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Mac mini Dissection
xbasque writes "Smash has a video showing the technique for cracking open a Mac mini safely. Upgrade the RAM and hard drive yourself and save a bundle (ain't that the point of the mini?)" And if you don't plan to take one apart yourself,
parvenu74 points out the pictures of exploratory Mac mini surgery on mini-itx.com, writing "From a post: 'The board itself is slightly smaller than Mini-ITX at about 160mm square by our estimations, and includes Ethernet, Modem, DVI/VGA, 2 x USB, Firewire and Audio connectors (sadly not optical).'"
I'll just spring for the extra 500 bucks and have apple do it for me.....or just buy two whole stinkin' computers for the same price. Hmm....
You can build two stinking x86 computers - or one very decent x86 computer, which would be my choice - for $500. If you know how to put parts together, you can easily make something that outperforms the mini. The problem is that 95% of the people out there don't build, but buy their machines from Dell, HP, etc. and $500 Dells suck badly. They come with Celerons and Intel Integrated graphics, they don't have Firewire or CD burners, and so the Mac mini looks reasonably competitive - especially if you value the aesthetics.
or if you like OS X.
or if you want a silent computer that doesnt overheat.
for a good cheap comp though, nforce3 + athlon + ram + HD + cd/dvd + case probablly might end up coming out to around $500. But the computer definetly wont be the size of the mac mini, or as quiet.
Is the slot for the WiFi\Bluetooth card any sort of standard connector? Apple carges $75 for 802.11* ($125 for 802 and Bluetooth), which seems sorta pricy, unless, of course, you need to get an Apple specifc part, at which point it is just a ripoff.
Yeah, you probably could just hook up a USB 802 adapter, but then you loose some "look how small it is" points.
#include <signature.h>
That's assuming that the size is an advantage for this crowd, when most users would rather have the slots and an accessible case.
Don't kid yourself, the size is more of a justifcation for a crippled low-end Mac than a feature.
But to a geek, small and quiet are generally "luxury" options. Given the extra $500, the geek isn't going to buy the computer equivalent of leather seats, he's going to get the turbos.
yeah speed if your encoding video or playing games. For day to day computer use, the mac mini is beyond perfect.
Plus the noise of pcs is horrid, my friend just recently built an athlon 64 rig with a nforce 3, and it is loud... so loud he had to get an even louder fan because it was running too hot. My PC is also very very loud, a P4 2.53ghz. My ibook on the otherhand, is dead silent which I love.
Untill you get to thinking about the slots and what you need them for. Example, my PC sitting here has 5 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot.
The AGP slot is occupied by a video card, which I just recently replaced for the first time in 5 years. On the mac mini, that's already built onto the board with an ATI chipset.
1 PCI slot is used by my Soudblaster card, which I just recently upgraded, again for the first time in 5 years, and that was because the card never worked right in the first place and this happened to be the time I was upgrading things. On the mac mini, this is built into the system
1 PCI slot is occupied by an ethernet card, un upgraded in 5 years. Gigabit is built into the mac mini
1 slot contains a USB/Firewire card, again, un upgraded, and built into the mac mini.
The other two slots remain unused, and for the forseeable future, I have no use for them. In the end, they're actualy a waste.
So when I look at the mac mini, it has everything I would use PCI/AGP slots for built in.
So then the question becomes well what if you want to upgrade?
Well, when I did my mass upgrade for the first time in 5 years (until now, I had only added RAM), I bought a new motherboard, a new processor, new graphics card, new soundcard and new RAM. My total cost came out to about $600 after rebates.
After reflecting on this, it occurs to me, that if a mac mini suits my needs, by the time I would decide to upgrade it, I might as well just buy a new one for $500.
In fact, for the first time, my computer would actualy be a disposable product. Something that I could (theoreticaly) just discard and buy a new one when it no longer served my needs, and it would be roughly price equivilant to upgrading the system.
So in the end, having PCI slots and an accessable case on the mac mini would seem to be more of a waste than a benefit.
Of course, you can always argue that hard core gamers and power users have other things and upgrade more frequently, but I argue that no hardcore gamer/power user is buying a $500 computer.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Here's a crazy, mixed-up suggestion.
Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?
People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.
People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink.
I call BS. You show me a a complete amd64 you can build for $500. I know I spent over 900 building mine last month.
I've seen lots and lots of PowerBooks in my line of work. Practically everybody I encounter, professionally, has one.
Know how many PC cards I've seen? Zero. Nary a one.
Since you're going to put the necessary ports on the machine anyway, and since you're going to build wireless antennas in anyway, what possible use is there for a PC card slot? Leave it out and keep costs down.
