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Price Drops For Mac mini Upgrades
RustNeverSleeps writes "Apple has just lowered prices on certain build-to-order options on the Mac mini. The combination Bluetooth and AirPort Express option has gone down to $99 from $129, 1 GB RAM upgrades have been reduced to $325 from $475 and the price of an upgrade from a 40 GB hard drive to an 80 GB hard drive has been reduced to $50 from $90. Also, the original 4x SuperDrive has been upgraded to an 8x drive for the same price. Interesting that they dropped prices so soon after release. Perhaps Apple actually listened to people complaining about overpriced upgrades."
Amazing - Apple seems to have finally realized that when you market something high quality and feature rich at low cost, people will flock to your stores. There may be hope yet for mass market acceptance of the Mac platform.
The Mac Mini - Greatly Insane!
A question: can a Mac mouse/keyboard from an old G3 system be used with the Mini?
Look, everyone's going to be excited about this, but let's just say this and get it out of the way:
All this did was correct stuff that was already WAY overpriced to begin with. I'm thrilled, and this pretty much seals up that I'll buy a mini, but I don't think it makes a huge difference to most people, maybe just to those on the fence. If they weren't going to buy one before, they probably won't now just because of these incremental price "normalizations."
Even if you consider the lowering of prices, the fact remains that you could spend $400-$500 to bring the Mac Mini up to a reasonable configuration by today's standards. IMHO, this doesn't go against their business model.
I spent the weekend researching the 20" iMac G5 the GF is getting. In the process of trying to figure out what/when the new iLife 05 and iWork software would be bundled with it (at no $19.95 handling fee. Anybody know?)
I got caught up in the Mac Mini frenzy. To me $499 is impluse buy pricing. I figured it was worth it to let me have my first Mac to enjoy and learn on. I had been holding out for the next gen PowerBook. I went to the Apple Store and began an order.
$100 more for the SuperDrive and faster CPU. I'll buy my own RAM and deal with a putty knife to put it in. Yeah, I need Wi-Fi and Bluetooth because you can't add that afterwards. Applecare? Good idea. Now it was $800, even with my educational discount. It was no longer in impulse buy range. I left the site.
You think maybe that Apple saw that happening again and again and took this action to keep the buyer there until they completed the order?
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
RAM is one thing that I don't scrimp on. High quality RAM made by reputable companies is very important. The last thing you want it to have to troubleshoot problems caused by bad RAM.
"Why can't the better (from an engineering point of view) instruction set architecture (i.e. PowerPC) win in the desktop market?"
Because the desktop market would not be best served by having Apple take the lead. Half of everything Apple does would be considered "anticompetitive" if they were in Microsoft's position. And talk about vendor lock-in! Apple doesn't even allow clones any more.
Apple would need to make a *lot* of changes to become dominant, and would need to take some big chances.
What do you need the PCI slot for?
TV Tuner. I know you can get a USB tuner, but that kind of defeats the whole form factor thing.
I'm not complaining though - this is going to be one really sweet DVD/DivX/MP3 player machine. I picked up a Remote Wonder control today, and now I can comfortably select and play movies from the couch.
If Apple were to release a version of the mini with 6-channel sound, a TV tuner, PVR software, and a good looking remote Windows Media Center wouldn't stand a chance. It would be the iPod of the living room.
READY.
#
This has been covered countless times before. The Mac is actually a very good deal if you equip a PC with comparable software.
I've never owned a Mac, but I would buy this if I didn't already have more computers than I need.
You're missing the intangibles. According to your pricing, a prospective customer would have to ask "is a much lighter, smaller, cooler looking Mac without the headaches of Windows that includes iLife worth an extra $89?"
Apple is betting yes. And next quarter we'll see what the market said.
Okay, fed up with everyone saying "1GB of RAM is sooooo expensive". Yes, it is. Bad Apple.
However, why do you want 1GB of RAM? I use a PowerBook with a 1.5Ghz CPU and 512MB as my desktop replacement at work, and have no problems. I've currently got Thunderbird, Adium (IM), iTunes, Firefox, Azureus and X11 open, with no noticable slowdown or disk swapping.
Unless you're going to be doing something you know is memory intensive (Photoshop), you probably won't use anything more than 512MB. If you're that worried, and live anywhere near an Apple store, see if you can try one of these out, open half a dozen applications and see what performance you get.
- XP Home isn't anywhere near as powerful as Mac OS X. Put XP Pro on that box.
- DVD-RW vs. DVD-ROM. Drop the Superdrive from the Mini, or add the burner to the Dell.
How's that comparison now? Enough to absorb the missing keyboard and mouse?Oh, and for the record, the real savings is in having a system that has fewer annoying habits, has a consistent UI across applications, and is less susceptible to worms, virus infections, and spyware, as well as including a robust suite of polished, easy-to-use applications that will cover most of the needs of the freshman computer enthusiast (photography, music, basic word processing, even movies).
"How do I get photos from the Sony Mavica to iPhoto?" my wife asked me. Answer: Plug in the USB cable, and when iPhoto automatcially opens, click the blue pill clearly labelled "Import." Tell me that Dell will be able to do that OUT OF THE BOX!
Do not touch -Willie
Actually, I suspect if you dropped a Dell tower on a Mac mini, you'd probably end up with some small scratches on the mini, and a big dent in the bottom of the Dell. The mini is constructed of fairly thick aluminum and polycarbonate (the stuff that makes bullet-proof glass bullet-proof). The Dell is constructed of sheet metal and rather cheap plastic.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
I'm glad we cleared that up.
I don't particularly like their explanation, but for every person who says that generic memory will work fine on modern Macs, there is someone who says that it won't. Judging the company's business practices on the response of one customer service lackey is questionable at best. If the modules are not exactly the same and the more expensive one has a greater chance of meeting their guarantee to customers, they are justified in selling it at a higher price. Unless you're one of those people who thinks that the physical item itself is the only item of value, promises have a monetary value and Crucial is taking advantage of it. As far as sending back cheap lifetime warranty memory if it doesn't work, I've been there, done that, and concluded that for me, it's not worth the effort. I take the chance of getting a bad stick from Crucial, but unless there's a major price differential I'm willing to pay a little bit more for greater assurance of making a purchase that will work with my hardware the first time. It's interesting that there are so many intelligent people here like yourself who value their time at about, oh, $0/hour. There's nothing wrong with that, as it's your loss, but please don't gloss over the annoyance of diagnosing bad RAM (especially if you are building a new machine) and sending it back/waiting for it to reach the vendor/waiting for the vendor to send a new stick/waiting for it to arrive when posting.
Now, the thing that suprises me most, is that the mini ITX crowd don't all jump up here and defend the Mac Mini...
You don't have a small form factor, and I hardly doubt that it's quiet. For some people, those are important design considerations. Now if you spec out a mini ITX box (say with a VIA Eden chipset, or whatever they are up to now-a-days...), it would be more relevant.