Apple Unveils Mac mini with Intel Core Duo:
The new Mac mini with the Intel Core Duo processor delivers performance up to four times faster than its predecessor in the same innovative and incredibly compact design.
Dammit. This wasn’t expected til June. And it has an audio line-in (that mine doesn’t) in addition to being 4x faster.
Gah.
This just illustrates the rule that the best time to buy a computer is always Right Now. It may be cheaper next week, but what will be available the week after that for which you will wish you had waited?
Seriously, the iMac we just got is fine. Faster is always better, but I suspect the price of the new one would mean we didn’t get anything. But the mini . . . as underpowered as it seems sometimes (at a blazing 1.42GHz, though much of the sluggishness is due to not having enough RAM), I would welcome a two-fold increase, let alone four-fold, especially at the same price.
C’est la vie. Dammit.
My mini has as much RAM as I could get in it; that’s not the problem either. Actually, most of the sluggishness is due to the crappy slow internal disk. I’ve heard, but not yet tried for myself, that if you install a speedy external Firewire disk and move the OS to it, you’ll see a significant increase in performance.
I have 2 FireWire disks hooked up to mine, so it would be easy to test this.
Yeah, the slow disks are a fetish of Steve’s (due to their relative quietness) but it comes at a cost. I recall reading something about buying PowerBooks with optional larger drives and the larger drive being a surprisingly snappy 7200 RPM drive. I considered getting a 7200 drive for my iBook when the disk went south last year, but it was pretty pricey and installation was an addition charge (my days of cracking open these things are behind me: I haven’t even been brave enough to crack open my mini).
I could see dropping a faster drive in it though: I could swap either the 80 or 120 Gb outboard drive in and use the slow 80 that came with it as a backup (ie, used rarely and non-interactively).
Sigh. Just looked at the new Mini specs. The disk is faster
(5400rpm vs 4200rpm; 28% faster), it’s got a dual-core CPU
(optionally, but when I bought this one I got the top-end model)
I’m with you. I shoulda waited a year.
so the mini’s resale value is . . . . not all that bad, actually. Perhaps the new Intel ones aren’t shipping in quantity yet?
If you look over the specs at the Apple Store, the extra ports, a total of 2Gb RAM, and the remote (which I wouldn’t necessarily use but hey, you gotta pay for it), there’s not much to compare. The new ones are just a whole lot more box for the buck. But the magic $500 price point is a thing of the past . . .
So sell the PPC one and get an Intel one in really fast before the prices drop? Or resign yourself to owning two, one of which will always be a lesser version (ideal backup server/file repository, I guess)?
The upside to this is that the Intel-based iBook, when it arrives, will crush the one I am using now like a bug. So waiting for that will pay off. June, most likely, December at the latest.