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The new Mac mini is almost certainly coming

Duke Nukem forever is almost certainly coming! 😉

Oh, it had been already released in 2011. Took only 14 years and I forgot about it in the meanwhile. 🙄
 
That article is total speculation without even a rumor to back it up. However, they also build a pretty convincing case that Apple with discontinue it entirely.
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"The design of the Mac mini hasn't changed significantly in recent years and is starting to feel a little dated, and the device doesn't have a clear selling point (or at least, Apple isn't doing a good job of communicating one). So it wouldn't surprise us if Apple quietly retired the line."
 
sleconte said:
All they would have to do is release a Mini with fairly current specs to make a ton of us happy - I'd go and get one.
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I'd get one if what I have now failed and replacement was more cost effective than repair…. but then the same is true for the current offering. Either way I would get an update in tech over the early 2009 Mac Mini I have now….

Which is why it is good to know that incrementally new Mac Minis will almost certainly keep on coming, albeit at relatively infrequent intervals.

Having the latest and greatest is not important to me. Having something up and running within a few days is more important for work and life in general…… I don't own a smart phone or any other gadget.
 
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The new Mac Mini is almost certainly coming. 🙄


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CWallace said:
I was long of the opinion that the Mac Mini is End of Life, but Jason Snell at Macworld yesterday posted an article about the Mac Mini possibly becoming a macOS version of Intel's NUC
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Why would that article give you any new hope? There's no new information, no rumours. The author just "hopes" and "would like to believe" a new AppleTV-sized Mini is coming. 😉
 
Boyd01 said:
Why would that article give you any new hope? There's no new information, no rumours. The author just "hopes" and "would like to believe" a new AppleTV-sized Mini is coming. 😉
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Because it shows a direction Intel is taking that Apple could leverage to make the Mac Mini relevant to Apple and Mac users again.

We know the Mac Mini is the lowest-selling Mac model and at best contributed around 0.0034% of revenues to the Mac Division in Q2 2017 (and this assumes everyone sold was the $1999 model). Why would they still even be offering the bloody thing unless they one-day expected to update it?

At least the MacBook Air justifies it's existence due to it being the highest-selling Mac model (at worst it probably contributed around 34% of revenues for the same period - 10,000 times what the Mac Mini brings in).
 
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CWallace said:
Because it shows a direction Intel is taking that Apple could leverage to make the Mac Mini relevant to Apple and Mac users again.

We know the Mac Mini is the lowest-selling Mac model and at best contributed around 0.0034% of revenues to the Mac Division in Q2 2017 (and this assumes everyone sold was the $1999 model). Why would they still even be offering the bloody thing unless they one-day expected to update it?

At least the MacBook Air justifies it's existence due to it being the highest-selling Mac model (at worst it probably contributed around 34% of revenues for the same period - 10,000 times what the Mac Mini brings in).
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The Air is a great Mac product and still enjoys high popularity. The Mini as a desktop is just not needed any longer because Apple ruined it's popularity in the 2014 release.
 
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CWallace said:
Because it shows a direction Intel is taking that Apple could leverage to make the Mac Mini relevant to Apple and Mac users again.

We know the Mac Mini is the lowest-selling Mac model and at best contributed around 0.0034% of revenues to the Mac Division in Q2 2017 (and this assumes everyone sold was the $1999 model). Why would they still even be offering the bloody thing unless they one-day expected to update it?

At least the MacBook Air justifies it's existence due to it being the highest-selling Mac model (at worst it probably contributed around 34% of revenues for the same period - 10,000 times what the Mac Mini brings in).
Click to expand...

It's odd, but almost certainly reasonable, to think that the success of the NUC and other SFF Windows machines may be the thing that keeps the Mini in the Apple lineup. Go NUC! Also, low sales of the Mini is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy by Apple. Perhaps the Mini would sell more briskly if the update interval was less than 1000 days, and the updates were actually improvements over the previous model.
 
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Rene Ritchie mentioned on a MacBreak Weekly episode fairly recently that he was forced to pick up a Mac Mini for a family member despite resenting paying for three-year-old machine. When he set it up, it was preloaded with El Capitan. That's not a good sign...
 
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DesertSurfer said:
It's odd, but almost certainly reasonable, to think that the success of the NUC and other SFF Windows machines may be the thing that keeps the Mini in the Apple lineup. Go NUC! Also, low sales of the Mini is something of a self-fulfilling prophecy by Apple. Perhaps the Mini would sell more briskly if the update interval was less than 1000 days, and the updates were actually improvements over the previous model.
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The Mini could have been more popular than the NUC if only Apple would have kept user upgradable RAM and HDs. If they had a Mini with M.2, latest CPU and ports and upgradeable Ram and maybe the addition of a quad core option they would still sell like hot cakes. But those Apple days are gone and never likely to be seen again. And so most of us have moved on. [Sigh]
 
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Crosscreek said:
The Air is a great Mac product and still enjoys high popularity. The Mini as a desktop is just not needed any longer because Apple ruined it's popularity in the 2014 release.
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Well it is true that Mac customers want portables - 80% of Mac sales are now laptops (and over half of those are MacBook Airs). Of the 20% who buy a Mac desktop, 95-97% buy an iMac (with 2-4% buying a Mac Pro and 1% buying a Mac Mini).

