lol
dyou really think it's just all down to Steve ? , a lot more folk have a say , no ?
how many of those apple people u see on their vids try to dress and act like steve?
almost everyone, cupertino is like f****** stepford
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Mac Mini End Of Life?
- Thread starter Dont Hurt Me
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how many of those apple people u see on their vids try to dress and act like steve?
almost everyone, cupertino is like f****** stepford
Good point. Guess I need to starting about picking a good one. I hope the mini gets a significant refresh, but I'm not holding my breath
I'd be happy with a rather tasty upgrade on the current specs, and get rid of that damn combo version! A £399 standard SuperDrive version with a vastly improved processor and 2GB of RAM, andddd 250GB HDD.. well, I'd be on that ASAP. I don't want to see them take it off the market though, as I believe it has its place - removing it and bringing in a consumer tower wouldn't sit well with me at least - there's little point in it in my eyes. Just get a Mac Pro if you want the power.
hmm, if mini is EOL, thn maybe a smaller version of the mac pro (like it looks the same but smaller.) those would sell like hotcakes. a mini mac pro!
just call me bubbles,darling. maybe with the new mac mini apple will decide to put in the x4500 like the new macbooks will have. or have the same igp as macbooks instead of having them lag 6+ months behind.
I'd be all over a Mini in a heartbeat with updates like you suggested ...I reckon the Mininanotower or whatever would be ok ya know ...it's not for the power , keep it the same power the macbook has at least............... it's for the upgrade ability which(unfortunately) will not really be an option because , well it's Apple isn't it...that said Apple has begun to make some parts user upgradeable such as the Macbooks HD etc so you never know what's going to happen , some crazy things have come from Cupertino in the past .....
well yeah ...bring that on , I'd queue up for one of those
lol , ok bubbles ....you seem awfully confident the new Macbooks will have x4500 , why so sure ?
Isn't that just weird, how a thread can make someone post just to say they don't like the thread, thus contributing to the length of the thread they don't like? Who has time to do this?
If I posted on every thread I thought was stupid on macrumors, I wouldn't have time to dress my Mini up like a chick and take her on dates.
You see, for some of us the stakes are higher than just better specs
.I'll admit I thought they'd EOL the mini early this year, but I suppose I'm glad they haven't...
In my little circle of existence I tend to be the person to ask when looking for a new computer, and the mini would have been a good fit for a few situations. When I explained that it didn't come with a keyboard, mouse, or screen, but still cost almost as much as a macbook no one was interested though, and eventually the two people I'm thinking of went with ~$400 Dell deals with 17" lcd printer etc.
I'd love a cheaper version of the Mac Pro (kee-rist, $2800 + ram & HDDs is simply ridiculous for the average nerd...a $1700 single quad desktop chipped model would be great as long as it kept the form factor, HDD bays etc.).
The low end desktop really does have its place, but if that place is profitable enough for apple to stick around remains to be seen.
In my situation (want Mac Pro & 30" ACD, but could spend ~$2750, not $5000), Apple would want me to buy a top end 24" iMac. Not happening, girlfriend has one, it's nice, but it's not for me. My only other option is a used Mac Pro (still too expensive to be feasible) or a hackintosh, which is looking more and more attractive, particularly as the whole process becomes easier. A nice quad core hackintosh and a 30" Dell, HP or Samsung could fall under my budget and provide 90% of a Mac Pro's performance...
Hence I can't help but think Apple is losing/has already lost the nerd/techie/photographer/designer/editor crowd who aren't rolling in $$$ and aren't afraid to assemble their own hardware...
Also giving up on the low end desktop market altogether would seem daft, but I suppose if it's not profitable enough, I can't blame them.
In my little circle of existence I tend to be the person to ask when looking for a new computer, and the mini would have been a good fit for a few situations. When I explained that it didn't come with a keyboard, mouse, or screen, but still cost almost as much as a macbook no one was interested though, and eventually the two people I'm thinking of went with ~$400 Dell deals with 17" lcd printer etc.
I'd love a cheaper version of the Mac Pro (kee-rist, $2800 + ram & HDDs is simply ridiculous for the average nerd...a $1700 single quad desktop chipped model would be great as long as it kept the form factor, HDD bays etc.).
