[Merged] New Mac Mini/iPod

[danielf]

Originally Posted by gooner4life

An Athlon FX55 is also near on 500 quid isnt it?

A dual 2.5 gig G5 will set you back £2000 ex monitor. You can buy a lot of kit for that.

http://www.jigsaw24.com/proddesc.asp?ITEM=M9457BA

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by gooner4life

An Athlon FX55 is also near on 500 quid isnt it?

And how much would two G5 2.5ghz chips cost you? According to Apples UK site a dual G5 with no monitor, only 512mb of memory and an out of date 9600XT will set you back £1999 ... I could probably build a far more powerful machine with better specced hardware for less than £1300 (including an FX 55)

Originally Posted by danielf

A dual 2.5 gig G5 will set you back £2000 ex monitor. You can buy a lot of kit for that.

http://www.jigsaw24.com/proddesc.asp?ITEM=M9457BA

And it only contains 512MB SDRAM?

[punky]

I have long moaned that everything Apple is expensive, but a $499 does sound tempting, even though you need to spend a few quid/bucks more for a superdrive and maybe some more RAM.

Only thing that worries me is about the cooling though. I wonder how well you can leave it going for long periods, like all desktops should be able to do. My powerbook doubles as a bar heater on cold nights

[gooner4life]

Originally Posted by Bifta

And how much would two G5 2.5ghz chips cost you? According to Apples UK site a dual G5 with no monitor, only 512mb of memory and an out of date 9600XT will set you back £1999 ... I could probably build a far more powerful machine with better specced hardware for less than £1300 (including an FX 55)

Yeah granted but it wouldnt look as nice, have the apple quality or run OS-X

[jtwn]

Yes but as already said, relative price to performance its still better. Give up, macs lose

edit: bit late with that post :o Still do not see the advantages of OS-X, and if 'apple quality' is a 9200se then that says it all.

[danielf]

Originally Posted by Scott

And it only contains 512MB SDRAM?

And no monitor The cheapest monitor apple do these days is a £700 20" one

Originally Posted by gooner4life

Yeah granted but it wouldnt look as nice, have the apple quality or run OS-X

You can get loads of case mods to make your PC look cool, and there's plenty of themes out there on the internet for XP

[danielf]

Originally Posted by gooner4life

Yeah granted but it wouldnt look as nice, have the apple quality or run OS-X

I have a dual 2.0 gig and a dual 2.5 gig g5 at work. Both sit on the floor, in between the radiator and the desk. Far too bulky to keep on the desk. OS-X is nice though

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by gooner4life

Yeah granted but it wouldnt look as nice, have the apple quality or run OS-X

If I'm spending 2 grand, I want something that's going to PERFORM like 2 grands worth of machine, not end up paying a premium for how it looks.

I'll not deny that apple USED to make great, powerful (and expensive) machines, however, x86-64 architecture seems to have put them in the shadows, now they're selling based on their historical reputation alone and not on the performance of their hardware, which is sad really. They're supposed to be innovators but they're being left behind (in the computing market).

[kronas]

Originally Posted by Ben_G

new gimmick

strange i keep thinking the same thing but i guess the 'market' is out there and people are wanting this

[testcard]

Mini Mac offers as many features that some users need packed into a tasty box.
Design, cool, street cred is an important part of ownership adds to the mix.
It seems "a nice bit of kit", that may attract new users to the world of computers,

[Richard M]

It makes an ideal system for internet usage, DVDs and general office type use.
It's not designed for heavy duty gaming, video editing or any other CPU-intensive stuff but it's ideal for browsing with a stunning UI, the anti aliased fonts are nice too, especially if you don't want to run Linux.
I think it would also make a nice system to have in the living room if it had a decent sound card but it only has a stereo output.

[Millay]

ive gotta say I am tempted, and im a die hard PC fan. the reason being, I would like to have run just for sorting photos music etc... I think this is fair to say that this is designed to go head to head with AMD's internet box thingy and not against serious computing power.

[BBKing]

Definitely tempted here - I have a server under my stairs which is 55cm high, built out of battleship steel, is rock solid reliable, 256Mb RAM, Duron 600Mhz (ok, it's old) and runs FreeBSD 4. If I can replace that with a box the size of a small brick which weighs naff all, can sit under my router, has superior performance, the same reliability, a more modern version of FreeBSD, runs all my current server software (ssh, webserver, DNS server, Samba fileserver, mail gateway, IRC client) at approximately the price of a new motherboard, RAM and CPU for the current box but plug and play I'll bite their hands off. Never mind the OS X front end. And the missus has been badgering me for an iPod - that £69 one will do nicely (miserly, am I...).

Actually, the rest of my family are all Macophiles, apart from my dad who has a Dell laptop on which he installs spyware, judging by the results of the last adaware scan I made on it. Should stick to the Mac.

I love x86_64, incidentally, my office workstation is an Opteron 150 running 64-bit Linux (a boring RHEL respin, cos we use RHEL and clones on servers and I need to test stuff before deployment using the same OS) and it's fine, barring the odd compilation problem on obscure code. But there's definitely a place for this Mac mini - I'd like to see how many you can fit in a couple of U of server rack space - a small web farm of 5 or so would take naff all room and cost half as much as a modern 2 CPU server.