I was being belligerent They do 'look' lovely on the whole.

 

£339 is way too expensive. It's 217(ish) quid from the states and even including VAT it's 250. Another example of Apple ripping off the UK IMHO

 

Love the warning at the bottom of the page :

Do not eat iPod shuffle.

 

Neil, when I spec'd one on the US site it was only £150.00 more in the UK. That was for a $1000.00 version. £150.00 is £150.00 I know, but I was expecting a £=$ conversion. iPod's were much worse IIRC, even with a worse exchange rate I ended up buying that from the US.

There's still a chance I'll buy one over there, but as I want options added it might be difficult just walking into a shop and picking one up.

I should add that buying UK produced goods in the US is much worse.

 

$499 = £266.67 ($1 = £0.5344, yahoo.co.uk this morning)
£266.67 * 1.175 = £313.33 inc. VAT

So the price isn't too far apart considering the UK market is much smaller than the US one and they will produce smaller quantities of UK parts so less volume discount from their suppliers.

 

Looks nice, but what could you actually use it for? Seems pretty underpowered for most intensive tasks. I guess it's aimed at people who just want to do word pocessing, browse the net, watch divx movies, listen to mp3s etc). Can't see why you'd want one if you already had a mac or pc...

Not meaty enough for proper use (i.e.what I'd want to use it for ).

 

Exactly how I was looking at it! Im still running Jaguar on my Powerbook and bought iLife 04 for £40 last year so upgrading the OS and iLife I might as well chuck some more at it and get em bundled! Pure class, just been watching the keynote video from the expo, great stuff as always!

Gary

 

Iain, it may not be as underpowered as you imagine, these new Freescale G4 chips it uses are supposedly very much improved over the older G4's in everything else.

I'd be interested to know what you would like to use it for (other than gaming) that it couldn't cope with.

You are however exactly right, its aimed at...
If you want more power, buy an iMac G5, or a dual 2.5 PowerMac

The ideal thing I see for myself is using it as a media server, plonked under the telly, and streaming stuff to "the daddy" upstairs and vice versa. It also pretty handy for my girlfriend to update her iPod.

 

Well (off the top of my head) any machine I bought would be used for...

• Programming (Java and C++)
• Resonably advanced video editing (from both analog and digital sources)
• 3d modelling, animation, and rendering using Lightwave
• Photoshop CS (used with the 3d modelling stuff and manipulating digital images)
• the usual web development / web browsing / office stuff
• and of course games

That's what I primarily use my pc for at the moment, and what I'd want to use a Mac for if I bought one.

 

Java programming and C++ I wouldn't know about but everything else on that list this will cope with fine.

A RAM bump would help with the Potatoshop and Lightwave though, but I used to do that stuff on a single 500Mhz. Some of the developers over at ars are talking about clustering a couple of these using Xgrid for large computations, could be handy for your programming.

Of course though, an iMac G5 would laugh at all of that, and there is of course the PowerMac, which would do all that with great ease.

 

How hard would it be to put a larger HD in? When I think about it 80GB just isn't going to last me the 5 to 10 years use I'll expect to get out of this machine.

 

Again, thats another thing that came up over at ars. It looks like its a 3.5" HD. A "special tool" is needed to get in the box, but I would imagine it won't take long for people to get inside it a swap it out. I was thinking about an external FW HD until then.

 

Well the whole machine is supposedly "non-user servicable" but from the image at http://www.apple.com/macmini/design.html it doesn't look too hard. You can always add external Firewire or USB2 drives. Bear in mind that the machine is quite small and thus may use 2.5" laptop HDD units.

 

I think it would struggle with that pretty old gfx card (only 32mb ram). Not enough ram to load the opengl textures etc in previews etc, and the performance won't be great when dealing with large poly counts...

I know it's not what this machine is really designed for though

I'm still toying with the ieda of getting one. Just too many other things to buy at the moment...

I agree with Jack though, that the 80gb hard disk does seem abit small. I've got 2x250gb in my pc at home, and I'm still struggling for space...

 

I think you're looking at this in the wrong context - it is designed for the home user. A TV box that does it all.

Any serious application user will buy a G5 system, not this.

I, for one, am seriously looking at it for upstairs interent (in bed - work, honest!!!) and maybe with the inclusion of some type of TV capture card, using it as a HD video unit.