The low end desktop really does have its place, but if that place is profitable enough for apple to stick around remains to be seen.
In my situation (want Mac Pro & 30" ACD, but could spend ~$2750, not $5000), Apple would want me to buy a top end 24" iMac. Not happening, girlfriend has one, it's nice, but it's not for me. My only other option is a used Mac Pro (still too expensive to be feasible) or a hackintosh, which is looking more and more attractive, particularly as the whole process becomes easier. A nice quad core hackintosh and a 30" Dell, HP or Samsung could fall under my budget and provide 90% of a Mac Pro's performance...
Hence I can't help but think Apple is losing/has already lost the nerd/techie/photographer/designer/editor crowd who aren't rolling in $$$ and aren't afraid to assemble their own hardware...
Also giving up on the low end desktop market altogether would seem daft, but I suppose if it's not profitable enough, I can't blame them.
Yes.
No.
Yup, Jobs has decided that the consumer market is where it's at: iPod, iPhone, iMac.
I suspect that it is all just down to Steve, but I do hope that there's at least one guy by his shoulder, saying to Steve:
"Psst! Take a look at how high the prices for used mini's remain on eBay!".
In some ways, I wish that I had bought an old PPC mini five years ago instead of the much more expensive G5 PowerMac ... the mini was 1/4 the price and yet, it is worth more today.
If this doesn't scream that the consumers are putting value on small desktop form factor, nothing will...and of course, it is also another nail in the coffin of all of the enthusiasts who want a "mini" Mac Pro: the used market simply isn't supporting higher prices in 'easily expandable' Macs.
-hh
Are you kidding? I just did a quick check of eBay - there are only a few PPC minis offered there but they are priced from $100 to $250. There are lots of G5 PowerMacs, generally between $400 and $900 (and two are asking $4400 and $2750, yikes). There's no way you could get even $400 for a PPC mini with new minis going for $600.
PowerMac G5s were well over $1000 until recently on eBay. I suspect the drop has to do with Apple's plans not to support Snow Leopard on them. Anyway, what's the point of "expandability" in a system that's already several years old? You'd be lucky to bring it up to current standards no matter how much you upgraded it. You really can't use a falling price in those systems to disprove a market in upgradable systems with current technology.
God I love this thread! It's full of hopeless wishful thinking such as this one, with infeasible high specs for a price tag worth of Best Buy! You're talking about Apple my man, home of high priced outdated once-was-high tech we're-gonna-burry-Mac Mini! We'll be lucky to have A) an updated Mini at all and B) some respectable ENTRY LEVEL specs like say a 6 months old MacBook.Keep it real friend! (get real first though...)
I see them moving to the Intel 4500 GPU and getting some nice Penryn or better processors. The Mini really does sell well as it is stylish and small, which I think is why it is purchased alot. Most just want a small decent computer to do Email and Photos on without the size of a MidTower case.
250GB HDD minimum
2GB RAM minimum
SuperDrive minimum (BluRay option)
HDMI (I think this is the killer, without it, there should be no update)
250GB HDD minimum
2GB RAM minimum
SuperDrive minimum (BluRay option)
HDMI (I think this is the killer, without it, there should be no update)
I was shopping for a mini a few weeks ago; the trend on completed sales that I saw was that 80% of the G4 mini's went for $300 or more. During that time, the cheapest that I saw one (a working one) sell for was around $250. I didn't see any go for under $200, let alone go for around $100.
The newer intel minis naturally tended to sell at higher price points. In looking at eBay's completed sales, there's currently five (5) new Intel minis that sold recently for over $800. And I'm ignoring the CPU-upgunned mini that went for $1025.
The G5 range has a lot of different models. When you look at the prices for just the 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz Single Processor versions (to be relatively comparable to the mini in power), they tend to be in the $400-$600 range.
Thus, a PPC mini for $300-$400 ... call that very roughly 66%-75% of new, versus a G5 SP PowerMac for $400-$600 ... roughly 25%-33% of new.
The basic Null hypothesis is that there's sufficient critical mass of consumers who put value on expandability that this preference is reflected in street prices.
There's also a second Null hypothesis, which is simply that people will similarly differentiate and be willing to pay something more for obtaining more CPU power. This is the G4 vs G5 CPU offset.
