A woman is always buying something - Ovid
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Apple's Mac Mini allows a second hard drive for £600
THE LATEST OVERPRICED CREATION from Apple's Mac Mini line has gone under the scalple showing just how much over the odds fanbois are willing to pay for a shiny logo and some angular industrial design.
Apple's Mac Mini is supposed to represent a low-cost Macintosh computer and years ago it was not a bad bit of kit for the price. However the latest version, which came out earlier this week, costs upwards of £529 and Apple thinks a £849 version can be used as a server. But after the chaps at Ifixit took the latest Mac Mini apart we were left to wonder whether you could even stuff £529 worth of tenners into an empty Mac Mini.
Being fair to Apple, its design department has been very clever in slimming down the Mac Mini further. No smoke and mirrors here, oh no, just remove the built in DVD writer and watch the fanbois fawn over 'cleaner lines', creating an opportunity for Apple to flog the same USB drive it offers Macbook Air customers for £66.
After taking the lid off Apple's 'mid 2011' Mac Mini, the Ifixit boys found out that there is enough space for a second hard drive, though Apple doesn't provide the connections required to hook one up to the motherboard. However Apple kindly offers fanbois the option to make use of this space by opting to have a 750GB SATA drive and a 256GB SSD for only £600, doubling the cost of a Mac Mini. At that sort of price the space inside the Mac Mini is priced higher per square inch than most of London's Zone 1.
On the whole Apple has done a very good job of packaging the pint size money hole, and it should be commended that it can fit a 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 chip into such a small space.
What users can easily do, as is evident from Ifixit's teardown, is upgrade RAM and the hard drive easily, which is probably more than what most fanbois would ever dare to do. That said, after spending so much to buy a Mac Mini, most fanbois won't have the cash left over to upgrade anyway. µ
Tags: Apple
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$225 for a second drive out of a Mac Mini server on eBay. Looks like everything needed to install it is there.
http://cgi.ebay.com/130554567488
Some of them buy apple.
Stay way fum tha lide cayl aayn.
I'll give you a good reason not to have a cd/DVD drive in a Mac mini. It runs too bloody hot! At least my 2010 Mac mini did until I took the drive out, even surrounding the thing with notebook coolers.
Cheers
If you really want 2 drives then an extra £150 (over the version that supports an SSD and HDD as an option) gets you two drives, an extra 2 cores and the server version of OSX.
I just checked and in the UK 256GB SSDs are £350-400 at competitive online shops.
So take that, the larger drive and then making the change and (although I hate to say it of Apple) the price isn't that bad.
Definitely misleading since the SSD is barely mentioned in the article and totally ignored in the title.
So that £600 includes a 256GB SSD? In that case I agree that the headline and tenure of this article is extremely unfair because I'm sure a techwriter know the prices of SSD's and that 256GB is a whopping big size for a SSD.
Although.. if you are forced towards an SSD because of the size mostly then it does seem a bit questionable from apple's side.
Faced with the dilemma of how to support idevices which everybody and their dog seems to be buying... i bought an ipod touch to test stuff on. but do I buy an ipad as well... and other itoys as they come out?
Normally I'd use emulators, but you need a mac to run their emulators, and I tried a hackintosh vm (which worked but then you're trapped on old software versions). I figured I might as well just buy a stupid mac and add it to my collection of rarely used computers. $600 is alot, but potentially losing business and opportunities is worse.
Anyways, ripoff or not, the new mac mini is at least using an i5. The last one was using a core2... I feel bad for anybody buying core2 anything in 2011.
I've been bad mouthing apple for a good 20 years, but let's be honest. Their market share for devices is huge, they make more money than microsoft, and it's hard to ignore them and wish they'd just go away when every second person you meet has an iphone.
YOU KNOW WHAT, I ALSO JUST UPDATED MY OWN PIECACRAP BOX, AND I TOO HAD LEFT ENOUGH SPARE ROOM INSIDE FOR ANOTHER DRIVE OR TWO!
GLORY BEE!
lol, this guy writes for a tech mag? what a total joke.
If you had, you would quickly realize there's nothing else similar on the market at that price. And yes, buy the €39,99 Mac OS X Server software and you have an excellent full-blown server.
£480 (the list for the SSD by it's self) is a little above the cost of a basic 240GB SSD, but in line with higher end Intel or OCZ MLC parts. £120 for an upgrade from 500GB to 750GB is the thing that would annoy me, but then there's nothing stopping you buying the base model and upgrading the HD and RAM yourself (the newer Mac Minis even have a little access hatch on the bottom to allow you to do this).
Question. Do you think you can build a whole server with those 600 quids ? Challenge accepted. :-[
you can get a 256GB SSD
For under $400us http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139417
If that's not marketing genius I don't know what would qualify. Selling substandard hardware at a premium, scamming their customers with practically everything they release and still getting rave reviews. It's seriously a cult...
The day I'll be able to short their plummeting stock I'll throw a huge party...
I think Apples are overpriced as well but aren't 256GB SSD expensive anyway?