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Apple's attitude to the Mac mini truly confuses me. Many years ago I was interested in getting one for eithet iPhone development or as a media pc but every time
by Marazan 10y ago
Apple's attitude to the Mac mini truly confuses me. Many years ago I was interested in getting one for eithet iPhone development or as a media pc but every time I looked they kept seeming to jack the price or downgrade the spec (relatively speaking).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rwmj 10y agoTBH I've never understood what Apple gets out of selling the Mac Mini. It cannibalizes their own low-end laptops/desktops, and at the same time must be quite a marginal product mainly sold to a small number of hackers who probably put Linux on them.
- zymhan 10y agoWhy would anyone buy a Mac Mini and put Linux on it?! There are a million other small PCs that are far better for that. If I was going to buy a Mac Mini, it's to have an affordable Mac that I can stick somewhere in my house to run occasional OS X software. I already have a few other computers, plenty of them running Linux. A Mac Mini is a great way to get a cheap OS X setup going. Also, it's not low margin, they charge $200-$400 for each upgrade you make. So if you only want a 1.8GHz box with 5400rpm spinning rust, then you're still paying $500 and Apple can't be out more than $300 in parts and costs. Especially given that they've been selling this model for 3 years, the cost of production is quite low.
- rwmj 10y agoBack when I had a Mac Mini (10 years ago), you could pull them apart and upgrade the RAM and hard disk, which I did. Is that not still the case?
- washadjeffmad 10y agoYou still can, but they're a few hardware generations out of date. You'd have more fun with a raspi 3 or a less expensive mini-ITX build that you can upgrade with current gen components.
- snuxoll 10y agoNo you can't, the current Mac Mini has RAM soldered onto the board. I think the only machines Apple now sells with any internal expansion are the 27" iMac and the trashcan.
- lultimouomo 10y agoRam is soldered so you cannot upgrade it. You can swap the HD with a SATA SSD, iFixit has an easy 35 step tutorial to do that (plus 35 steps back to reassemble it) that involves a custom made tool to remove the motherboard and a pretty rare anti-tamper Torx TR6 screwdriver. (Once you get ahold of the screwdriver it's actually not as hard as it looks. You can DIY the motherboard removal tool from a wire coat hanger and in 40 minutes of focused work you'll be done.)
- bangonkeyboard 10y agoThe last Mac mini "update" in 2014 soldered the RAM to the motherboard and sealed away access to the internals. [0][1] [0]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0456.jpg https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IMG_0... [1]: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/11/not-the-upgrade-we-were-hoping-for-the-2014-mac-mini-reviewed/2/ https://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/11/not-the-upgrade-we-wer...
- jdeibele 10y agoYou can't upgrade the RAM anymore. "Mac mini (Late 2014) does not have user-installable RAM." https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205041
- zymhan 10y agoI thought the author had an older Mac Mini that would be upgradeable, since they were looking at buying the 2014 model.
- danieldk 10y agoAlso, it's not low margin, they charge $200-$400 for each upgrade you make. So if you only want a 1.8GHz box with 5400rpm spinning rust, then you're still paying $500 and Apple can't be out more than $300 in parts and costs. I still have a Late 2012 Mac Mini. The CPU is almost as fast as the 2014 and I put in 16 GB RAM when I bought it (you could just pop off the bottom without a screwdriver). Later I also added a 500GB SSD. It still runs great. Still selling the 2014 Mini is even a bigger offense than if they'd sell the upgradable late 2012 flavor.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 10y agoI think it's sold mainly to companies that want a cheap machine for iOS development. Hackers are more likely to build themselves a hackintosh and triple boot.
- washadjeffmad 10y agoHeadless systems, digital signage, PVR/HTPC, and testing farms are what we mainly use them for. They're crammed behind every conference TV and in every AV cabinet, but I doubt too many people use them as their primary device.
- rwmj 10y agoWouldn't a NUC or Brix running Linux be a better choice for this?
- danvasquez29 10y agoProbably, but in an office with a couple hundred macs it may seem easier to keep everything playing nicely together.
- washadjeffmad 10y agoI think so, and definitely for at home use, but outside of server the Linux team doesn't have much purchasing power.
- quantumhobbit 10y agoI have one that I was using as a great home theater of to stream Netflix and other online services. I wish they would support it more because it was far more versital than the roku I use now and much simpler to use than a Linux or windows equivalent.
- swozey 10y agoAndroid net/media boxes are becoming very popular, to the point you can grab them off of Amazon for very cheap. I haven't jumped into that ecosystem yet so I'm not sure how great they are or what the best ones are. I've been thinking of buying a few of them to replace the Rokus around my house.
