TUAW is one of the least reliable sources of Mac rumors. This is nothing more than a guess pulled from other recent rumors. Please don't give them credit when Apple come out with a new Mac mini.
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Mac Mini to Launch at Macworld San Francisco?
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That is kind of my point. I didn't mean perfect fit in terms of performance...
On a big hard drive
On your open source storage solution, streaming round the house and out your router of course?!
Er, yeah, like a super-massive RAID or three you mean?! I'm really not buying upwards of 6 or 7TB of storage and then spending the time and effort of ripping every DVD I own just because Apple might not want to include an optical drive thanks. And that doesn't even begin to address the Blu-ray situation (please don't even think about saying I should use AnyDVD on windows... plus that would involve buying a Blu-ray drive anyway, in order to rip them, so it would defeat the object, no?!)
My current TV is only 720P / 1080i or I'd test it now, but my MacBook (GMA950, like the current mini) outputs 1080i to my TV absolutely fine, no dropped frames when playing back 1080p trailers. Looking online, it seems the option for 1080p is there if you look for it hard enough in sys prefs/displays. So I cant' see why the mini wouldn't already do 1080p.
Yeah, an array full of cheap disks - for the many benefits, not because 'apple might not include an optical' (which I guess unfortunately, they will). Ripping disks isn't any effort, but it is a lot of time - which is why you should have started ages ago!
Not sure what you're talking about 'defeating the object'. If you want to watch blu-rays, you're going to have to buy a drive, inside a mini or not. I suggest using anydvd on windows.
You can cheat a fair bit of time with an internet connection and legality ignorance.
What stops most people switching to Macs?
PRICE PRICE PRICE.
Over the last year or so, pretty much everyone i know wants to switch, but i can't recommend anything to them that at the end of the day can't be done half the price cheaper by a windows based computer. iMacs are expensive, end of story, so too are the laptops, 13" screens simply aren't big enough for the majority of people, and Mac Pros are just way too big and powerful for the majority of people too. On paper the Mac Mini should have been the perfect Mac to recommend to most people wanting to make the switch, but i haven't been able to recommend it because the current specs were so crap.
and now there won't be firewire?! what do i say to people wanting to use Final Cut to edit DV and HDV projects, or pretty much any format other than AVCHD?
me: "yeah now the Mac Mini has the CPU and GPU power to run Final Cut satisfactorily, and you can use a cheaper monitor or the one you already have as well as your own non-apple mouse and keyboard that you love, but wait you can't ingest or output your footage with the Mini or use a firewire scratch disk, you'll need to buy a macbook pro, imac or mac pro to do that, oh and you would have been able to use the mac mini as a hassle free and cool HTPC but you will need to buy a $35 adapter to use the mini display port, and you'll need to run audio separately because there's no HDMI, oh yeah and all that media you have daisy chained on your external hard drives by firewire, you will need to buy bigger hard drives to move that stuff to and probably buy a powered USB hub so that you can still use your mouse & keyboard, plug in your MP3 player, use your USB flash drive, and if you want to watch a Blu Ray, you will need to buy an external drive, and most likely have to disconnect a USB device so you can connect it.. oh yeah and you will need to get a copy of windows and use bootcamp, or parallels to play it"
friend: "can i not just get some acer laptop or small dell desktop for more or less the same price, same spec, maybe even better, and do pretty much all those things, and more, like playing games too?"
me: "yeah but you won't be able to run Final Cut"
friend: "guess i'll have to learn Avid, Vegas or Premiere then, i'm sure Final Cut isn't the be all and end all of non linear editing"
me: "you suck"
friend: "yeah well at least i can use the bluetooth on my phone to actually do stuff, other than get crappy signal on a headset"
Apple, please don't remove firewire from the Mac Mini, let people enjoy your great OS, give us an affordable Mac, one that has the features and usability people need, give us a mini Mac Pro.. PLEEEEEEASE!!! i myself want a Mini to use as my dream HTPC, and i know plenty of others who do too.
PRICE PRICE PRICE.