£340 seems too good to be true!!!

Dan

 

For anyone wanting a simple (and resonably cheap) Mac, then I can't see the problem with this.

Browsing the net, e-mail, editing some home movies, handling home digital pictures, etc.. Why would anyone want (or need) to spend £1000 just to do that? Don't think it's aimed at converting existing power users, but to try and establish the product to the mass market.

Still think they should've included a wireless mouse & keyboard at least in that price and the RAM is a bit tight.

 

The way OSX deals with graphics is entirely different to a PC, that graphics card is not as big of a deal as you think.

All that space and you need more? I think you need to cut down on your ****

 

And when has anyone ever seriously considered hard disk space over 5 or 10 years??

10 years ago, my Dad bought me my very first PC with a 40MB hard disk. It's only got a 1yr warranty, so next year whip the 80GB out and stick in a decent one.

Stefan

 

>And when has anyone ever seriously considered hard disk space over 5 or 10 years??

I just did. And 80GB just isn't enough. If I can upgrade, which it looks like I can, then great.

Perhaps it's using the same HD's as the iPod??

 

Doubt it. iPod HDD's are pretty low speed and aren't recommended for continuous duty as a boot drive.

 

So how many of you have ordered one?

I got expected shipment date of 29th Jan 2005. Knowing Apple it could be 2006

 

xcode that comes with Plus you have the option of playing with more than just Java and C++ of course, there being Carbon and Cocoa too.

 

To be honest Ive played around with xcode and interface builder and it all feels very antiquated, I dont think a highly productive and slick development IDE exists for OS X although I'm happy to be proved wrong. Mind you that could change with Mono now being run on OS X.

To answer your original question Iain dunno if you use eclipse for Java dev work but you can get eclipse for OS X too.

Gary

 

They must be confident of meeting that date as usually on launch they say "Ships within 6 weeks" or something like that. Looks like they are stockpiled, ready to go when the resellers have their marketing materal etc.

It looks like a nice little machine and I may get one later in the year (when Tiger is preinstalled). For now, I haven't got the space or the spare cash and more importantly I never buy a Rev. A Apple product

 

I'll try and confirm availability tomorrow as we'll probably be ordering a couple of thousand once Apple send us the official release.

We normally get asked to buy spec a , spec b before the release if they have stock wihcv leads me to think a 4-8 week lead time, with some stock filtering through quickly and then a backlog.

I think this machine is very similar to the cube with more clout. i used my cube for years for some DTP work and video stuff and it was adequate. I think this machine is ideal for people who want to swtich fro PCs to Macs and beleive me there are lots of people switching. At one stage about 20% of our sales were to new users who were hacked off with PCs reliability.

Did you also see the links Apple is forging with car manufactuerers such as Ferrari and Mercedes ? They are buliding in iPod compatability into future models !



AllanB

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by JackClark

>And when has anyone ever seriously considered hard disk space over 5 or 10 years??

I just did. And 80GB just isn't enough. If I can upgrade, which it looks like I can, then great.

Perhaps it's using the same HD's as the iPod??

But my point is 5/10 years is a lightyear in IT. We're already up to 400GB drives, so even if Apple did fit a huge drive (by today's comparisons) it probably still won't be enough in 5/10 years time given recent history.

I don't think it's aimed at those needing (or wanting) that sort of storage so I think the criticism is a bit unfair. Apple own description is "affordable".

It's got firewire and USB, so can easily take an external drive if you needed the space.

Anyway, I'm lucky that my Brother gets a decent discount (well for Apple) so I'll be getting one next month. His work is an Apple repair centre too, so once I have it, it'll be opened for a peer inside.

Stefan

 

LOL - I wonder who will post here first to say they have theirs...

Mine says 29th Jan or before

 

At 2 X 6.5 inches who will be the first to stick one of these in a head unit spot in a car?

 

Wondered whether to get one to stick on my home network to use as a cvs server, and also to have a play around with osx etc, but they aren't as cheap as I thought. Gone to the apple configuration page, added the options I wanted (1Gb ram, dvd writer, wireless etc), it came to best part of a thousand quid and that's before I added a monitor...

 

Get the RAM elsewhere and I think your price would come to around £500 instead.

After looking into the tech sheets, although it appears the RAM is not user-serviceable, it is. It doesn't void the warranty if you do it yourself .