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Those Were Mac Mini and White MacBook Part Numbers, Not Mac Pros

I'm not surprised at all that the White MacBook hasn't been discontinued. College girls love it. They can do whatever they want to it and it'll still be a wildly popular machine. I could see them making it thinner, but the white color is very desirable for that particular market--and yes--college girls will buy computers based solely on their color. If Apple doesn't make one, some POS PC company will (and probably already does) and Apple would lose out.

The Mini, I've said before, is Apple's most versatile computer. Even with the 2.4Ghz C2D, it's still an impressive machine for the majority of users--myself included. I could see the server edition including the faster processor & major storage upgrade to compensate for the reduction in server software pricing.

The standard version could still include a relatively large capacity HDD while the "faster" version could be a processor bump and a smaller capacity SSD. With a Thunderbolt port, one could easily attach an external storage system and rely on the internal SSD for booting and apps. If graphics performance is increased along with it, that could turn out to be a really impressive little machine.
 
theSeb said:
You can easily add eSATA, USB3 and a BluRay drive to a Mac Pro right now.
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But particularly in the case of eSATA and USB3, you shouldn't have to pay extra for such basic things on machines in that price range.
 
milo said:
But particularly in the case of eSATA and USB3, you shouldn't have to pay extra for such basic things on machines in that price range.
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USB3 isn't supported in the chipset as yet. There's little need to add it (or eSATA) as Firewire and Thunderbolt cover the storage expansion requirements

snowmen said:
I want a 1.5TB 7200rpm drive with 16MB cache? :eek:
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Tough. They're not available in the 2.5" form factor.
 
theSeb said:
Hellhammer, how does this chip compare to the i7 2600 in the iMac BTO speed wise?
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Well, the only difference is the 200MHz in clock speed. That would make it about 6% faster. If I had to guess, they come from the same production line but the Xeon gets to keep the ECC circuity while i7 gets to keep the IGP circuity (i.e. Xeon supports ECC RAM but does not have an IGP).
 
Know what I would like to see in a new Mac Mini? 4 HDD with a striped RAID. I don't need terabytes, just a few gigabytes. But I want them save. And exchangeable. I think small companies would love that.
 
Have they gotten rid of the funk magnet that is the rubber bottom on that thing yet? It gets gross really quickly.
 
acidfast7 said:
I also think there's a big psychological hurdle when one enters the four digit price range for a notebook for a university student. Especially, when some competitors are only 500-600 USD.
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You get what you pay for.

Aluminum unibody, glass trackpad, backlit keyboard.

Show me a $500 Dell or HP that has that quality of materials and craftsmanship
The ones i have see are plasticky and look fugly
 
makes sense, the macbook really needs an update, especially before back to school gets going! And the mac mini has been out for a while too... I do hope they refresh the mac pros though... I'm not expecting any huge change there... but maybe some basic upgrades to the configurations, better gpu's, more ram, etc... and thunderbolt, of course... I guess we'll see, eventually...
 
DrJohnnyN said:
You're kidding, right?
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I'm in the same boat as the guy you questioned...

I love my white macbook. She's a beauty. Wouldn't change it for a thing. White to me makes it that much better. Plus when I purchased my macbook(6,1) it had better specs than the 13" MBP at the time!
 
There's plenty of things that can be upgraded in the Mac Pro other than the processors. It's not Apple upgraded to the current spec as soon as the processors were available, nope - they took their sweet time.

For one thing, to add ThunderBolt, and more expansion slots could be added, so professionals can bypass Apples silly decisions on I/O and add their own USB3 (there are too few USB ports on the Mac Pro anyway), eSATA or whathaveyou without losing expansion slots for other things.

The Power Macintosh 9600 had *six* PCI slots, and back then Apple supported *everything* else natively - i.e. all major I/O, drives and whatnot. That would be like a Mac Pro with *nine* slots, but six would be nice enough.

I'm not surprised there's no Mac Pro upgrade coming. It's nearing EOL at Apple. Maybe in 2012 or 2013.
 
MagicBoy said:
USB3 isn't supported in the chipset as yet. There's little need to add it (or eSATA) as Firewire and Thunderbolt cover the storage expansion requirements



Tough. They're not available in the 2.5" form factor.
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Thunderbolt isn't supported in the chipset either, and its still there. Thunderbolt covers NOTHING as there is not any adapters or really any thing to use with it. USB3 devices already exist and are in use.

