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| Most helpful customer reviews 247 of 263 people found the following review helpful. Major Upgrades 2.3 GHz Intel Core i5 dual-core processor – a major upgrade over 2010′s model which used the antiquated Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Intel HD Graphics 3000 integrated graphics processor – An upgrade but not really as benchmarks show that the I.G 3000 is worse or at best equal to the Nvidia 320m integrated graphics processor in last years model. Thunderbolt port – a super fast data transfer port. Data transfer speeds (in daily use) are supposed to be as fast as USB 3.0 and firewire 800 if not more. But useless as of now, because no consumer level thunderbolt compatible products are available. The products that do exist are horribly overpriced. The TB port also functions as a Minidisplay port. For connecting your Mac Mini to an external monitor, you’ll need a Syba High Quality Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter If you want to connect it to a tv, you’ll need a Kanex iAdapt MDPHDMIV2 HDMI V2 – Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter with Audio Support Bluetooth 4.0 technology – the latest version of Bluetooth. Useful for transferring data off your mobile phone and connecting other Bluetooth peripherals (keyboards, magic trackpad etc) to your Mac Mini. 500 gb (5400 rpm) hard drive – last years model had a 320 gb hard drive. A minor upgrade. Slow. NOTE – the Mac Mini no longer has an optical drive (Superdrive). STANDARD FEATURES – from last years model (minor changes noted in brackets) are Unibody enclosure HDMI audio/video output with support for up to 1920 x 1200-pixel resolution and multichannel audio output (HDMI to DVI output adapter included if required to connect to a DVI only monitor) Four USB 2.0 ports Secure Digital memory card slot compatible with SD, SDHC, and SDXC media Software included is OS X 10.7 Lion and a 1 year warranty on parts and 90 day telephone technical support is standard. The new Intel i5 processor in the base Mac Mini is a speed demon, allowing the Mac Mini to obliterate 2010′s model in performance benchmarks as well as real world usage. The Mac Mini is excellent when it comes to watching full HD videos, working on documents, listening to music, streaming movies / music, surfing the web and other regular computing tasks. Something to be aware of though,there is no optical drive in this year’s Mac Mini. If you need one, you’ll have to purchase an external DVD drive and connect it to the Mini through one of it’s USB 2.0 ports. Apple expects you to download all software from the internet (Amazon digital downloads,Itunes Store, etc etc). Taking away choice from the buyer is never a good thing for anyone except for Apple. Apple is still including 2 gb of ram in this machine – which is sad / shameful / disgusting (take your pick) for a product being sold in 2012 but I’m sure they have their reasons (Upsell to the mid level Mac Mini or the Mac Mini Server. Higher profit margins. Etc etc) but this leads to a degraded user experience out of the box. The Mac Mini is unable to multitask effectively. System lockups, pinwheels, stuttering. I recommend adding 4gb (2 x 2 sticks) Corsair 8 GB DDR3 Laptop Memory Kit CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9 of ram if you want to multitask smoothly. It’s easy to replace the ram, just twist the bottom cover, open it up, pull out the old ram sticks and add the new sticks. (I suggest reading through the manual once before you do so though) Apple has also bumped up the hard drive capacity from 320 to 500gb but it’s still a 5400rpm hard drive. Another helpful way for contributing to a degraded user experience as programs take longer to launch. Thunderbolt is a good addition to the machine but useless as of now because no consumer level (affordable) Thunderbolt products exist. The products that do exist like the Apple Thunderbolt Display and the Promise Pegasus NAS Hard Drive Array, both cost $1000. The Thunderbolt cable itself costs $50. Last year, when I wrote my review of the 2010 Mac Mini. I said that the Mac Mini was a horrible value for the price considering it contained an antiquated C2D processor(and rightly so). However the changes in this year’s model make the Mac Mini an OK purchase at this point in time. With a $100 price drop and the new machine being twice as powerful as the old one due to the Intel i5 processor, the base model 2011 Mac Mini is recommended if you’re looking for a capable, non obtrusive,power saving machine that will handle your daily computing tasks. But think about it. For all of Apple’s ” It Just Works” motto, this machine doesn’t “Just work” until you add additional ram by yourself. Which again makes me ask, why would I or any other customer pay a premium price for a hobbled user experience out of the box? Not a good move by Apple. It makes them seem no different than any of the other low end electronics companies that try to nickel and dime us. Hopefully next years model will include enough ram to run smoothly out of the box. Notes of Interest – The power supply of the Mac Mini is still internal. This may look cleaner from a design standpoint but it can also be considered a design flaw. If the power supply ever malfunctions, instead of a power brick, you’ll have to take your entire Mac mini in to an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider and leave it there for repairs which may lead to more downtime. No optical Drive – From now on, it’s