- voltagex_ 10y agoGoogle have really hamstrung the Android TV ones, but most of the media boxes you get off Amazon won't have that. I have the Xiaomi MiBox 3 and it's a pain to put other apps on it. Anything that isn't explicitly Android TV compatible won't be installable from the Play Store, and even if you sideload it, it doesn't show up in the menu. Amusingly, this is the most useful that "OK Google" has ever been (Xiaomi's remote+voice control is excellent) I will say it's worth reading up and buying based on chipset+firmware. You probably want Android 5+, something that runs Kodi well, Ethernet and HEVC decoding. I'd recommend the Mibox but Google and Xiaomi have really made a mess of it.
- ajmurmann 10y agoI've been to countless offices that use Mac Minis for dashboards and CI monitors.
- Symbiote 10y agoI set one up at work for this purpose, but using an old, unused Mac Mini. If I'd needed something new for refreshing a couple of web pages, I'd have bought a Raspberry Pi or similar. Would anyone really buy a Mac Mini, new, to do this?
- ajmurmann 10y agoWell it depends. If it was just me I'd buy a raspberry pi. If it was a single or small number of machines for work I might buy a Mac mini, just because I know for certain that it will work and know exactly how much labor will go into it. The labor and risk easily can outweigh the lower price of acquisition.
- srj 10y agoIf you already have an expensive IPS monitor which Mac do you buy to do your design work? There's the old mini and then the really pricey trashcan Mac.
- manarth 10y agothe really pricey trashcan Mac Whose last update was 10 months older than the mac mini's.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- notalaser 10y agoQuite a while ago (~2007) I bought a Mac Mini which I used as my main machine for quite some time (until 2011 or so, I think). I did a lot of programming on it. It was a very good machine and frankly, if Apple were to upgrade it to a decent spec (for 2017), I'd buy one on the spot. I don't need a laptop and, consequently, I don't want to pay a single penny for portability. My previous monitor was almost ten years old when I gave it away, and I'd have kept on using it if I hadn't had to buy a larger one (tl;dr small desk, got a big 1080p monitor and hung it on the wall behind the desk for extra space). Unless an iMac is going to last me 10-12 years, there's no point in paying a single penny for a monitor that I'm going to stop using when the computer it's glued to goes obsolete. Sexy design, stupid engineering. That leaves me to choose between a Mac Mini and a Mac Pro. I don't need a Xeon machine, but a three year-old dual-core i5 machine with a crawling hard disk isn't quite on-par with what I need, either. My current machine is a five year-old quad-core i7 that's running just fine. My only beef with it is that between 2012 and 2017, a bunch of things happened on Linux and now I'd really, really rather use OS X (hell, I'd rather use Windows if it didn't shove ads down my throat...). An up-to-date Mac Mini would be exactly what I need -- small, runs OS X, doesn't come with a bunch of hardware that I don't need, can run Emacs, compile C programs, run Perl/Python/whatever scripts, plays music and ssh-es into other boxes (my current machine does all that, too, except its OS keeps breaking)
- antfarm 10y agoThey make nice build/CI servers for iOS development.
- newscracker 10y ago> Apple's attitude to the Mac mini truly confuses me. I'm probably speaking for thousands of people. It's been complete frustration to see what Apple hasn't been up to on the Mac front. Apart from not updating a few ranges for years (and introducing updates that reduce or remove the kind of expandability the core Apple customer base wants), not reducing the price of old systems is highly insensitive on the part of the company. It looks like in another one or two years macOS won't support some of the aged hardware that Apple sells. That may be the time it'd completely junk those ranges. It's sad to see this. Though lacking in certain ways, the HP Z2 Mini seems like a decent alternative for people who can move out of macOS.
- ianai 10y agoThey definitely have unmet demand. They also just cut their CEOs pay for under performance. They could upgrade the whole line in one go and be right back to relevance.
- kogepathic 10y ago> Though lacking in certain ways, the HP Z2 Mini seems like a decent alternative for people who can move out of macOS. The Z2 Mini is a completely different class of hardware. People who are looking for an alternative to the Mac Mini would be well served by an Intel NUC, Zotac ZBOX [0], or Gigabyte BRIX [1]. [0] https://www.zotac.com/product/mini_pcs/all https://www.zotac.com/product/mini_pcs/all [1] http://www.gigabyte.us/products/list.aspx?s=47&ck=104 http://www.gigabyte.us/products/list.aspx?s=47&ck=104
- protomyth 10y agoand yet, the HP Z2 Mini is the same price as the middle Mac Mini packing quite a bit more power and expandability.