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Mac Mini To Be Discontinued?

:(

Just a quickie,

I have 'switched' 8 people in the last 2 years. 4 of them bought Mini's. Including my brother with his 1.66GHz. They are fantastic little machines, and I'm pretty sure after this long Apple must have had enough cost-reduction projects to pull a profit from them.

I'm also pretty sure you can ouput 1080p (through VGA?) from them no probs. (please correct if I'm wrong)

I have always had my eye on a Mini as a server. The lack of a gaming GPU ensures use for little else. Can anyone on here photoshop a cube-sized aluminium Mini/Cube hybrid? I think that (as the a new hybrid :apple:TV / Mini) would look so cool.

Common Apple, geeks love the Mini too, just allow it to support more RAM and the newer Intel Chips! :)
 
johnee said:
aside from cost, i don't see a valid customer base for it. it's like a imac on training wheels that's not to be trusted to be given a real design point.
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PR firms that have the LCDs and keyboards but need a word processing station. 599 vs 1k? Ya, they'll go for 599.
 
I hope it's true

I hope it's true because Apple has to dumb down OSX in order to handle the slower machines. With them out of the way, Apple's next cat can hopefully make a bigger leap without the mini weighing it down.
 
epochblue said:
I hope not too! I have fairly grandiose plans for a mini once I have enough money to buy one, a couple of 1TB drives, and an eye-TV. ....perhaps you can see where I'm going with that.
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I just bought a refurb Mini to use as a media server (third Mac in 18 months - not because of any trouble with the other two) Currently, I have a four year old SDTV with s-video and composite inputs, so no :apple:TV for me. When we upgrade to a HD TV the Mini will be able to drive video to it.

It only has a 60GB HDD so I only have our music (27GB), some movies, TV shows, and the complete Dora the Explorer seasons 1 and 2 on it, but I'll either upgrade the drive (WD have recently announced a 250GB 2.5" drive @ $200) or get an external ministack enclosure and stick a 750GB drive in it ($300 for enclosure + drive). Maybe I'll do both, but I'll probably wait till I need the space, and prices will be much lower towards the end of the year. Then I'll get an Elgato EyeTV so we can use it as a DVR and get rid of our VCR.

It's absolutely silent, and I am also using it as a media server freeing up space on our main Mac. Sharing its iTunes library, video, even 1080p content downloaded from the Apple website, and music plays flawlessly, and wirelessly, on our other Macs. I don't have a keyboard/mouse connected, rather I control content by VNC'ing from my iMac. I tried a few third party remote control extenders and settled on RemoteBuddy.

Even if I had an :apple:TV-compatible TV I think I would get the mini. Although I like the idea of the :apple:TV I prefer for our digital content to be on a computer not used for other things.
 
BRLawyer said:
Anyway, it's funny to see people defending the Mini now that it's pronounced dead...many pundits in THIS forum have always bashed it because it's not "powerful enough"...just silly.
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And as always, the uninterested 90% have simply passed right by.

And pundits have done this? Really?
 
I love my Intel Mini. My first Mac and the reason I switched. I use it as a HD & SD media server as well as for email/web/the usuals and it's perfect sitting there looking cool and being silent under my LCD TV.

Regarding the lack of sales, I have no figures at all, but consider the range of aftermarket Mini accessories there are. If it sold badly, this market would not exist. That doesn't rule out it not being a profitable line for Apple, but many have gone on to purchase their other offerings.

Having said all that, I'd love for a Santa Rosa based version with h264 decoding onboard to be released. If the Mini does leave the Apple line up, something to entice potential switchers and the media player users to the Apple brand needs to appear in it's place. If :apple:tv can't satisfy the HD needs of the latter group, something (with a consumer and prosumer version) needs to arrive to appeal to both these new customer groups.
 
Steve Jobs probably wants to stream the product line down. The mini and AppleTV are too similiar in characteristics. While I think the mini is a pretty cool idea, most people who buy their first Macs are doing so with an iMac or MacBook/Pro thus defeating its real purpose.

Hell, all I really want is for them to bring the MacPro prices down.
 
BenRoethig said:
They also tried to make the Mini as small as they could instead of making it as usable as they could in a small package. Apple's experiments usually don't turn out so well.
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So true. Apple could have made a slightly bulkier mini with a 3.5" drive. This alternative may have even been cheaper for Apple to manufacture, but was likely not sexy enough for Steve.

Everyone has their own ideas about how the mini could be improved, a 3.5" HD would have done this at the same price point.
 
Rocket Rion said:
I hope it's true because Apple has to dumb down OSX in order to handle the slower machines. With them out of the way, Apple's next cat can hopefully make a bigger leap without the mini weighing it down.
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A ridiculous assertion. If my dual-core 1.67GHz/1.25GB machine is really holding the OS back, then I'm terrified to see what's coming down the pipeline. Perhaps every image will be vectorized with procedurally-generated sound effects to match, and we'll have a 3-D dock, checksummed swap reads/writes, and all kernel messages will be encrypted?

