Pound For Pound, The mini Is A Good Buy
In the past there have been some charges that the Mac mini is simply overpriced junk. And while I am not in a position to make statements one way or the other, I can give my observations based on some recent data that I uncovered.
According to this piece, there is about $400 ($387.14) spent on the major components to create the mini, as it sells for about $600 ($599). Is this reasonable? Depends on whether you want the form factor, OS, and abilities of having something like this as a computer.
Let us not forget that smaller is not always cheaper. But considering how well I have seen these machines do with heat overall, I think they are worth the cost. Besides, I have used a number of tiny form factors for media solutions in the past and the mini still beats out most of them with regard to performance. Then again, your mileage may vary.
5 Comments
GRPeng
June 29th, 2009
at 4:38pm
The current model eliminated most of my long time complaints, except for being overpriced. Unfortunately they added the amazingly frustrating Mini DisplayPort and continue to ignore the much faster eSATA port on so many mini ITX motherboards like the Intel DG45FC. This will become very important when the price on SSD drives drop.
All Macintosh computers still suffer from the flaw of no support for playing Blu-ray movies, not just the mini. You can get the Dell Studio Hybrid with twice as much RAM and a larger hard drive for $100 less, or add a slot loading Blu-ray drive for $100 more. Since it comes with a HDMI port, it is a lot easier to hook up to a HDTV.
Matt Hartley
June 29th, 2009
at 5:06pm
Now this folks, is the RIGHT way to counter with a different perspective. Note the absence of name calling and other silliness?
GRPeng shared some pretty solid points. Nicely worded.
What Little Things are You Missing out On? | Chris Pirillo
June 29th, 2009
at 11:56pm
[...] Pound for pound – the Mini is a good buy. [...]
Throwboy Wave ~ Windows Fanatics
July 1st, 2009
at 3:30am
[...] Pound for pound — the Mac mini is a good buy. [...]
Gord
July 1st, 2009
at 12:03pm
I purchased one of the first generation Mac Mini’s which at that time was selling for around $699. CDN
I used it for a year then sold it to a small local radio station 20 kw FM broadcast which runs a 12 hr/day community radio broadcast. That was four years ago and the Mini has been running continuously over that time. To my knowledge, there has never been even one problem with it, in spite of having three or four persons per week preparing/running their own DJ show on it.
I am thrilled that it has run so well and so long without intervention, which is much better than the two MSoft PCs we had running the station before that.
Just thought I would share that with you, although it is not used/abused to way some travelling DJs would, it has proven to be all we need, for now, at a reasonable price.