Leagro

Now they've been out a while, I wondered what the views were on mac mini's?

I was thinking of getting one as I'm a bit of a fashion victim & wanted to try a move away from Windows.

I've seen some comments that once you've spec'd it up, it's not exactly cost effective when compared to a similar pc spec. However, I'll probably get my wife to buy it for m'birthday, so no worries there!!

angrynorth

My girlfriends mum and dad have one of these and its mint. They went for 512 ram and the 1.25 and its plenty quick enough for 90% of what most people need. The only area it falls down on is games.

As for price for price costs, that's not strictly true...
Base Dell Insprion Dimension 3000
Intel® Pentium® 4 processor (2.80GHz, 533fsb, 1MB cache)
Microsoft® Windows® XP Professional SP2 - English
512MB Dual Channel DDR333 (2x256MB)
Enhanced USB Multimedia Keyboard
FP / MG 17in (E173FP) TCO99 Value Midnight Grey Flat Panel
80GB IDE (7,200rpm) Hard Drive
No Floppy Drive Required
Dell USB Optical Mouse
Dell v92 Data/Fax/Voice modem
16x max. DVD +/- RW with dual layer write capability
Sound Blaster® Live! 24-bit ADVANCED HD™ Sound Card
Dell A215 speakers
Microsoft Application Software
Microsoft® Works 7.0 - English
Norton Internet Securities 2005 - 15 month (English)
Dell Photo Album
Dell Picture Studio - Photo Album Premium
Dell Picture Studio - Paint Shop Pro 8.0 Premium Edition
Dell Media Experience 2.0
Total £784.91

Now compare that to the mini...
Mac mini 1.42 ghz
512MB DDR333 SDRAM - 1 DIMM
80GB Ultra ATA drive
DVD±R/CD-RW
Bluetooth + AirPort Extreme Card
Wired Keyboard & Mouse Kits (optical)
56k V.92 modem
Mac OS X
Total £627.00 You have over a hundred quid to spend on a monitor then.

So that argument isn't really true is it? There will be home builders out there that are cheaper but I doubt they come with solid warranties and the build quality and engineering excellence that the Mac mini does.

So yeah, I'd say get one. But I would say that
www.demomac.com to see what you are missing.

Markus

Biased as I am, I think they are great little machines.

OK, so the pricing is somewhat steep compared to a PC, but it's the most cost effective brand you mac you can get, plus it's a tiny form factor.

If you purchase now you'll get a free upgrade to OS X 10.4 aka Tiger, which is nice.

You'll no longer have to worry about trojan's, spyware, adwarware and viruses, as there are really none of this (currently) for the Mac OS.

KiwiGTI

They are brilliant.

I bought one for a cheap headless web server (to use Apache, PHP and MySQL) and it has now taken over my PC, although not for games. OS X is so far ahead of XP at the moment and it just looks good and works. The built-in apps are all excellent too and are far nicer and easier to use than PC equivalents. (The photo books in iPhoto are worth the price of the Mac Mini alone)

I have also bought MS Office and iWork, I'm producing documents for work using Pages that really impress people. MS Office is newer and nicer than the current PC version and can be bought for £100, they sell the educational licensed version to anyone.

Even the performance surprised me, MP3 encoding in iTunes is only 10% slower than my P4 3.2GHz PC.

It is also silent and looks good.

Leagro

Would you say I'm better off getting a mac mini, rather than an older G4 for a much cheaper price. For instance, something like this:

G4

I'll probably be using it for internet\mail\photo\music mainly???

angrynorth

That G4 is a decent machine, it should be noted though that that particular model is a noisy bugger. AKA the wind tunnel. So long as you don't mind A BIT OF BACKGROUND FAN NOISE then you will be ok.

I expect it will go quite high in price though.

Markus

G4 offers more expansion (without voiding a warranty) than the mac Mini does. Yup they can be a bit noisy, but they are rock solid.

I'm surrounded by first gen G4 towers and they're great

The machine I type this and the rest of my drivel on is one of these G4's, the only things I've upgrade are RAM (went to 1GB this morning) and Hard Drive (up to 120GB, partitioned into 8), have had it for, ooh, over four years now and it's great

Would I replace it with a mac Mini? Quite probably. I could spec the drive and RAM, no problem. It's just the video output that's the problem, I've got a three monitor setup, which I dearly love, and could not contemplate going back to a single screen, regarless of it's size.

if I were you, I'd go for the Mac Mini