Apple should draw the line? I think that is an interesting question.
Click to expand...

This has been my theroy since this thread started if they do come out something new why does everyone think Apple will lower the price or just give it away? Not! at least $999 +++
 
spatlese44 said:
Guess it's just with all the buzz of other manufactures getting into this market, Apple might try to compete a little on price. Particularly interesting is this tidbit of a cheap Core 2 for US$84.

"In addition, Intel plans to launch in the third quarter of new low-end dual-core processor Core 2 Duo E5000 series, is to replace the existing Core 2 Duo E2000 family, the first model for the Core 2 Duo E5200, using 45-nanometer Wolfdale core, the core Clock to 2.5 GHz, FSB must maintain a speed 800 MHz, but L2 Cache behalf by the capacity of 1 MB up to 2 MB, to further improve the price per unit price of about 1,000 84 U.S. dollars."

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fhkepc.com%2F%3Fid%3D1306%26fs%3Dsbar&hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=zh-CN&tl=en

Yes, it's translated from Chinese, and yes it's for a desktop chip, but they could underclock it, and it's only 65W as is. Chips at this performance level are getting cheap.

p.s. I liked the translated comments after the article.
Click to expand...
Sadly that's LGA775. Even the Dells are using Socket P mobile chips. If you want cheaper then go with the weird T5xxx/T7xxx variants and mobile Pentium Dual Core chips.
 
spatlese44 said:
I've been contemplating a Mac Mini or hackintosh and keep finding the same basic math. If I try to build something cheap, I'm stuck with worrying about patches and such and to get up to the level of a Core 2, it's going to cost close to what a Mini does anyway. Yes, if you want to go up to quad core, that's a different story. So why not just buy the Mini and be done?
Click to expand...

Abit IP35 Pro: $140
Q6600 2.4GHz Quad Core: $190
Zalman CPU Cooler: $50
2GB OCZ Platinum RAM: $50
EVGA 512MB 8600GT: $90
320 GB Western Digital Hard Drive: $85
Samsung DVD Burner w/ LightScribe: $28
*Decent* looking case with power supply (take your pick): <$50.
Retail copy of OS X: $130
An $800 Mini-killing Hackintosh: Priceless.

Plus many of the linked items often have mail-in rebates... you can probably net down your price ~$100.

Don't worry about patches... the motherboard listed only requires one simple audio patch.

-Clive
 
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