New Mac mini?

With the keyboard, mini and monitor (and ACPP) the total is $1,115.00

If you're going to spend that much money, I'd just buy an iMac G5. The Mac mini is a good deal, but only if you already have everything except the computer. When you have to buy a monitor, keyboard, etc. for it, its value significantly drops.

I currrently have 128 built in ram, and then 256 that i added, i figured i could get 256 on the mini mac, then take the 256 from here and put it in.

I'm a little unclear about what you're suggesting here, but the Mac mini ram will not fit in the ibook, and the mini has only one memory slot - which ships filled.

Check out the other Mac mini threads here, or Apple's tech specs.

With the keyboard, mini and monitor (and ACPP) the total is $1,115.00

If you're going to spend that much money, I'd just buy an iMac G5. The Mac mini is a good deal, but only if you already have everything except the computer. When you have to buy a monitor, keyboard, etc. for it, its value significantly drops.

I'd second that. The iMac G5 can be had refurb for $1099.00, and it's more computer for the money once you break the $1000 barrier.

I was playing with both in the Apple store yesterday, coincedentally enough. The Mini actually sort of impressed me with how much it didn't suck, I'll give it that. (It was faster then I expected, based on my experiences with G4 Powerbooks.) The G5 feels quicker though, definately, if only for its SATA hard disks.

Of course, I was also fool enough to play with a dual G5 tower with 4GB of RAM. Gads that machine was spooky, spooky fast.

--Peace

1) Never, ever click the Post Comment button more then once(or that happens).

2) Preview, a standard Mac OS X everything-app(opens almost all PDF and picture files) is excellent for resizing photos, for more powerful features there's iPhoto.

Also, plugging a mouse in will never ever make a computer slower(not ever), unless you have some unnecessary heavy mouse driver program that only turns on when the mouse is in(never seen one, but you never know).

Mac mini only comes with... Mac mini. No mouse/keyboard/anything except the full suite of software. Every other new Mac comes with everything you need out of the box(sole exception - the G5, which ships without monitor).

If you're running OS X, you don't really need a driver for a Microsoft mouse. They tend to be fairly USB HID-standards compliant.

does anyone know what program i can use to resize pics on my Mac? (like on a PC, u can do it in Paint)
muchos gracias

There's a freebie called Graphic Converter X which works wonders.

mac mini looks great but with 167 FSB, man that really blows. If you're going to drop a grand on a computer, atleast get an Imac G5 that has atleast 533/600 FSB. I do video editing and i honestly wouldn't like buying a new system without atleast 600-800 fsb. the G5 atleast has that or more

I'm typing this on a Mac Mini (1.42GHz, 512MB). It's fine for for the purposes I require of my primary computer: browsing, iPhoto, iTunes, domestic accounts, snotty correspondence to my telecommunications supplier etc. It is also more then twice as fast as the PC (800MHz PIII) next to it that I have used for video editing continuously during the evening for the last four weeks. If I wanted to waste processor time on my primary computer, the Mac Mini, I'm sure that it is up to the job. Its spec is no different from that of the Powerbook that is regularly used by video editors working on the fly.

The "papermarks" for the Mac Mini are weak. The disk spec sounds appalling and one would expect it to swap frequently. It doesn't and it is a far more pleasant experience than the G3 iMac that sits, disconsolantly retired, in the corner of my living room. The Mini Mac has been used for eight hours today and "top" reports no page outs so far.

Benchmarks for the Mac Mini confirm the user experience. They indicate that the theoretical performance of a Mac Mini is slower than an entry level G5 iMac but it is closer than the papermarks would indicate.

Real world: It looks gorgeous but it has cost me a lot. As a result of buying this thing, my spare 15" TFT has come out of retirement and my new spare monitor is a back-groaning 17" CRT (the 15" TFT is temporarily hooked up to the Mac Mini until I have opportunity to swap it for the 19" Neovo currently used on the ancient PC). In previous times, when I needed to test a hack or dead Mac it took two minutes to grab the 15" TFT but I now think first whether it is worth lifting a 17" CRT...

