As I mentioned before, I needed a mac mini this week because I am flying out to my parents place to setup a new mac. Therefore, the way in which apple went about this "update" was inconvinient for me. I didn't want to give them a mac mini without a 5400 RPM hard drive. Disk performance is just not up to par with a 4200 RPM disk.
So today I went on a quest to find an updated mini. The first store I went to was the Rosedale store in Roseville, MN. The manager their was not accomodating at all. I asked if she would be willing to go in back and get me the newest mac mini they had. She stated that there was absolutely no way to tell how new a mini is by the box. So I explained the production week in the serial number to her and she said that she was not going to have one of her employees look through their stock of mac minis with superdrives just to find the newest one. I was ready to pay $700 for the newest one they had and that was the response I got. So I told her to just to back and get me one then. She grabbed one and it was week 27 which was very likely the older model, so I told her I didn't want it if she wasn't going to make the effort of getting me the newest one they had. She wasn't goign to check so I walked out.
Then, I went to the Mall of America store. They wouldn't confirm that they had any upgraded minis but they said they had some pretty new ones. So I had him bring one up. It was week 37, so I bought it. So I got home and opened it up. It has the 1.5 ghz processor, Seagate 5400 RPM 8MB cache HD, & the dual layer DVD burner. I'm going to upgrade it to 1GB as well.
Just thought i'd let everyone know that some stores do have them, but I don't know how much of an effort they will make to get you one. I can also confirm that the 5400 RPM HD makes a significant performance difference in the mini. My sister has one with the slower drive and it is definately noticable with any disk intesive task.
Now here's a question. What happens when it needs service? Let's say I need a new HD and they put in a 4200 RPM one because that's what I was guaranteed to begin with. I will not be a happy camper. I really hope that they repair the mini to it's shipped state..not just to what the specifications stated.