[sodamnregistered2]

Considering the mini is essentially the second coming of the cube, I'm surprised that there is so little mention of this. People liked the cube, but it was too expensive for what it was. It did pioneer 2 things Apple has continued to work on - quiet computing, and small computing.

That said, I wonder about 2 things:

1. Why did they opt to use notebook drives? They are slower, more expensive and less reliable over time.

2. Why don't they try harder to make duals? After you've already built the case, and added the components, adding a 2nd CPU, or at least having the option to do so in the lineup. should be trivial, especially considering the G4 is technically an obsolete part.

Would you still like the mini if it was large enough so it could cool 2 CPUs and you could use a full size SATA drive? What if you could get a dual 1.42 mini for $999?

[westrock]

Originally Posted by sodamnregistered2

That said, I wonder about 2 things:

1. Why did they opt to use notebook drives? They are slower, more expensive and less reliable over time.

2. Why don't they try harder to make duals? After you've already built the case, and added the components, adding a 2nd CPU, or at least having the option to do so in the lineup. should be trivial, especially considering the G4 is technically an obsolete part.

Would you still like the mini if it was large enough so it could cool 2 CPUs and you could use a full size SATA drive? What if you could get a dual 1.42 mini for $999?

1. Balance of Size and price. Slower also means less power drain, less heat, and less (near zero) noise. Those were some of the exact reasons I replaced my PC with one of these.

2. Price point again. The G4 is older technology and probably easier to package. Also this product is a gateway product...they are hoping that poeple that don't want to jump into unknown territory for $1500 will be willing to "try" Apple for $500. Then once they get hooked they will upgrade to a better profit margin product. Or poeple may actually be happy with the Mini and although they may not upgrade, they will probably purchase other Apple products or they will tell their friends.

I would have never bought a first Apple for $1500...however $500 ($300 after my Best Buy rewards discounts) was much much easier to swallow. I can give it 6 months and see how I feel about Macs come next Tax return. To be honest, with 1gb of memory doing day to day applications this thing has overly impressed me with its capabilities. I would not expect near the quality from a $500 e-Machine.

It actually reminded me of the original Cube. When I was looking at buying a Mini I looked at the used market of Cube to see if maybe I get something similar...the Cubes still went for the same if not more and actually had way less content. The Mini is a major upgrade over the Cube.


The only feature I miss going to the Mini from my PC was going back to one monitor. Had the $600 Mini offered dual DVI I would have bought that one instead. I think its more practical to buy the $500 model and then buy a 3rd party 1gb stick and an external USB/FireWire drive.

[Graymalkin]

I think the answers to these questions ought to pretty obvious.

1) The Mac mini could have either been the "Mac mini" or the "Mac so-so size". Apple opted for the mini option. If you've seen the inside of one of these guys it is painfully obvious why they have laptop components. They don't have a whole bunch of room for large drives nor the connection cables they would need. Laptop disc and hard drives are designed to fit into tight spaces and use fairly compact power and data cables. Trying to squeeze even a single molex connector inside of the mini would be a pretty dumb idea.

2) I'm sure the engineers working on the mini would have loved to fit two processors into the sucker. Again, the mini is a choice between large and loud or small and quiet. Dual processors would have likely required a high speed fan inside to keep them cool. A high speed fan would have been excessively loud and ruined part of the attraction of the mini, a small quiet computer to replace a large loud tower. My grandparents bought one and were worried it wasn't powered on because it was essentially noiseless whereas the HP it replaced sounded like a broken air conditioner.

[neowolf]

1. Slower, yes. More expensive, somewhat. Less reliable? Not really. Sure notebook drives fail more often, but they're also normally getting lugged around more often. Something I doubt any drive handled gracefully. The mini's a desktop machine so I don't expect that to be an issue and if you haven't seen the inside, these things are PACKED...

2. Which leads to part of the same reason here. There literally isn't room for another G4 and on top of that this is supposed to be the "cheap" Mac. Dual processors would already cause it to outclass the eMac by far and clearly jack up the price.