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Has the price gone up too?
I would love one of these boxes sitting under my TV (when I finally get round to buying a TV), but for this new price, I might look around...

Yeah, now starts at £649!!! (used to be £499).
Frankly, £649 is just far too expensive for what you get (or rather don't get - no keyboard, mouse, screen). Nice design, but really expensive for what started out as a low-end entry mode to get Windows users to switch to a Mac.


You might want to hold out for an updated AppleTV, which rumour has it that it will be a lot cheaper, have no (or only minimal) storage in the box itself but will store and download content from the cloud (presumably MobileMe?) on demand. Just a rumour, but a strong indication that it's for real - and the price was rumoured to be just $99 - what that will be in £s who knows. I'd imagine it will use the same redesigned case as this new Mac mini and may follow shortly... Could be worth waiting for?

I know it's not a new-feature, but the article caused me to follow links and look at OS-X Server. I reckon that on a mini would make a pretty decent cross-platform server in a tiny package. I appreciate it's not going to be for everyone, and I could do it using OSS (In fact some of the Apple server stuff is open-sourced), but this + seperate storage for backing up user profiles, docs and music should do my phone in the future. I'm starting to think Photos/Lr Catalogs[sic] (and other such big-file project - I'm thinking audio/video stuff) will have to be treated seperately, although I'm not quite sure what the best approach will be. At the moment it just about all fits onto my MacBook, and so is backed up with everything else, but I know this won't be the case forever, and the idea of accessing gigabytes and gigabytes of data over a network for searching does not appeal!

I've considered it, but I'd like to have the greater flexibility a proper OS gives, rather than the "Front Row only" type OS...


Edd, I agree, I'd like the School of Art to buy one for their Mac room, would simplify things and is nice and small so wouldn't get in the way.

It is a little too expensive to replace the Apple TV.

I depends what you need... An HP small business server costs less and is more powerful - but big and noisy...

If it is just doing file and print server duties, the mini would make a good power saving server. A small intranet would also be a possibility. But for app servers etc. it would soon show its limits, with only SATA drives, mobile processor, slow memory and a chipset ethernet port...

It also has the advantage of no client restrictions, unlike Windows (you need to buy CALs for additional concurrent users on the server platform).

For our SQL Server or Citrix servers, it would be a non-starter (the former has a fibre attached SAN and they all have redundant power supplies and redundant ethernet ports... But I'd still like to see one in action, it could make a cheap way of mirroring main servers, for failover duties.

Yup, I was thinking home-server type setup. WHS, AFAIK, is fairly Windows-centric. There don't be seem to be many Mac-apps that are intended for concurrent multi-user access, but for most DBs for personal projects I either use Bento on a standalone machine, or MySQL hosted centrally. The other option is a much cheaper 1U box in a rack under the stairs. Anyhoo, it's years before these sorts of decisions need to be made.

It's a very nice looking machine (with or without the optical drive) but the price is just silly.
I suppose some of the cost (in £'s) is down to how weak sterling is but it's still far too much money for far too little Mac IMHO.
I dread to think how much the new Mac Pro will cost whenever it's released if this is the sort of thing Apple is trying to pull.

Someone needs to go up to Mr. Jobs and give him a slap before he disappears up his backside completely and takes the Mac platform with him. I wonder if there is an App for that (doubt it would get through the vetting process).

As I blogged previously, if you spec it up slightly it works out more expensive than a 21" imac with a faster CPU. Think the extra £100 was a bit of an error!

Unless they are planning to release a new iMac and price that ridiculously high, too.

As with the not allowing ipad sims to work in Iphone4s, shows a certain arrogance, which apple has always had but seems to be increaseing

Is that because they use the different size cards?

No, they both use Micro-SIMs, but they're configured differently, whatever that means... This explains it better than me!

What does surprise me about the specification, is that, for the price, there is only 2GB RAM and that there is only a Core 2 Duo inside. For that price, I'd expect at least a 2.24Ghz Core i3 and 4GB RAM in the base machine - heck, I'm buying Core i3 Toshiba Tecra laptops for less than the Mac mini; and they include Core i3, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD, 15.4" 1366x768 display, webcam, BT, Wi-Fi, SD card slot, 4 USB, E-SATA, Firewire, DVD-writer, keyboard, stereo speakers... For the price Apple are charging, I could probably squeeze in the docking station as well!

Considering everything Apple aren't giving, that is a high price for outdated technology...