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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."
Anyone know what happens to people that paid the previously higher price? I recall something like this happening to the powerbook? I could be wrong, but I think mac reimbursed in some way.
This news has lots of people asking "What about exisitng orders" (they got e-mails notifying them of refunds of the difference), but the real question is why, four days after product availability, did Apple do this?
Possible reasons:
- Sales figures in first tow weeks overwhelming under BTO projections
- Analysts/Fans complained of over priced BTO
- Yet-to-be-released products with similar BTO pricing coming sooner than Apple originally planned
- Margins on BTO items are higher, even at reduced prices, than margins on the original equipment.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
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."
:( I can never win :)
I have always said "the day a Mac becomes affordable I will own one." The mini brought that to be and mine is on its way (should be here the 27th).
I am getting the 1.42Ghz with 80GB HD. It'll have the bare minimum 256MB of RAM and the regular combo drive but if push comes to shove I'll get an external Firewire DVD writer and might even open the case myself and add some RAM. Who knows. It'll all depend on how well it performs for me.
I always wait too long and am left in the dust by the early adopters. Now with this price drop I got burnt by being one
was thinking about getting a mini for my kitchen however i want to minimize kitchen top space.
i figured i'd use a 12" LCD and sit it on top of the mini.
Can anyone recommend a bluetooth 1/2 sized keyboard?
1. Start by announcing something cheaper than competition or usual
2. Stress out benefits of given product so potential buyers actually think it's good value.
3. Let early buyers get in.
4. For those still undecided, actually improve the deal (i.e more features, ie. superdrive) and/or cut the price
5. Those actually undecided that thought it was already good value now think this is fantastic value.
6. Sell like crazy
I think this technique is call "push-over" or something like that. The key to it is to convince people that even at a premium your product is fantastical value (Apple sure knows a lot ib this field). The more you convince people at step 2, the easier the push-over.
IMHO, APPLE had it all laid out. They knew they could make the fat margins with early adopters and then have the extra publicity announcing this. It keeps the momentum...
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
A reseller I was talking to said that he preferred that they only sold with 256MB of RAM, as he can sell people third party ram and installation and make a profit on that, whereas his profits from the Mac Mini are almost non-existant.
An eMac is $800 with a 17" CRT built in.
A Mac mini has no monitor, or keyboard or mouse and only costs $500 for roughly the same hardware. The pacakging is also a lot smaller and simpler.
Apple could still be making decent margins off this I think. And as others have noted if there are many accessory sales margins are even better.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
IMHO Apple would win some more "do it yourself" people if they offered upgrades and parts. That's because the Mini is not intended for the "do it yourself" kind of people. We know YOU and the rest of the Slashdotters can build a beowlf cluster from scrap parts of a Commodore64 for less than $99.
If I want to buy a Mac Mini in Belgium, the entry price is 519 euro, as opposed to 499 in the US. At the current conversion rate (taken from XE.net/ucc), the "correct" EU price should be 381.68 eur.
Even tough Apple is an American company, they're not going to convince me this price is because the stuff has to come from the US of A. And even then, you'd think that Apple, being a global company, should be able to get some volume discounts from their transport service.
This goes for all of their products. If I want to buy a Powerbook, it's actually cheaper to take a plane to New York, buy it at the NY Apple store (if there is one, I suppose there is), put it in my bag and fly back to the Old Continent than to buy it here, be it from a store or from the Apple website.
Come to think of it, anyone from Belgium or Holland who wants to buy some mac stuff? I'll go to NY, pick it up and pass the discount on to you. The more, the merrier.
(yes, I know I won't be able to walk trough the airport with thousands of $ worth of stuff without being robbed (be it by criminals or by the import tax officers), and I know this doesn't include cab rides.. but you get the picture)
I COMPLETELY disagree.
When I bought my iBook, it came with 256 RAM. Everything about the notebook felt slow, and Warcraft III was barely playable.
After upgrading the RAM to 512, everything just flew compared to before. I was very pleased with the performance boost, and the notebook actually felt speedy for once.
As the Anandtech article mentions, the Mini Mac comes with an extremely slow HD like notebooks. Disk swapping is incredibly slow, and absolutely kills performance if you have little RAM.
And get with the times, this is the age of multitasking. Sure, Photoshop is a memory hog, but having things like iChat, Safari, Mail, or any other various applications open at the same time will slow down your computer with 256 RAM.
btw: somewhat wrong. apple keyboard costs 29.00 [-student discount 26.00] and includes the very neccesary usb hub. bluetooth not actually required get your facts straight.
Buy a mounse at office depot for $10 (or $14 NOW, I guess here,
or your local computer retailer. Compare to base-line dell offering with intel extreme graphics, intel celeron CPU, etc.
mac mini still plays ut2005 without lag, only slightly jumpy running @ 800x600 32bit etc, etc.
This competes with any base-lline x86 system very well.
I like that I can pick My display or buy the apple dvi to rca connector and use my TV. you won't see that sort of a thing on a pc either, nor at that form factor sie, quality, etc.
Can I be a Luddite too?
I've used Macs with 256MB that ran fine too. 5 years ago. Not now, no way.
You're granting that you can't run anything on these things (like photoshop), then say "why would you want to?" Well, why not? You should be able to. The guts of the Mac mini is pretty similar to a powerbook (comparable chip, graphics, etc). I have 512MB in my powerbook, and THAT is often too little.