Over the last year or so, pretty much everyone i know wants to switch, but i can't recommend anything to them that at the end of the day can't be done half the price cheaper by a windows based computer. iMacs are expensive, end of story, so too are the laptops, 13" screens simply aren't big enough for the majority of people, and Mac Pros are just way too big and powerful for the majority of people too. On paper the Mac Mini should have been the perfect Mac to recommend to most people wanting to make the switch, but i haven't been able to recommend it because the current specs were so crap.
and now there won't be firewire?! what do i say to people wanting to use Final Cut to edit DV and HDV projects, or pretty much any format other than AVCHD?
me: "yeah now the Mac Mini has the CPU and GPU power to run Final Cut satisfactorily, and you can use a cheaper monitor or the one you already have as well as your own non-apple mouse and keyboard that you love, but wait you can't ingest or output your footage with the Mini or use a firewire scratch disk, you'll need to buy a macbook pro, imac or mac pro to do that, oh and you would have been able to use the mac mini as a hassle free and cool HTPC but you will need to buy a $35 adapter to use the mini display port, and you'll need to run audio separately because there's no HDMI, oh yeah and all that media you have daisy chained on your external hard drives by firewire, you will need to buy bigger hard drives to move that stuff to and probably buy a powered USB hub so that you can still use your mouse & keyboard, plug in your MP3 player, use your USB flash drive, and if you want to watch a Blu Ray, you will need to buy an external drive, and most likely have to disconnect a USB device so you can connect it.. oh yeah and you will need to get a copy of windows and use bootcamp, or parallels to play it"
friend: "can i not just get some acer laptop or small dell desktop for more or less the same price, same spec, maybe even better, and do pretty much all those things, and more, like playing games too?"
me: "yeah but you won't be able to run Final Cut"
friend: "guess i'll have to learn Avid, Vegas or Premiere then, i'm sure Final Cut isn't the be all and end all of non linear editing"
me: "you suck"
friend: "yeah well at least i can use the bluetooth on my phone to actually do stuff, other than get crappy signal on a headset"
Apple, please don't remove firewire from the Mac Mini, let people enjoy your great OS, give us an affordable Mac, one that has the features and usability people need, give us a mini Mac Pro.. PLEEEEEEASE!!! i myself want a Mini to use as my dream HTPC, and i know plenty of others who do too.
Can you elaborate on what "screaming" means to you? Your use of the word is ambiguous. Is that faster than the external FW400 drive?
Here were my testing conditions.
Computer: 1.66 gHz Core Duo Mac Mini with 2 gb RAM.
Benchmark software: Intech SpeedTools
Internal drive: Seagate 2.5" 120gb Momentus SATA drive, 5400 rpm with 8 mb cache; 1.5 gbps SATA bus
External drive: Seagate 3.5" 500gb Barracuda PATA drive, 7200 rpm with 16 mb cache; Neptune FW400 enclosure with Oxford 911+ controller; 400 mbps FW bus
I had about 80gb of the internal drive occupied with OS X, various applications and user account info. I initialized the Neptune and used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the internal drive to the external drive. I ejected and disconnected the FW drive and ran SpeedTools. I then rebooted the computer using the Neptune FW drive and reran SpeedTools. The internal drive won nearly every hard drive benchmark.
The DVD's should be backed up to hard drives and run through iTunes with an AppleTV, Mac Mini media server, etc.
I don't know what to tell you about the Blu-rays, I believe it is a very high quality but ultimately dead end product category. I have a box of Laserdiscs as well.
Because there's no such thing as movies on DVD, nor services like Netflix.
I'm speaking for the future. The end design is the death of physical media.
Most graphic designers don't need powerful GPUs to do their work. All they need is a really good display (and a computer capable of driving that display at the native resolution in 24-bit per pixel).
Again, I'm really not going to purchase TBs of storage just to back up several hundred DVDs (which would frankly take months to do on its own). I struggle to manage to deal with all the captured TV and music I have on my drives now without adding my entire back catalogue of movies.
As far as Blu-ray goes, it's already more successful than Laserdisc IMHO. Dead end? well only like any format that will be superseded in time. Vinyl, tape cassettes and CDs are a 'dead end' if you like. I think 2009 will be the year when we finally see how hollow the promises of downloads solving everything are, and Blu-ray will really gain traction. I even expect Apple to capitulate finally, though it might not be with the Mini, or in January. But I'd like it to be.
One day, when storage is even more plentiful and cheap, and when downloadable content is actually feasible for everyone because we have a proper fast internet without silly caps and bandwidth limitations to all but city-dwellers you're right, it'll be silly to keep using discs. But just because it's possible to spend loads of money on ridiculous amounts of storage and network it to a media playing device like an AppleTV etc, that doesn't automatically make it a better option than an optical drive, at least not in the next week
But hey, make it an option to have an optical (preferably Blu-ray) drive or additional hard disk like the rumour says, by all means.