Edit: Core FinalCutPro?
 
Oh Nooooo....

But on second thought, if they replace it with a nano, pico, femto, whatever, that would be great. I do engineering design services and travel often between customers and a remote design center. The Mac Mini is my primary design platform and intrepid travel companion. Everyone has monitors, keyboards and mice available to use while visiting which makes toteing just the headless Mini around quite viable and pleasant travel experience. Being that I regularly consume ALL of the Mac Mini IO plugs, having good IO is important to me. I could live with or without the CD/DVD player. If the Mac Mini is replaced with, let's theoretically say, the iPhone, I'd use it as my primary design/travel companion if it could sport the same or better processor power and maybe a full-featured docking station. I can only hope.

Fletcher
 
They still need a low end machine

If they're doing away with the Mac Mini and the 17" iMac, I hope they replace them with a Mac Tower. The new "Mac" would basically be a low-end PowerMac with lower end and lower priced components and a limited, but still acceptable, upgrade path so as not to eat into sales of the PowerMac. Prices could start at $600-700 without a keyboard and monitor, and go up to just below the low range of a PowerMacs cost.

I'll take mine in Black.

Oh, and they could hire the guy who used to do Dell commercials, and start a "No Dude, Get a Mac" campaign.
 
The mini G4 was my switching machine. A KVM so I could easily switch between that and my linux box and it was a good choice. an all in one was too expensive and I just didn't have the space for a iMac and another monitor.
Since then I've bought an iPod and a MacBook. This is going to be added to with the next rev iPod, another MacBook (when the wife has the money to buy mine to replace the mini, I'll buy the new latest MacBook.) and a nano for my wife.
This of course is only our immediate plans. I have a two year old, in five or so years he'll be needing a computer for school, which will be a mac. All my future machines will be macs (unles I have a very specific reason for it not to be, like wanting to run a VMS cluster on itanium chips or something)
Even if apple take a loss on the mini, they certainly have follow up and future purchases worth that loss out of me! I think it's a great entry point computer.
 
FoxyKaye said:
Then again, I just recommended we move up to the iMac for the reasons of the LCD, iSight, and better processor for only a few hundred more dollars per computer (less if we buy refurbs and count the time and turnover of locating and replacing used monitors and keyboards)..
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but the thing is that not everyone can afford that "few hundred dollars" more. some are looking for a cheap machine, and paying a bit more even though you might get a lot more is simply not an option.

the mini does have one problem: it's too expensive. when they moved to intel, they increased the prices. back when i got my 1.25ghz g4 mini, it was so cheap that i could buy it without a second thought. had i hated it, the loss would not have been that great. bu now it costs so much that impulse-buys like that are not an option. apple: drop the price of mini by 100-150 bucks, and then things become interesting again. and dvd-writer wouldn't really cost you anything extra. hell, you could keep rest of the machine more or less unchanged!

it would be a real shame if the mini got killed. i seriously love mine, and i'm thinking of putting one in the living-room as well.
 
I'd just like to say, the Mini was my introduction to Macs too (well, after the iPod). Not that I bought one before this week, but when they were released, I thought it was cool that Apple could put a real computer in such a small, quiet package.

I considered buying one, then looked up specs on other Macs and settled on an iMac instead. So, some successful upsell there ...

Also, I know two people (software engineers) who did switch by buying a Mini first, then bought MBPs later. Still, for every person I know who bought a Mini, there must be twenty who bought a PC instead.

So all we have here is anecdotal evidence either way. No one but Apple knows how successful the Mini is. You have to get up early to get a refurb though ... they go very quickly.
 
My first Mac was a G4 Mini, and without that I probably would never have given Apple a second thought. I have since bought several others (20" G5 iMac for my son, 17" G5 iMac for when he's home from college, 15" PB, 17" C2D iMac for my wife, and now a new C2D MB for myself). Apple would have had none of these sales if it were not for the mini.

EDIT: The part that really blew me away (besides the fact that "it just worked") was the absolute quiet of the Mini. I had been used to a PC tower that sounded like a jet plane taking off.
 
NanoMac ;)

Seriously whatever happens that will cause their price to drop, so be it. I want to buy a used one but I'm not paying it's current price. $300 mini would be great
 
Somehow I had a feeling that this might happen. I was really waiting for the C2D mini but I was afraid this would happen for a while now.

So last week I was in PC world and got the current low-end mini while it was discounted (they were overstocked or something).

It still would be awful to see it go though, I have 2 mini's and they are my main machines. My powerbook has been surpassed by the mini G4 as it is a much handier desktop mac, and now I only use it while on the road. The mini is so quiet, low-power (a big advantage in this time of rising energy cost) and convenient to bring along that I need it :) Maybe I'll quickly buy another one when they get axed.
 
The mac mini has helped me switch 3 of my friends over to Mac. Most people that use a computer for the simple things don't need a power house, they just want to surf the web, and play with their digital camera. The mini is perfect in this role. Please Apple, don't kill it off, or at least, replace it with something similar, maybe with better video ;)
 
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