And rather than having an "either/or" situation, Apple could launch both an AppleTV-sized model aimed at media servers and CoLos (where storage is offline via NAS or SAS) and a Unibody sized model with local storage (including an M.2 raid option) and perhaps an optional AMD-series 400 series dGPU.
 
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CWallace said:
Apple could launch both an AppleTV-sized model aimed at media servers and CoLos
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Seems to me that Apple has zero interest in either of those markets. They don't want you to have a media server, Apple wants you to stream everything on an AppleTV from servers they control. And if they are interested in the server market, why did they discontinue the Xserve and Mini Server?
 
Boyd01 said:
Seems to me that Apple has zero interest in either of those markets. They don't want you to have a media server, Apple wants you to stream everything on an AppleTV from servers they control.
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I can still download anything and everything I purchase from iTunes and play/serve it locally.


Boyd01 said:
And if they are interested in the server market, why did they discontinue the Xserve and Mini Server?
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An Xserve was a very different beast from a Mac Mini Server. And in the market the Xserve played in, it could never hope to compete with Tier One Enterprise OEMs like HP, Dell and IBM (whether running Windows or Unix/Linux).

The Mac Mini Server, on the other hand, played on a much more even field and it leveraged all the other things a Mac Mini could be used for so it didn't cost Apple anymore to offer it as an option. (And while yes, you could technically do general PC things on an Xserve, the design was brilliant at precluding you from doing so.)
 
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Easttime said:
This is page 404 of the thread. Shudder. Hope it isn't a sign of the Mini's future.
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It's a sign that the Mac Mini is still here, and that new Mac Minis will almost certainly continue to come, albeit relatively infrequently, though some suggest it isn't.

A few weeks back Phill Schiller said:
"On that I'll say the Mac Mini is an important product in our lineup and we weren't bringing it up because it's more of a mix of consumer with some pro use. … The Mac Mini remains a product in our lineup, but nothing more to say about it today."

CWallace said:
Well it is true that Mac customers want portables - 80% of Mac sales are now laptops (and over half of those are MacBook Airs). Of the 20% who buy a Mac desktop, 95-97% buy an iMac (with 2-4% buying a Mac Pro and 1% buying a Mac Mini).
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Interesting….. What's your source for those stats?

Given that I am taking my Mac Mini to use in class at work more these days, and that I could soon enter a more itinerant phase in my life, I am considering purchasing a MacBook Air, mainly for work. Still not really keen on laptops, and would prefer stick with the Mac Mini as my main machine when I am of fixed abode, so certainly want new ones to keep coming.
 
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I now have 3 mac mini's and 2 Lenovo m700's
The Lenovo m700's crush any mac mini in every way there is (other then os)
I have them with an i5 6400i and i7 6700t one has a 240gb ssd with 32gb ram the other has 12gb ram and a 500gb ssd
One has windows 7 the other has windows 10. Do you really need a nuc sized pc no.. the lenovo m700 can use an i7 and 32gb ram with a 2tb hdd and a 1 tb m2 ssd quiet and pretty much a dead solid pc.

Apple is not going to ever give us an apple mac mini like this as it would really hurt the imac. The iMac is truly what held apple back in desktops. Worst decision they every made was to not drop it and go with killer mac minis and solid mac pros . Around 2015 or 2016 as the intel gen 6 cpus allow 32gb in a macmini sized pc
Just let people choose their own screens. Be nice to have a 50 inch screen for a desk top. I do use a 48 inch with my lenovo.
 
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I'm wondering why people still think it's about not undercutting the iMacs. Apple sure didn't have that issue years ago with the 2012 Mini

My thinking is that Apple decided 3-4 years ago that we're now in the "Post PC" future and that the < $1000 space would be taken up by iOS devices, most notably the iPad replacing everything for low end computing. That was definitely the trendy way to think at the time. That would also explain the period of neglect the entire MacOS lineup went through until recently. It would also mean in Apple's eyes that the Mini (+ MBA) would be the "enemy" of the iPad Pros and Apple would have pre-decided that the iPad Pro would win
 
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twalk said:
I'm wondering why people still think it's about not undercutting the iMacs. Apple sure didn't have that issue years ago with the 2012 Mini

My thinking is that Apple decided 3-4 years ago that we're now in the "Post PC" future and that the < $1000 space would be taken up by iOS devices, most notably the iPad replacing everything for low end computing. That was definitely the trendy way to think at the time. That would also explain the period of neglect the entire MacOS lineup went through until recently. It would also mean in Apple's eyes that the Mini (+ MBA) would be the "enemy" of the iPad Pros and Apple would have pre-decided that the iPad Pro would win
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Interesting thoughts. I can see that might have been their thinking. I have an iPad Pro and a Mac Mini and I wouldn't give up either of them.
 
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