Depends, some more complex work can be aided by a better graphics card / chipset. If you're doing design for screen and not working with immense vector or bitmap layered pieces then the Intel 945GM will do fine. Having the nVidia 9400 will be a much more capable piece of hardware and effectively improve system performance in addition to performance to software that can take advantage of it. With Snow Leopard coming along and the possibilities of having OpenCL share the workload of the main CPU on to the GPU, it could just mean more overall performance for the Mac mini.
Regarding the 1080p discussion on the last thread or so. Yes the Mac mini can drive a resolution of 1920 x 1200, however it currently cannot decode 1080p video.
I don't think anyone disputes that, but the point being made is that the current Mini is probably good enough for most of such work. Notable exceptions are Color, Motion, Aperture, Photoshop CS4 (but not CS3) and Pixelmator, which all leverage the gpu. Otherwise, cpu is king on Macs.
There is no such thing as "decoding 1080p". There is decoding of compressed video, such as MPEG-2 (which the GMA950 can do), VC-1 and AVC (which it cannot do), but size is not an issue so long as it does not exceed 1920x1200 and 24fps (and maybe even 30fps). It's also not relevant since the cpu does all the decoding anyway under OS X (which should change, as you pointed out, with OpenCL - hopefully), other than for the Apple TV 2 software. It's also functionally meaningless since a 2 gHz Mini can already play 1080p Blu-ray content, provided it's been decrypted and de-HDCP'd, and you have the right software.
You can get a serious amount of storage space for the price of a mac mini. You mention several hundred dvds, probably wouldn't even need more than a couple of disks without redundancy anyway.
With some disks, an old recycled pc with a resale value of 0, some free software and an old xbox with xbmc by every tv you could have a jaw dropping system for your collection and loads of money spare.
I'm not sure what your options are or where you live, but if you're not happy with your isp, change it.
I don't think size is as much of an issue as heat. Put that 12v line in there for the drive in combination with the cpu's heat and you're going to need some active cooling. That kind of goes against the Mini's historical design. About the only time my Mini's fan comes on is when I do Handbrake encodes.
Apple likes to keep the form factor same/similar across their various products:
Mac Mini Intel-------- 6.5x6.5 - 2006 Feb. 28
Airport Extreme N--- 6.5x6.5 - 2007 Jan. 9
AppleTV--------------- 7.7x7.7 - 2007 Jan. 9
Time Capsule--------- 7.7x7.7 - 2008 Jan. 15
I'm just saying that there is a precedent for the 7.7 x 7.7 form factor and this form factor also allows for a 3.5" SATA drive.
I'd also like to note that the new MacBook motherboard fits within a 7.7" form factor. In theory, the MacBook mobo could be dropped into a 7.7" Mac Mini with minor modifications.
As for dissipating heat, it doesn't seem too big of a challenge given that there's a 3.5" drive AND a power supply inside the Time Capsule package without any major heat problems. Just speculating here...
I'd love to see it, but I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if it came with a 3.5" drive.
Right. I have a first gen Mac Mini-- the only thing hindering playback of 1080p content is just the CPU being powerful enough to decode the compressed video (1.66ghz core duo). Otherwise I have it hooked up to a 1080p display-- works just fine.
Again, I'm really not going to purchase TBs of storage just to back up several hundred DVDs (which would frankly take months to do on its own). I struggle to manage to deal with all the captured TV and music I have on my drives now without adding my entire back catalogue of movies.
As far as Blu-ray goes, it's already more successful than Laserdisc IMHO. Dead end? well only like any format that will be superseded in time. Vinyl, tape cassettes and CDs are a 'dead end' if you like. I think 2009 will be the year when we finally see how hollow the promises of downloads solving everything are, and Blu-ray will really gain traction. I even expect Apple to capitulate finally, though it might not be with the Mini, or in January. But I'd like it to be.
One day, when storage is even more plentiful and cheap, and when downloadable content is actually feasible for everyone because we have a proper fast internet without silly caps and bandwidth limitations to all but city-dwellers you're right, it'll be silly to keep using discs. But just because it's possible to spend loads of money on ridiculous amounts of storage and network it to a media playing device like an AppleTV etc, that doesn't automatically make it a better option than an optical drive, at least not in the next week
But hey, make it an option to have an optical (preferably Blu-ray) drive or additional hard disk like the rumour says, by all means.
Well made points!
To be clear, I'm not ANTI Blu-Ray or anything, I just don't see Apple doing it because it doesn't support their strategy. Like you say, the only way they would do it is if they are forced to. (Blu-Ray becomes a defacto standard, where my Mom has one)