Forums | MacLife

If the story is true them dropping it is pretty lame. How remember AI is a rumor site and has a history of being wrong as often as they are right, so take every article from them with a grain of salt.

Yup this is annoying. Now if they kill the 17in iMac as well, that means desktop options are:
a) buy a decent machine with a giant monitor that you're forced to abandon when you upgrade.
b) buy a really expensive tower

lame.

That said, the Cube and MacMini have failed to address the one thing Mac user have been demanding for several years. People have been asking for a headless desktop  that was both affordable AND upgradable.

Yep, if Apple can squeeze the Mini into a case the size of the Mini think what they could squeeze into something the size of the old LC pizza box. Give it a real hard drive and one PCIe slot, price under a grand and watch them not fly off the shelves because Apple won't bother to actually have any manufactured until they have 100,000 credit card numbers.

Pariah wrote:

If you look at the Mini simply as an inexpensive Mac it is a pretty lousy deal but if you have an application that would really benefit from a small form factor then it's extremely small size might be worth the premium. But...yeah, if size is not a critical factor the price of the Mini aint so great nor is it's purpose clear.
I've never been a fan of the Mini but it seems to suit lots of people. I'd never advocate killing it off, tho. Apple's problem is lack of choice, removing choices just makes things worse.

Let's hope that any sort of removal means that a mini-tower is in the wings.

Phydeaux wrote:

Let's hope that any sort of removal means that a mini-tower is in the wings.

That would be so sweet, I think thats a trade off not many people would turn down.

Pariah summed it up pretty well.  I bought my PPC mini since it was the cheapest ticket to OS X, and a nice complement to my Windows gaming box.  Of course, now that's no longer an issue, and many probably feel the same.  Nevertheless, I don't want to see the mini go.  It's a pretty creative design and the hacking community is really in love with the thing (A fact Apple recognized on its website).

This is one of my favorite mini hacks.

lord funk wrote:

The mini is almost the headless Mac everyone complains doesn't exist.

No...the Mini aint even in the same ball park, really, it's just not anywhere near close.

We've been down this road before, but what the hell.  It's a new topic, so I'll state it again.

The built-in laptop HD sucks.
Fast laptop HDDs cost more than normal HDDs.
Fast laptop HDDs still suck.
The built-in optical drive sucks.
Fast laptop optical drives cost more than normal optical drives.
Fast laptop optical drives still suck.
You can't upgrade the graphics.
The built-in graphics suck.
You can't install PCI cards:
     Sound Cards
     ESATA
     RAID
     PPU
     (others might have different cards in mind)
You can't add more than 2GB RAM.
The CD is not a C2D. 
It's also not as fast as a normal CD (mobile chip)
+The things you mentioned.

Those are the biggest ones.  In a nutshell, a comparably-priced consumer tower would have three times the CPU power, 50x the graphics power, and offer loads more expandability.

SpacemanSpiff wrote:

IIRC a mini with a 23" monitor is within dollars of a much more powerful 24" iMac.

*sigh* Alright, yes, but I bought a 22".  Show me the 22" iMac.

I guess the concensus is: whether or not the mini sucks, it will be very lame if Apple doesn't at least replace it with SOMETHING, even if it's a turd in a hard drive case.

At least the AppleTV has dedicated graphics...

And the hackers have gotten it to run OS X, but the GPU doesn't work yet.

Jim6009 wrote:

Speaking for the schools that still use Macs, canceling both the 17" iMac and the Mini would cause serious financial pain-unless of course some new version if the eMac shows up.

Absolutely.  There have been plenty of times at my uni where the answer is: let's get a mini to run that (media carts being the number one reason).