Well, we're getting closer to another Stevenote and the Apple rumor mill is at full tilt, so take this one with a huge grain of salt, but the team over at AppleInsider says they "sincerely believe" that the Mac Mini is about to be discontinued. Citing sources for whom they have the "utmost respect," AI says that Apple management was only bending to shareholder demands for a sub-$800 Mac when it developed the Mini, and that the recent release of the Apple TV all but spells the end of significant updates to the lil' bugger. We can see what they're getting at, we suppose: the Mini has never gotten a lot of attention, but the similarly-discontinued products AI compares it to -- the Cube, the PowerBook 2400, and the 12-inch PowerBook G4 -- were all higher-end machines, while the Mini sits at the very bottom of Apple's product line. On top of that, the description of the Apple TV as the "next-generation Mac Mini" strikes us as a little odd, since the Mini was never sold as a media extender (even though you can
use it that way) and the Apple TV was never sold as a general-purpose computer (even though you can
use it that way). AI does seem pretty confident in the case it's laid out -- but as with all things Apple, only time will tell.
posted May 24th 2007 8:22PM
2.2% of lots of money is still lots of money.
I own 4 Mac mini's (one for each member of the family)...they're great. My daughter uses hers to edit her vids with Final Cut Express HD...just using her 1GB Ram Core Duo box (added a couple of external FW drives but they're cheap! Other than a little slow on the render, it works great. The rest of us just use 'em as general purpose home computers and I bang away as a Java developer in Eclipse and jump into Parallels (yes, it works great on my 2GB machine) when I have to hit my companies VPN, plus I can do some IE testing... So I don't want to hear about the Mini being incapable...not true! All of these machines would have been Dells if Apple didn't have something like the Mini available.
Look at it logically: Apple won't abandon the low end market...they need it for switching. The new Airport Extreme is the same size as the current mini, the AppleTV is a bit bigger (have them both). So there's two scenarios: a new "mini" comes out in the same foot print (6 something inches square), maybe a little taller so they can put in a 3.5" drive? but not much more. Or they make the new mini in the 7.7in square packaga ala Apple TV, it's a little taller (to fit the Superdrive naturally) than the AppleTV, maybe has most of the features but is focused on being the home computer and not for under the TV. Just don't see them getting rid of the segment and making their entry into desktop computers be the 20" iMac (as much as I covet one of those, it's not going to happen...)
Don't kill it Apple. Let it live. What do you have against the little people!
The education market was slipping from Apple in a big way until the Mac Mini came along. iMacs are too expensive for many districts that could source monitors and peripherals at prices Apple could/would not provide, and the Mini also allowed for component recycling (i.e. using the same monitor over the lifespan of 2 CPUs or vice versa). This is a valuable money-saver for schools who were rejecting the all-in-one Apple consumer iMac. Laptops are too prone to theft and damage, iMacs are too proprietary. Mac minis have proven to be very easy to secure in educations settings with terrific interchangability at a decent price. Without them, Apple's education sales would have plummeted even as its consumer sales have risen.
If Apple does kill the Mac Mini, it is because thay will seriously modify the iMac line and address these concerns. I would look there rather than at the AppleTV for form factor changes.
please don't do this. My son wants a Mac and an upgraded (and cheaper) mini would be a good bet: I want to try it out as a media center with the living room flat screen, and/or use it as my son's box (garageband, video editing etc.).
I am certainly not interested in seeing the market niched into living room boxes doing too little (e.g. Apple TV, 360).
Apple is not likely to cancel a product for which there is a reasonable market. They're still growing market share and they need products that are less intimidating for those who want to switch over from their PC's...
Now, integrate Apple TV, the Mac Mini, and the perpetual rumor mill about an Apple Media Center and season with a DVR and you've got a pretty solid competitor to TIVO...
The mini was very important for me, it's what got me to test the Apple waters and I even now own a mac pro as my main computer. I know several others who also got a mini as their foray into the Apple world.
I have a PPC Mini, and it works very well indeed as a media centre box sitting on the shelf under my LCD TV. The eyeTV DTT plugin gives it full PVR capabilities, I can schedule recordings remotely over the web, and edit out the adverts with a click of the mouse once the recording's done. It runs a bittorrent client, a home webserver, and I can SSH into it to do a little PHP and Ruby development on the side. Why would I want to replace it with a laptop, a beige box PC, or an Apple TV for that matter? It does the jobs I want it to, better than any of the alternatives, and it looks good too.
I'm typing this on our brand new Mac Mini, the first Apple product I've owned since 1987 (the year I went to college and left my Apple IIe at home for my sister to use). The reason the Mini was purchased? The hardware. You cannot find an equally capable WIndows machine that is as quiet and small as the Mini is at any price, and those attributes are VERY desirable for something that sits in our family room next to the television. If Aopen or somebody else made hardware this good at this price, I probably wouldn't have bought this, but there are no viable substitutes right now. For that reason -- the mini is a fantastic media center PC -- I hope it does not see its EOL quite yet.
Speaking of the mini being deep-sixed, I have a perfectly good 1.66ghz mini that has one little problem--the diagnosis of a fried motherboard. What can I do with the thing besides parting it out--a replacement motherboard from Apple is $700. Can I through something else in there, like a pc commodity board??