You know, I am sitting here using my Apple iBook G4 933Mhz and wondering why people get so wound up about the 'lack' of power in the new Mac mini. The only thing I would do is upgrade the RAM as I did with this iBook (added 512MB for £75 from crucial) which makes the machine nice and snappy. Other than that, the G4 is a great processor because it runs cool (my iBook is currently running at about 40 degrees Celsius and the fan doesn't kick in until it hits 75 so it is virtually silent. Same will be true of the Mac mini. Compare that to a typical cheap PC. Also, my iBook has the same graphics capabilities and a slower CPU than the mini but it is able to play UT2004 at 1024x768 surprisingly well, better than the Geforce4MX my PC came with.
All things considered, the Mac mini will be a great machine to use and own. Mac OS X works smoothly even on a sub 1Ghz G4 so the mini is going to be ample. More to the point, where my XP Pro box with Athlon XP 2200+ and 512MB of RAM quite often feels slow and bogged down the iBook multitasks much better. I doubt that the slow hard drive in the Mac mini is going to be that big an issue either. Just do yourself a favour if you buy one, get the cheapest and stick some Crucial RAM in it (512MB is the sweet spot). I would get a Mac keyboard but use a standard 3 button scroll wheel mouse and put a good quality 17" LCD on there. That is going to get you a really nice Mac for budget PC money and it will run OS X, something I think is worth a great deal.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
At http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/editors/2005/01/mi niapplesandoranges/index.php I read this:
"""
But it was only a matter of time before someone would argue, "It's still not price-competitive with the cheapest Dell." And within days we've got our first such columns and articles, all of which leave me scratching my head, wondering if these guys are as bad at comparing products when they shop for themselves as they apparently are when comparing products for their columns.
"""
I agree. I'm a really recent switcher. I had a second hand mac kicking around years ago (and despised the OS - I ran Be on it), but bought an iBook laptop last Friday. It's my first mac and my first laptop. My justification was that it was cheap, runs unix, has full driver support, especially for wireless networking. I've held off for about two years waiting for a laptop that can deliver that for less than two grand Australian. That's a really compelling formula, and a far better geek computer than a PC.
To get a happy unix experience on a PC laptop you either pay a lot more money or roll the dice on linux drivers and winmodems. Or you can try and run Windows and put up with the limitations of cygwin or the speed hit of vmware. Yuck.
Not that it's always been this way. Until recently, Apples sucked. But OS X has become usable and the hardware has a better reputation than it used to - laptops in particular.
If I were Apple I'd be a bit concerned at the powerbook line - the iBooks deliver so much for so little now the powerbooks don't look very attractive.
Believe with me, my saplings.
The goal in designing the Mini was never to make the cheapest possible machine, it was to make a low-cost Macintosh that Apple wouldn't have to be ashamed of.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Everybody making comparisons seems to forget the fact that you get loads of *useful* software out of the box with *all* Macs.
OS X Panther and iLife '05 allows you to do useful things with your machine out of the box. Not only that, but the software is *good* and it all works together.
There is nothing comparable to a Mac in the PC world. Apple build the machine from the ground up, including the operating system and utilities. It all works nicely.
I only realised that when I bought my iBook, so I don't expect people who haven't owned a Mac to understand.
-- The doctor said I wouldn't get so many nose bleeds if I just kept my finger out of there!
Sucks for who? You have to remember, this thing isn't aimed at "power users," this is for people who want to do word processing, email, web, some digital music (would actually be an awesome digital music machine with an external FW drive), some basic photo viewing/processing, and maybe a little gaming. Laptops, including the one I'm typing this on, all have these "sucky" 4200 rpm drives, and they work fine for most everything people do. Want power? Get a G5 tower or a high end PC; obviously the mini isn't for you. Your point is pretty pointless.
http://tofslie.com/files/evolution_apple.jpg
FYI: the Mini takes 17vdc nominally, but it only needs 17v if it's providing power to firewire devices. If you don't have any FW peripherals, the computer itself will run on 12v.
I would say that depends, firstly I am a geek and yet I value the aesthetics of Apple, plus it helps to 'sell the idea' to the wife (no obv jokes please - I am not self delusional) in this case small and quiet are good points.
If the box is in your bedroom then quiet is certaibnly a good point as no doubt it will be on 24/7 either searching for ET or folding or rendering or whatever. Plus it is the perfect size for a media centre another plus point and if you want to get ubergeeky it is the perfect size to make a damn big cluster without needing an airplane hangar to house all the nodes in. Imagine 16 Dell boxes stacked up on top of each other - urrghh sorry bad mental imagine, my brain now needs a clean.
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
Why on earth would you want to put Mandrake on it when you've already got a beautiful unix based OS with it. And why on earth would you want a PowerPC box to put linux on? Bob
Heh. Just because you can plug in a GbE or FW800 into a PC doesn't mean you should. Try doing that on a PC with 32-bit PCI slots and see your bandwidth disappear once you use your GbE, FW, and sound (if you have a card) together. Do it only if you have 66MHz, PCI-X, or PCIe. And if you get a cheap mobo where its GbE is run through the PCI bus, you'd really be crying for more bandwidth. The mini has USB 2.0 high speed (or was that full speed, well, it's the faster speed) ports.