From the above sales values, there is roughly a $100-$200 difference in the respective price points. This is the degree of differentiation.
This differentiation then gets 'shared' by these two factors (expandability value and 'more power' value)...and it virtually doesn't matter how much of this difference we want to say is spent buying CPU power, because its still only a total differentiation of $100-$200.
For only a $100-$200 spread to cover both factors (power, expandability), I personally don't see enough differentiation actually occurring in prices to conclude that an appreciable segment of the market appreciates (and thus, is willing to pay for) hardware expandability.
-hh
So you admit that the mini is not "worth more today" than a Power Mac G5.
Someone may be asking $300-$400 for a PPC mini but that doesn't mean they're going to get it. I think you'd have to be crazy to buy a PPC mini for that when you can get a brand new Intel mini from Apple for $600. And like I said, someone was asking actually $4750 for a Power Mac G5 on eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Apple-PowerMac-...39:1|66:2|65:12|240:1318&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14
Those are the price points you pick. I say the difference is more like $500 minimum. I looked at the first 30 Power Mac G5s advertised on eBay (and I even threw out those top two as unusually highly priced), and the average asking price came out to just about $750. And actually that's not even the actual asking price but just the opening bid number.
Like I said before, I don't believe you can make any conclusions about the market for new hardware based on asking prices of these obsolete systems.
I don't think you can buy any version of the Mini for less than $300, assuming it is in good working order. I agree - if you spend $400 on a used G4 Mini, why not spend $499 on a refurb Intel Mini? Ebayers are going nuts for whatever type of Mini they can get. Makes me want to sell my 1.5ghz G4 Mini and put the money into my next Mac.
Hard to look at Apple in the last 5 years and not agree with that. Buy it, use it, show it off, sell it on eBay and buy the newest version.
Nice work if you can get it.
Mac Mini
I want eSata + extra DVI not HDMI!
So what we both need is expansion card slots. Two would be good.
Accessible Ram card slots, so we can put upto 4GB (min) Ram in there.
Not extra drives - could resolve this by going the firewire external drive [then u can add however much you want as easily as u want], or eSata route (add my RAID). The main normal drive could be flash, or as per MacAir sort of thing, this would help it to retain compact form in spite of new expansion slot issues, and accessible Ram slot things....?
I reckon. And i'd pay a *bit* more for it too!?
t
I want eSata + extra DVI not HDMI!
So what we both need is expansion card slots. Two would be good.
Accessible Ram card slots, so we can put upto 4GB (min) Ram in there.
Not extra drives - could resolve this by going the firewire external drive [then u can add however much you want as easily as u want], or eSata route (add my RAID). The main normal drive could be flash, or as per MacAir sort of thing, this would help it to retain compact form in spite of new expansion slot issues, and accessible Ram slot things....?
I reckon. And i'd pay a *bit* more for it too!?
t
If you really want to niggle over $100 despite much larger day-to-day variances. My point is that its close enough to be a wash, and it is very clear that the PowerMacs have come down a lot further from their original MSRPs than the mini.
I wasn't referring to asking prices: eBay has this little feature called "Search COMPLETED listings".
I agree...but I'm not King, so I don't get to dictate what the real world (s defined by eBay) used market prices actually are.
Irrelevant; the question is actual sales, not "Asking".
For example, here is search for completed sales on 1.6GHz SP G5 Powermacs. and it currently has 11 valid listings. These sales were concluded at: $375, $375, $405, $375, $375, $375, $365, $375, $375, $190, $375.
Yes, the overall average price for a G5 PowerMac will increase if you include the significantly newer and more powerful versions. But if you limit yourself to machines that are of the same vintage as the G4 mini's and similarly the basic models that MSRP'ed for "only" $2000, you will find what I reported above.
If you must insist on including these later and higher end G5's, then sure, your current resale average moves up to $750, but this is based on an average original MSRP of now around $3000, so instead of it having lost 66% of its value in 5 years, it has lost 75% of its value in 3 years.
Too late. The bottom line is simply that if expandability is valued by the marketplace, it must inevitably show up in the open market resale prices.