THunderbolt may be faster, but its already months behind the USB3 market in penetration and the longer the wait the less likely it will be that the market will ever support it to the level of USB3.
 
dazzer21 said:
If Apple were to knock the price of the standard MacBook to, say (deep breath) £599, maybe even £499 as a loss leader, in usable specification, it could make some headway into stealing sales in the mid-range PC laptop market and introduce more people to the wonders of OS X with the hope that they may upgrade in the short- to Medium-term.
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Why would Apple do that? Apple's goal is not stealing market share from others. Apple's goal is to make the best hardware and software that you can buy and to make lots of profit on the way. Selling the MacBook for £599 or £499 doesn't help one bit with that goal.
 
gnasher729 said:
Why would Apple do that? Apple's goal is not stealing market share from others. Apple's goal is to make the best hardware and software that you can buy and to make lots of profit on the way. Selling the MacBook for £599 or £499 doesn't help one bit with that goal.
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The goal of corporations is to "maximize stockholder value" which usually means to maximize profits. If they dropped the price they would have to sell significantly higher volume to make up for the reduced margin. I'm sure Apple has done the research to come up with the best price since they do have enormous profits!
 
gnasher729 said:
Why would Apple do that? Apple's goal is not stealing market share from others. Apple's goal is to make the best hardware and software that you can buy and to make lots of profit on the way. Selling the MacBook for £599 or £499 doesn't help one bit with that goal.
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They don't do that either, they just make the most expensive because their casing is well designed, and they have the market cornered on OS X. They take the same hardware from a $999-1,200 PC, make it look pretty and charge $2,200.

Anyone that honestly think that Apple sells superior hardware is either just ignorant to the current state of hardware, or just trying to give themselves another reason other than "I wanted OS X" or "I think it's pretty" because that's really the only two reasons to but Apple. Apple make average hardware look stylish.
 
talmy said:
The goal of corporations is to "maximize stockholder value" which usually means to maximize profits. If they dropped the price they would have to sell significantly higher volume to make up for the reduced margin.
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That would only be the case if the creation of a 'cheap' entry level model was going to cannibalise sales of their more expensive hardware. It won't. Anyone buying Apple 'because it's an Apple and they know Apple even more than Apple does' are going to be looking at nothing less than the midrange. I think that *one* of the reasons people buy cheap Windows laptops is because they can't afford to go higher up the chain.

All I'm saying is that the Macbook needs to be cheaper than the Air anyway, and that if it were possible for Apple to do it, a cheap-ER version, aimed at those people who are prepared to save that little bit more than what their otherwise affordable, cheap Windows laptop would cost, that would go towards expanding Apple's market share in the same way that every other model in their range strives to do.

As a previous poster has said, Apple thrives on making the ordinary look extraordinary. They CAN afford to make such a machine AND make a healthy profit on it. I can't see the harm...
 
New Airs coming up soon! New Mac Pros soon! New Mac Minis soon!

RELEASE THEM ALREADY. I was all excited for a July 6th release. Let's get going. When's Lion arriving already?

Yes, I'm impatient.
 
LarryC said:
Some excellent points. I think that the answer is that there are those who place form over function. I am looking forward to buying a new MacBook with a 750GB hard drive.
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for a laptop SSD is better, 128GB SSD would be awesome.

for storage you can always use an external hard drive.

SSD == Faster and save little bit of battery.

whether MB or MBP first gets SSD as standard config is the question!!!

APPLE is all about mobile now, laptop, iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.

with $60B the can put SSD (Flash) in all of their computers.
 
ikir said:
Buy a Radeon 5770 (yes it works), put 4-8GB ram, maybe make a raid 0 with 2 normal 7200rpm HD and your Mac Pro will fly!!!

Even the first Mac pro can still be a wonderfull machine. Upgrade and update OS to Snow or Lion and you will have a brand, fast, new machine.
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+1 i added an SSD to my base 2009 MP and it just flies opening files and apps. great decision.

So, doing those suggestions to yours and no matter the MP, you'll see a big diff.
I wasn't sure about the SSD, but wow is all i can say.
 
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