If today you can edit on a uber $2000 mac, and its 'professional quality' then if in 18months time, the same spec mac comes out for $500, will you stupidly claim that its "cheap junk, good for web/email only" ????
You want fast DV editing? plug a FIREWIRE 400gig drive into it, then you cannot claim its a hookey pooky cheapass mac.
Todays $300 PC was $1000 in the year 2000, ie with the same specs if it was available. I could edit fine in the year 2000, though not as fast as a $5000 RAID scsi PC of today, its not as bad as a 1995 AVID system.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The mac mini is a "decent" game system.
Sorry, you're wrong here - Macs are just not gaming machines, unfortunately. Many games are never ported to the Mac platform (e.g. Halflife), most are ported months or years after the initial x86 release, new games require faster Macs than what us mortals can afford, and old games aren't Mac OS X native so they run (poorly) under emulation.
And I say this as a long-time Mac lover, typing this on my iBook G4 which I love dearly, but on which Warcraft 3 is slow, UT runs in Classic (which doesn't seem to support multiple mouse buttons), Quake 3 also runs in Classic because the native port is even worse, and the UT2k4 demo doesn't even render the title screen correctly. Granted, this machine is nearly a year old now; perhaps a Mac mini would fare better with newer games (and the Classic issue should now be moot). Even still, Counterstrike isn't going to happen. I've been using Macs seriously since System 6, but I can't recommend them as a gaming platform until more game developers take the platform seriously, doing side-by-side development and releasing dual-platform hybrid CDs (a few do this already, of course).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
It would make a good brain for a robot
:)
I don't think hardware limitations are the reason we don't have super-intelligent robots running around. It's more of a software issue. Hey, if you can provide working AI robot software, I'll pony up for the hardware and we can split the profits 50-50. Deal?
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
1. With fedora core does the bundled software with the motherboard work?
Answer: Nope.
Now you're deliberately misquoting me. The previous question had to do with Antivirus software being bundled with the mobo. Of course it won't work under Fedora Core, but it's not like it's really needed under Fedora Core either.
How much value is gained from knowing that if you want to take up a new hobby you have some quality tools available to you?
Answer: To me, absolutely none. If I am not interested in something, I won't use it. If I am interested in something, I will buy it to use it.
If you look at something like this and go "Hm. Video editing. That might be cool. GarageBand. Sound editing. That might be useful to me" then this is possible added value. I looked at it and went "Hm. Don't own a video camera, and have no intention of buying one. I don't have a band, or much musical talent, and no time to bother anyway." Those bundled packages are a pointless waste for me. Would you buy a more expensive PC if the dealer was throwing in a MIG welder on the off chance you might like to learn to weld? And don't go off on how that's not software. There's a larger chance I'll use a MIG welder in the next few years than video editing software.
. The grandparent forgot to mention you'll need to buy and equivalent for xcode
Really? What the hell for? Am I developing software? Do I plan to develop software? Do 97% of people who buy a home computer develop software? NO. And in case you missed the part where I mentioned Fedora Core, I'll clue you in: It's got a huge amount of software development tools in there that I'll never use either.
So because all your appliances are getting smaller they are easier to rip off?
Yes. This should be self explanatory. If it's at a front desk at a company it's small enough to take if the secretary is distracted for a minute. It's smaller than a laptop and easier to conceal, and those go missing from companies all the time. If it's at home and someone busts in to your house, they want to take small, easily portable items. Cash and small electronics. The mini-mac is now in the "small electronics" category. A plasma TV still weighs over 100 pounds and does not fit the "small electronics" category.
The mini has more style.
Style is in the eye of the beholder. How else do you explain the AMC Gremlin ever seeing the light of day?
You get things done more easily in fedora? What type of things?
My job. Systems administraton. Reading and answering mail. Browsing the web. Writing documents and spreadsheets. Shell scripting. Works fine for me.
I like linux but it isn't ready for the desktop.
Funny. I've been using it as a desktop for 4 years. I wish someone would have told me it wasn't ready for the desktop. Oh wait...
OSX IS... you get the power user shortcuts that advanced users delight in. But you can do pretty much everything with the single button mouse most of us have. Can you do that in Fedora?
Do I want to? 80% of what I do doesn't even involve a mouse. And there's that lovely phrase that sets my teeth on edge. "Power user". After almost 20 years of doing this for a living, "power user" to me brings to mind the computer equivelant of a four year old with a chainsaw. Every person I've met who called themselves a "power user" managed in some way to cause untold mayhem and then expected me to bail them out.
