Should I Wait?

Well, since everyone is so hot on the April 1st date, you could always wait until Friday to see if it actually gets announced.

Other than that, it's up to you whether you want to wait or not. I do suggest that whatever you do, you order a MacMini configured with the options yo want instead of trying to add them later.

 

That would be a bit of a surprise, and who knows if the people you talked to at Apple really know anything about the actual plans? The retail people are generally the last to know.

 

Panther is a proven system. Go ahead and get the system now. Every day you wait, is a day you could have been more productive on your Mac. Get Tiger when people are comfortable the bugs have been worked out.

You can get many of the Tiger features in Panther with third party shareware and freeware:

Konfabulator, Menustrip, QuickSilver, and Launchbar provide many of the same features. You can find them on:

http://www.versiontracker.com/ and http://www.macupdate.com/

 

That depends on the place you buy it from. My local Apple resellers have them in stock:

http://www.apple.com/buy lets you find your local resellers.

http://www.macprices.com/ lists several mail order shops.

Wherever you buy, don't get the extra RAM from them, unless it is Apple. Apple's RAM prices are a premium, but if you are handy with a puddy knife, you can put in your own RAM from one of these good RAM resellers:

http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html#RAM

Or ask if one of your local Apple resellers is willing to install the third party RAM for you. I know Apple's own retail stores won't, but most third party resellers will. Just be sure to get the RAM from a good vendor in the link above.

 

Build to order from Apple always takes longer. But then again, you don't have to risk damaging your machine installing parts.

 

Congrats!!! Did you do BTO?

 

Actually you did BTO. BTO = Build to order. When you customize your addons on http://store.apple.com/ that is a BTO sale. Those can take several weeks longer than just buying a raw machine.

There really is no way of knowing how long the order will take except to watch:

http://www.apple.com/OrderStatus for your order and to see if anything changes there.