What I've pointed out via eBay completed sales is how small that that differentiation margin is, even before we try to ascertain how much of this difference is due to other factors. For example, we must attribute at least some portions of this differentiation to the G5's higher CPU performance than the G4, another piece to the G5 PowerMac's faster hard drives, another piece to the G5 PowerMac's larger hard drives, another piece to FSB, etc, etc.
And FWIW, I am a PowerMac user, so its not like I'm trying to "diss" the tower configuration - - my point is that the marketplace ultimately determines a product's value and the PowerMacs, and when viewed in appropriate perspective, while the PowerMac prices have declined like normal computers, the mini ... even the 2005 vintage G4 mini ... remains almost inexplicably immune to decline.
-hh
A much different claim from your original one, which was, "In some ways, I wish that I had bought an old PPC mini five years ago instead of the much more expensive G5 PowerMac ... the mini was 1/4 the price and yet, it is worth more today."
Interesting. I wasn't aware of that.
So you're conveniently choosing to look only at a relatively underpowered category of Power Mac G5. Now let's look at the first 11 completed sales of all Power Mac G5s:
$700, $918, $586, $783, $918, $650, $999, $760, $650, $600, $896.
An average price of $770, even higher than the estimate I had come up with based on asking price.
You aren't making much of an argument if you select only data that supports your conclusion.
You are the one who claimed that PPC minis were "worth more today" than Power Mac G5s, without putting any qualifications on it. I'm not insisting on anything, just pointing out that that is wrong.
And I continue to believe that they are not strongly related. I don't care what a five-year old expandable machine costs today; it's still old technology. Its price doesn't come into my desire to buy an upgradable machine of current technology. My Power Mac G4 might bring only $100-$200 on eBay today. Would that stop me from buying a new midrange Intel tower? No, I'd jump at the chance to buy one.
We're not in court.
I didn't know that a G5 lost more value than a G4 mini and I'm happy that -hh told us.
And if you are considering price and power, the statement "it is worth more today [than a G5]" is true.
Accuracy is always a virtue.
Higher-priced items that are prone to depreciation always lose more value over time. After five years a Lexus will have lost more value than a Ford, but that doesn't mean you'd rather buy a used Ford than a used Lexus. The fact is that used PPC minis are still cheaper than used G5s.
How is it possibly worth more?A different tack on PPC -
Seeing as the G4, G5 has an upper ceiling on RAM, and CPU - presumably there are some comparison. Wouldn't they be having a run for their money just against a souped up Mac mini at this point?
Talking about relative performance increases is one thing - and i'm not doubting you could probably squeeze a useful relative performance increase from them, but what are those raw figures, and actual increases in absolute terms?
E.g. - From Apple's own pages
Figures are show how faster a current Mac Pro 8-core 3.2GHz is in comparison to a 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 Quad. Both with 4GB RAM:
Final Cut Pro 1.8x
Photoshop CS3 1.6x
Maya 2008 2.1x
Modo 301 4.0x
Cinebench 10.1 3.0x
LogicPro 8.01 ~2.4x
OsiriX 1.2x
PyMOL 2.1x
XCode 3.0 2.8x
Integer and FloPS not given versus G5, but the Mac Pro used did still show a 1.3-1.6x performance increase.
Ok - so that Mac Pro 3.2GHz is running 2x Xeon 5400(X5482 I think) 3.2GHz Harpertown processors. Not to go too way off topic, but i'd imagine any soon to be published stats comparing the current Harpertown Xeon versus an upcoming Gainstown Core i7/Nehalem would show a decent bump... at some point. Till then, the X5492 quad-core Xeon 3.4GHz processor's out now.
Intel has already said that Gainestown - the DP server Nehalem chip - is the famongst the first from the Nehalem stable. With a volume ramp for 1H 2009, it'll be out (maybe not from Apple until WWDC) by the summer, and Snow Leopard i'd say.
I'd reckon you'd say you could see a ~25% relative speed when comparing a top end Gainestown configured Mac Pro, with a current one. Ballpark guess, that'd make a high end Nehalem Mac Pro ~50% faster than any G5.
It'd be darn hard to get an absolute performance boost from a PPC machine that would compare with one for a Nehalem Mac Pro. We don't have to wait long really, as Intel's already said they'll be spilling some of the beans about the benchmarks for Nehalem at IDF Taipei, in Taiwan, which is about a month away (October 20-21 '08).