No, it's not a big deal. I've used the audio-in jack on my Macs for about 1 hour over the last 5 years, and I'm an audio freak. Prosumers are the only ones who'll be doing any audio recording, and for them a $ 30 iMic isn't going to be a showstopper.
As with all the "they should have included 'blah'" comments: that's just the opposite of the point of this machine. If you want the kitchen sink, buy a PowerMac G5. Hint: it costs more than $500.
I don't understand how the MAC-mini works. If it's so small, how does it keep the rain out?
The same way you've kept out my understanding of your implied humor in your post. Security through obscurity! The water does not know the Mac Mini isn't waterproof.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
Well, this is going to be modded as redundant, but, please, remember that you get an amazing operating system (XP and Linux do not come close wrt usability, despite progress) and a lot of software bundled with it. And great software, that really increases your productivity. Coming from Linux, I used Thunderbird and its address book for some time on the mac. But then I saw the sinergy of the OS X Address Book with Mail.app and other apps (like Adium), because friends used those. It was simply astounding. You cannot come close to that on XP unless you do everything INSIDE Office, and still there's a big gap. I miss only NNTP in Mail... Note that Office does not come bundled with the under-$500 cheapo Dells.
Of course the mac mini does not have 5 PCI slots. Of course it does not have an AGP 8x slot. Of course thereì's no room in it for two 10000 rpm 160Gb S-ATA Hard drives. Of course it does not come with 2 2.5Ghz IBM PowerPC 970fx processors. That would be a completely different machine (which in fact, except for the number of PCI slots, Apple also offers).
Secondly, the Athlon system has a 300W PSU, while the Mac uses 85W (almost the power consumption of the CPU alone in an Athlon system). This equates to around 0.6/hour more to operate the Athlon than the Mac Mini. Not much, but assuming the system is on for 10 hours a day this is over $20/year. Again, not a huge amount, but worth considering. Not to mention the fact that the Mac Mini will be much quieter as a result.
Thirdly, you didn't include the cost of software. Perhaps you are going to run Linux/BSD/ReactOS on the system. Perhaps you can find some open source equivalents of iMovie, and friends.
Finally, the AMD system is a lot larger in terms of physical space. I have recently got rid of all of the desktop systems I own because their noise and space requirements were too irritating. I may invest in a Mac Mini once Tiger is released, because it has none of these disadvantages.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Think through your math again:
512MB for the mini from www.crucial.com costs $80 plus shipping. You have to install the RAM yourself (no big deal, but work nonetheless), and you end up with the original Apple 256MB as a spare because there's only one DIMM slot. Sure, you can sell that on eBay for $25, but that's even more work.
512MB installed by Apple cost you $75 -- less cash up front -- and you didn't waste any money or time on installation, there's no extra 256MB to throw away or sell, shipping's free, etc etc.
So the cost of upgrading the RAM yourself is $85 (incl shipping) - $20 (eBay sale minus costs) = $65, and the cost for a seamless experience with preinstalled Apple RAM is $75. Isn't your time and convenience worth at least the $10 difference?
Wish i had your confidence there... The last several Dells I've helped setup and get running had NO AGP slots on the mianboard! Think i'm BSing? Crack open one of their mid- to low-range models and take a peek inside. You can see where the AGP slot is supposed to go, BUT! The slot itself was never installed!
This is one reason why I urge my clients that buy Dells to overbuild their processor and memory so that Dell will be forced to put in the nicer boards instead of the low-grade POS Intels that they seem to love.
The other reason is that I don't want to hear them bitching that their system is slow 6 months down the road..
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
1. Produce an iPod that runs Keynote and outputs video to a projector.
2. Incorporate an integrated reference/bibliography manager into Pages.
Strawman accusations coming from someone listing interrupt conflicts on their list of why not to use x86? Time to fast forward a few years man. If you'd stop tweaking and futzing for about a day or so I'd put money on your x86 machine working just fine. If not, well, i'm sorry, buy quality components next time.
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
There are a number of reasons we don't have super intelligent robots running around. But one of them is arguably a hardware problem. Most AI algorithms are at least NP hard and many are exponential or worse. Hardware that can solve such problems in linear or even constant time would be a big step forward. Practical quantum computers, anyone?
-- I speak only for myself
We're om /. here so why do you use wattage? Of course you mean power consumption.
Because CPU manufacturers specify the power consumption and thermal load of their CPUs as "wattage." Take a look at this Intel document and you will see that the term I used was a correct and accepted one.
To any half clued techie, Wattage sounds just as silly as Ampereage, Faradage, Ohmage and Voltage. (current, capacitance, resistance and potential)
Well, perhaps if I was "half clued techie" I would think it sounded silly. But since I've got some real engineering experience, I recognize that the term is correct.
How is this flamebait? It's a joke. Hint: look at the third paragraph, and read it again.