A serious note about real world vs benchmarks vs papermarks: In my job I get to test loads of i386 PCs. When new technology emerges, the guys at Tom's Hardware get all excited but when I get this stuff on my desk I am usually disappointed. Obviously, the PC hardware aimed at gamers performs better than that aimed at the corporate market. But often the new stuff for the corporate market is no better than the mature corporate product (eg two years ago, Pentium 4 systems with SDRAM or DDR were significantly slower in real life than the PIII systems that our supplier wished to discontinue). In the case of Pentium 4 systems with DDR (eg Intel D845PT), the first generation performed like dogs but performance improved significantly with Intel's later chipsets. Little of the performance improvement in later generations can be attributed to raw cpu clock speed.

And that is why the Mac Mini works pretty well. The technology on which it is based is theoretically slower than the current stuff. But with age comes maturity and I daresay that the engineers who put it together were familiar enough with previous mistakes to not make them again.

Real world =/= benchmarks =/= papermarks.

Phil

Wrong. 167MHz denotes the old terminology for bus speed which seems to be what Apple will always use for G4 computers. FSB is a different thing altogether. Notice how the term FSB didnt seem to exist before the Power Mac G5? Based on my loose understanding of the concept, the FSB should be equal to the RAM speed, which on the Mac Mini is 333MHz. Therefore, it has a 333MHz frontside bus.

Wrong. 167MHz denotes the old terminology for bus speed which seems to be what Apple will always use for G4 computers. FSB is a different thing altogether. Notice how the term FSB didnt seem to exist before the Power Mac G5? Based on my loose understanding of the concept, the FSB should be equal to the RAM speed, which on the Mac Mini is 333MHz. Therefore, it has a 333MHz frontside bus.

Uhm, no. FSB is "Front Side Bus". There is some hokum at work when FSB speeds of various computers are discussed, but "167Mhz" is accurate for the Mac Mini.

Various CPUs these days, starting with the AMD Athlon five-something years ago, support transfer modes in which multiple memory transactions can occur per bus cycle. So, for instance, a bus with a 100Mhz clock can provide the same theoretical performance as a 200Mhz bus. The "DDR" in "DDR RAM" translates to "Double Data Rate" to reflect the fact that it can also perform this magical feat.

(See:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/ddr2.html

For some info on the RAM portion of this.)

Pentium IV CPUs quad-multiply their busses. So when you see "800Mhz FSB" in that world, it actually means "200Mhz x 4". Which obviously is even faster then DDR RAM, which is why you're starting to see the appearance of "DDR2", because the gap between CPU and RAM bandwidths is opening up again. (The G5's "1Ghz" FSB is achieved in a slightly different way, but the end result is similar.)

Anyway. Now that you have the background:

The G4 CPUs Apple uses still only support SDR data transfers. One transaction per clock. The reason Apple uses DDR RAM in them is because SDR SDRAM isn't widely available in speed grades faster then 133Mhz, and frankly, they'd look sort of stupid selling machines that take RAM that's getting difficult to buy anymore, since everyone else uses DDR. However, what this does mean is the "DDR" abilities of the RAM are wasted, and the total performance of the system is dictated by the CPU bus speed, which is 167Mhz, not the RAM's "multiplied" 333Mhz speed. This also applies to the G4 Powerbooks. The fact that Apple even bothers to quote that "333Mhz" number in their documentation is in fact somewhat deceptive to the consumer. (Although it does help them buy the correct RAM, since memory vendors often use that in advertising their wares.)

Understand?

--Peace

I was playing with both in the Apple store yesterday, coincedentally enough. The Mini actually sort of impressed me with how much it didn't suck, I'll give it that. (It was faster then I expected, based on my experiences with G4 Powerbooks.) The G5 feels quicker though, definately, if only for its SATA hard disks.

Of course, I was also fool enough to play with a dual G5 tower with 4GB of RAM. Gads that machine was spooky, spooky fast.

--Peace

I was just at an Apple Store today, and I was *really* impressed with the mini. Even before the Mini came out, I've thought the iMac G5 looks really clunky in person, much more so than in pictures. As for performance, I've not been impressed with much of anything. Everything from 1.5 Ghz powerbook to an iMac G5 to a dual 2 Ghz G5, gave me nothing but spinning beachballs every time I wanted to do *anything*, even with 512 MB of memory. For normal everyday activities, I haven't seen any improvement over my 800 mhz G4 Sawtooth on any new machine. I know there's no possible rational reason for it, but the Mini was really snappy with fewer beachballs than the others. Go figure. I definitely see myself getting one of these a year or two in the future.