E.g. 3.2GHz Bloomfield on display blitzed trounced the benchmark by an insane margin.
Utilising four cores and eight threads, the CPU made short work of the benchmark in just 19 seconds and scoring more than 45,800 CB points.
A Core 2 Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz got ~ 12,000 Cinebench points
and when overclocked to 4.0 GHz ~ 15,000 points
Nehalem 3.2GHz? 45,800 CB points. Article here. There's a thread on Macrumors here, but i wouldn't be sure how to make sure like was being compared with like.
Some more Cinebench stats from anandtech,here basically showing an early Nehalem 2.6GHz on an early platform was running faster than the fastest 3.2GHzz Penryns.
In the end, even if PPC did get support, they would still be showing their age with the models in the pipeline, that are going to be more suited to use the new features coming. Maybe even at a rather competitive price point too...
Sweet F.A. to do with Mac mini EOL, I know!
Is the number of people waiting out for a Mac mini refresh gradually diminishing? Turning to a Macbook (or waiting out for the October refresh?)
Seeing as the G4, G5 has an upper ceiling on RAM, and CPU - presumably there are some comparison. Wouldn't they be having a run for their money just against a souped up Mac mini at this point?
Talking about relative performance increases is one thing - and i'm not doubting you could probably squeeze a useful relative performance increase from them, but what are those raw figures, and actual increases in absolute terms?
E.g. - From Apple's own pages
Figures are show how faster a current Mac Pro 8-core 3.2GHz is in comparison to a 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 Quad. Both with 4GB RAM:
Final Cut Pro 1.8x
Photoshop CS3 1.6x
Maya 2008 2.1x
Modo 301 4.0x
Cinebench 10.1 3.0x
LogicPro 8.01 ~2.4x
OsiriX 1.2x
PyMOL 2.1x
XCode 3.0 2.8x
Integer and FloPS not given versus G5, but the Mac Pro used did still show a 1.3-1.6x performance increase.
Ok - so that Mac Pro 3.2GHz is running 2x Xeon 5400(X5482 I think) 3.2GHz Harpertown processors. Not to go too way off topic, but i'd imagine any soon to be published stats comparing the current Harpertown Xeon versus an upcoming Gainstown Core i7/Nehalem would show a decent bump... at some point. Till then, the X5492 quad-core Xeon 3.4GHz processor's out now.
Intel has already said that Gainestown - the DP server Nehalem chip - is the famongst the first from the Nehalem stable. With a volume ramp for 1H 2009, it'll be out (maybe not from Apple until WWDC) by the summer, and Snow Leopard i'd say.
I'd reckon you'd say you could see a ~25% relative speed when comparing a top end Gainestown configured Mac Pro, with a current one. Ballpark guess, that'd make a high end Nehalem Mac Pro ~50% faster than any G5.
It'd be darn hard to get an absolute performance boost from a PPC machine that would compare with one for a Nehalem Mac Pro. We don't have to wait long really, as Intel's already said they'll be spilling some of the beans about the benchmarks for Nehalem at IDF Taipei, in Taiwan, which is about a month away (October 20-21 '08).
E.g. 3.2GHz Bloomfield on display blitzed trounced the benchmark by an insane margin.
Utilising four cores and eight threads, the CPU made short work of the benchmark in just 19 seconds and scoring more than 45,800 CB points.
A Core 2 Extreme QX9770 3.2GHz got ~ 12,000 Cinebench points
and when overclocked to 4.0 GHz ~ 15,000 points
Nehalem 3.2GHz? 45,800 CB points. Article here. There's a thread on Macrumors here, but i wouldn't be sure how to make sure like was being compared with like.
Some more Cinebench stats from anandtech,here basically showing an early Nehalem 2.6GHz on an early platform was running faster than the fastest 3.2GHzz Penryns.
In the end, even if PPC did get support, they would still be showing their age with the models in the pipeline, that are going to be more suited to use the new features coming. Maybe even at a rather competitive price point too...
Sweet F.A. to do with Mac mini EOL, I know!
Is the number of people waiting out for a Mac mini refresh gradually diminishing? Turning to a Macbook (or waiting out for the October refresh?)
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