I seriously do not understand how can it ship with a 500GB 5400rpm drive by default. This gives such poor experience to the user that Apple should have opted for all-ssd approach two generations ago. Very disappointed by that.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but they appear to have done the same thing with the Mac Mini to achieve the lower price point as they did with the iMac earlier this year, by introducing a 1.4Ghz i5 model? I don't recall the base Mac Mini being as weak before...
I've been waiting for about a year for this refresh and fully expected to buy one today, but after looking at the combination of price, default HDD, processors, and very weak integrated graphics, I just can't justify buying this. Compared to the relationship between the 2012 Mini and the 2012 computing ecosystem, the 2014 Mini is really not that impressive.
Not a bad price until you see it costs $300 to go from 4GB RAM to 16GB RAM.<p>Do these have user-upgradeable RAM? I can buy RAM a lot cheaper than that.
BTO option is now a dual core i7 (3Ghz), vs previous model's BTO option of a quad core i7 (2.3Ghz).<p>I wonder what the performance difference is between the two.
The $699 model + the SSD upgrade sums up to a whooping $899.<p>I like the form-faktor and all, but really, with 900 bucks i am sticking to my custom ITX builds
This is a credible answer for our new default developer machine, now that it has 2 Thunderbolt ports, but it doesn't seem cheap enough. We want dual 27" 2560 x 1440 displays, 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB fusion drive. This is for Rails development, so we're not taxing the CPU or GPU, although we do run parallel_rspec and parallel_cucumber, so more cores are helpful.<p>The 27" iMac is $2199 + $399 for this Monoprice monitor w/ DisplayPort <<a href="http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id=1130703&p_id=10489&seq=1&format=2>" rel="nofollow">http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=113&cp_id=11307&cs_id=...</a>, for a total of $2598. This has a 3.2GHz i5 and NVIDIA GeForce GT 755M 1GB GDDR5.<p>The new Mac Mini with 3 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB fusion drive, keyboard and trackpad is $1537 + 2 x $399 for the monitors = $2335.<p>I'm not convinced saving $263 is worth going from 4 cores to 2, and presumably a worse graphics card.
Despite the HDMI port and 2xThunderbolt ports, still maxes out at two monitors rather than three... guess Iris Pro would have been required for triple-head support.
Now I wish I hadn't bought a new Mac mini 6 months ago. But I really needed one then. In any case, I applaud the switch to ULV processors (like those found in ultrabooks or the MacBook Air). Anyone know if this generation of Mac mini has a fan in it? I have a serious fanless fetish.
A disappointing update, but would still consider it to replace my mid 2010 Core2Duo mini if the Thunderbolt ports supported Multistream Transport (MST) so I could daisychain 3 x Dell U2415 19x12 displays.
Mac Minis have been great entertainment boxes for me!<p>Hook them up to a LCD TV, use a wireless mouse and enjoy tons of free content on Hulu, YouTube, Justin.TV substitutes and others!
I'm slightly bummed that I can't get SSD on their starting model, and have to force myself to a fusion drive if I want to do better than hard drive.
Did I miss something, or does maxing out the CPU and the RAM on the mid-level model get you the same specs as a maxed-out high-end model for $200 cheaper?