basically BYOMKM and D (Bring your own Mouse, Keyboard, Monitor and Disc burner) If you need to buy an optical drive, that will be $50 – $80 extra. Certain reviewers are claiming that Apple was able to drop the optical drive which is why they have reduced the price by $100 and they wanted to pass the savings on to “us” the consumers. That’s not true. Keep in mind that that the Mini has always had an optical drive before this model. The Mac Mini when launched, first cost $499, then went up to $599 and finally $699. At all those earlier price points, an optical drive was included in the machine. Now the machine costs $599 but doesn’t include an optical drive. So if you read a review telling you that Apple could reduce the price by $100 only because they removed the optical drive, that’s not true. Apple removed the optical drive for their selfish reasons ( To push users towards digital downloads from their App store, etc etc) Also, the standard Mac Mini now has space for a second hard drive due to the removal of the optical drive. So if you wanted, you could add a second hard drive. It’s a complicated process (Why? Cus Apple wants it that way) and it may void the warranty IF you break something while doing so but it’s possible. You’ll also need a special SATA cable. For detailed instructions on how to, check iFixit.com Value Equation – Even though the Mac Mini is the cheapest mac desktop, it can get expensive fast. Cost is an important aspect to consider before you jump into Apple Land. If you decide to upgrade the ram ($60) and also need to purchase a LCD monitor ($100 to 300) keyboard and mouse ($30 to 60) and optical drive ($50 – $80) and AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Mini (NEWEST VERSION) ($144) once you total it all up, the Mac mini will end up costing almost as much as a Macbook Air (low end model which is more portable) or the entry level iMac (21.5 inch screen, 4gb of ram, dedicated graphics). If that’s the case, you better off examining those machines as purchase options instead of buying a Mini or purchasing a Home.Theater.PC by any reputed PC maker. Hope this helps! 48 of 55 people found the following review helpful. The biggest…and maybe only problem (I haven’t fully diagnosed it yet) is the lack of RAM. Apple ships the base model Mini with 2gb of RAM, which from my past experiences should have been fine. My old, poor, overheating, since deceased Intel iMac had 2gb of memory and worked fine. The difference between this Mini and that iMac was 10.7. Lion apparently takes a lot more RAM so whereas I routinely had over a gig of free memory on the iMac, my Mini is currently cruising at 500mb of space to spare under normal use. But that’s not all, since the video card uses some of that RAM, I only have about 250mb of available memory. This is the fastest processor I’ve ever used and it’s getting soundly beaten by my old HP laptop running a 1.3ghz Core Duo 2 chip and 4gb of RAM. I can’t listen to music on iTunes or Rdio without the sound skipping whenever I load a particularly complex webpage. I don’t even want to talk about my experiences with photo editing or trying to run a virtual OS. Of course the answer is more RAM, which I’ve ordered. However, when you consider how cheap RAM is, there no excuse for Apple to not include at least 4gb. Other computer makers ship sub-$500 desktops out with upwards of 6gb, yet Apple deliberately forces customers to pay for an upgrade to their brand new computer. Back in 2001 I bought a white iBook G3 at the cusp of Apple’s conversion from OS 9 to OS X. While it shipped with OS X, the hardware was pure OS 9 and it showed in its lagging performance, particularly with the video card and display. I think Apple did something similar here, shipping a desktop that doesn’t have the specs to run it’s most current operating system. You expect something like this from a Packard Bell or eMachines, not Apple. EDIT: After installing an extra 4gb of RAM (bringing it to 5gb), the Mini runs like it should have. Upon installing the memory, the Mac went from using 1.4 gb of RAM after a reboot to using 1.8 gb. This means the operating system in resting mode needs more memory than is available on the stock Mini. So I’ll keep my review at 2 stars since Apple is selling a brand new computer that can’t properly run it’s newest operating system due to a lack of resources. 66 of 79 people found the following review helpful. A quick list: The base mac mini now starts at $599. This is a $100 decrease from the previous base mac mini. The Mac mini has kept the same basic shape. You can still twist the bottom cover to upgrade RAM easily. Apple has eliminated the optical drive across the board with this release. There are a good number of build-to-order options. You can use SSD, upgrade any machine to 8GB of RAM, upgrade both internal drives for a total of 1.5TB. Amazon only offers the three stock machines.(But you can upgrade the RAM easily on your own.) The Mac mini has left the Core 2 Duo family and now uses Intel i5 and i7 processors. A significant upgrade. In some cases doubling the performance. The RAM has changed from PC8500 DDR3 1066MHz to PC10600 DDR3 1333MHz.The Apple avilable limit is 8GB, but we’re hoping to test 16GB soon. The Mac mini gains Thunderbolt. This will be a huge deal eventually as more ThunderBolt Accessories are released. The mini machine still uses a ridiculously small amount of power and is nearly silent in operation. |
OK MAC MINI
Hobbled, crippled, can’t even play MP3′s without skipping
Incredible performance.
