Hey all you mac queers

[Charlie]

Aight, the mac mini - what's the story on it? Is it as big a steaming pile as the ibooks from a few years back, or is it a halfway decent machine?

Been looking at a new job which has more mac-related responsibilities to it, mostly panther & tiger boxes. Most of my mac admin experience has been with 8.x, 9 & early OSX boxes, but that's been 2 - 2 1/2 years ago. So, as such, I've been looking at picking up a cheapie imac or somesuch off of ebay and throwing tiger on it. That being said, prices on a used box that will run tiger decently are the same as what a new Mini runs. I've been looking at the base 499 model - 40gb drive, 1.42ghz proc with 512mb on it. Figure I'd spring for the superdrive upgrade so that I can at least use it for some multimedia work as well.

Thoughts?

-Charlie

[AdironRider]

Its a good machine but you cant really expand. Doesnt sound like you plan on doing that so its a good buy.

[permit]

The MacMini is pretty sick. Doesn't have any of the heating problems that the G4 Cube had way back, and is perfect for people that already have a nice monitor and keyboard. I'm planning on building the perfect home theater setup with it and a few external hardrives; it would be able to control music, movies, pictures, cable box, etc all from a wireless keyboard and mouse, and would be hidden away wherever so it's just your TV chillin' there.

Anyways, yes, it's a good buy.

[bwanac]

I have the 1.25Ghz Mini.
I like it. You may want to opt for more RAM. 1GB.
If I had the money I would. Other than that I love it.

[Tvan]

As previously stated, the mac mini is not the disaster that the G4 cube was, but it will not be very fast without large amounts of RAM. Unless you already have a moniter that you would be satisfied using, my recommendation would be the imac. It is worth the extra $$, and it was named computer of the year by the Wall Street Journal (read the review if you want to know why). But the most important thing is that no matter what mac you get, it must have at least 1 gig of RAM in order to run OS X well. And don't get 1 gig from the factory, get as low as possible and upgrade with Crucial RAM.

[permit]

Very true. The new iMacs are badass and make the G5 Towers obsolete to anyone that doesn't do film editing or anything else you'd need 8GB of RAM for.

[Julien]

first a mac... next thing you might become liberal... watch out charlie.

And yes the mac mini is bad ass. I would also opt for new as macs tend to hold their value pretty dam well making used ones a so-so buy.


good luck with all of that,
Julien
[edit] and student discount FTW [/edit]

[hamann318is]

I thought there was a bunch of hype about Tiger, but it IS a lot better than Panther.

[Tvan]

I thought there was a bunch of hype about Tiger, but it IS a lot better than Panther.

Tiger puts the sex in OS seX.

[Charlie]

I always hear this "student discount" nonsense bantered around Mac stuff, where do I go to apply for this? I've got enough buddies still slumming away in college (and I only graduated a few months ago) that I could probably scam this somehow.

-Charlie

[permit]

I always hear this "student discount" nonsense bantered around Mac stuff, where do I go to apply for this? I've got enough buddies still slumming away in college (and I only graduated a few months ago) that I could probably scam this somehow.

-Charlie

Anyone can do the student discount thing online, it's really based on the honor system. If you go in person, then you need a student ID.

Go to the Apple Store sight, scroll all the way down, and on the right side, you'll see a link for the Education Discount site. Just pick out what school you go to, and you'll be forwarded to their site. The discount usually just saves you the cost of tax, but for some things it's a pretty decent amount of cash.