As to the people saying you need 1GB, what for? I've got a flatmate that does graphical work on a PowerMac with 512MB, and it's fine for everything except Photoshop
Answered your own question, photoshop for one. Also games, and people who multitask heavily (ie, me) or work with memory intensive apps for work (also me).
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
On the Apple forums, several people have described random kernel panics and general operating unpleasantness after going with cheap RAM.
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e =CT12864X335&cat=RAM
If that happens, then your RAM is defective. Assuming you bought memory with a lifetime warranty (can you even find memory that doesn't have one?), then get it replaced.
The only place I would get Mac RAM from would be Crucial.com, and they're more or less the price of the Apple RAM, though the 1GB is a hundred less. Crucial is a division of Micron and thoroughly tests their RAM.
I'll never buy from Crucial, and here's why. I was shopping for a memory upgrade for my PowerBook when I came across this product on their site:
http://www.crucial.com/store/MPartspecs.Asp?mtbpo
It's a 1GB memory module for my model of PowerBook. It's $480. I thought this price was a little high, but Crucial is generally kind of expensive. Then I found this page:
http://www.crucial.com/store/PartSpecs.asp?imodul
It's an identical 1GB module, but for $340.
What's going on here? I e-mailed them and asked what the difference was. Here are some quotes from their reply:
Thank you for your e-mail. At Crucial we offer different "flavors" of the same memory, some that work in specific systems and some that work in general systems.
If you placed the general use module into a PowerBook the system would become unstable and even lock up at sporadic times.
Part number CT12864X335 is not compatible.
I'm not sure what's going on here. It's obvious that this e-mail is at extreme odds with the truth. One explanation is that they've caught on to the idea that Mac owners have more money, and they decided to cash in. Another explanation is that their customer support is incompetent. Either way, I see no reason to buy from them and every reason to avoid them.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
A linux kernel tree (without any object files) is about 230MB.
Doing deltas between different versions is much faster if both versions are in memory. This means you need at least half a gig for the page cache, with nothing else running.
For me personally, a gig is the minimum for development, and 2 gigs is noticeably nicer.
My personal machine has a half gig though, as I don't do as much kernel work there.
Even if it had a 160GB disk, you would probably complain that with all that disk space, it doesn't have the CPU to fill it up in a meaningful way. It is the way of first-world society, I guess. "We all want SUV's!" -> "now we want them to ride like cars!" -> "now we want them to be as fast as cars!" This spurs technical advancement, of course, but people never stop to think that just because we can do these things doesn't mean we should. In computing, people do have reasons to use huge amounts of disk space and as much CPU as they can get. Vendors will continue to supply these people. I don't agree with the idea that all efforts should be focused on these goals, though. Yes, yes, cheaper low-end hardware for everyone is driven by the high-end hardware, but the low-end hardware gets pushed off the market so fast that only the geeks browsing Pricewatch end up with it anyway. There's my rant. Thanks.
Ok, with the current exchange rate on 26 Jan 2005 825.00 Dollars U.S. = 1,015.33 Canadian dollars.
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With that said...
Here's what I found
Cache 1MB L2
CPU Speed 2.0GHz
CPU Type AMD Athlon 64 3200+
Graphics Card GeForce FX5500 128MB AGP Card
Hard Drive 160GB 7200RPM
I/O Ports See The Features Section
Included Software Microsoft Works 8.0
Network Card 10/100 Ethernet
Optical Drives 16x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer
Preloaded Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Home SP2
RAM 1GB PC3200 DDR RAM
Sound Card Integrated AC 97 Audio
Speakers Stereo Speakers, Black
System Bus Up To 1600MHz
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?l
All for 999.00 Canadian or 811.73 US
And this is a pre-built system from an overpriced corporation...You could get this system for probably half that amount if you bought and assembled it yourself.
I just don't see the draw of the mini...its WAY to expensive for what it's capable of.
I reject your reality and substitute my own
That's not even remotely the same computer. It's HUUUUUUGE!
... I've not decided. But your comparison sucks. :)
Try making a mini ITX that can sit in the living room (like a Mac Mini) and is of comparable size, *then* you've got yourself a comparison.
I need a new computer. I've been thinking about what to get, and I can go the cheap, huge, noisy, ugly route (like what you posted), or I can go with an mini ITX or something (the Mac mini is sweet and cheap cheap for what you get, but I want to run Linux -- I'm a fan now!). Also, I'm broke so I may have to live with something similar to what you posted.
I can get what I really want and spend 700-800 or so bucks, or the cheap route and spend only a couple hundred
>> 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).
Games. They're the sole reason I run Windows, and have been for 4-5 years now.
For all your Mac advocacy I will still not be even considering a Mac until all the games I want to play are guaranteed a Mac release.
Seriously, aside from upgrading the RAM, what else needs to be upgraded in this computer? I would guess that most people who are buying the Mini have another Mac or a PC or two. I fall into the latter group (my Mini is the first Mac I've ever owned) and find that it's much more effective to use the resources of my PC's (large hard drives for storing huge files, DVD burner for writing movies created with iMovie+iDVD) than to use the mini's. And with the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connector, I can pull up a full Windows XP desktop on my Mac whenever I need it, which is becoming increasingly less and less. (Oh, and using a Firewire cable to network between my PC and my Mini gives me transfer speeds that make the hard drive and not the network connection the bottleneck point!)
Absolutely true. Every OS X window is a bitmap, which eats a fair amount of memory compared to the Windows GUI.