In the various laptops, soldered-on RAM is a trade-off for the increasing thinness of the machines. Whether it's worth it will depend on the individual's needs.
In this case, the Mac mini is the same size as the previous generation, which had had user-replaceable RAM. Soldering it on the RAM in this new generation is just a dick move on Apple's part. It's hard to think of a legitimate reason for them to do this except to make more money from you.
Agreed. I'm willing to put up with soldered-on RAM and minimal expansion for my rMBP because I see benefits from it. I don't see any such benefits in this Mac. I can just build a Hackintosh and be done with it, and I think that's what I'll do next.
I'd like to buy a rMBP, but the non expandibility annoys me. I have mid 2012 MBP 4GB RAM, 512GB HDD, and I was able to gradually upgrade it to 16GB together with 960GB SSD. It is certainly heavier than the rMBP but it suits my needs perfectly.
In comparison, the rMBP has a perfect display, but I will need to get the most expensive model. I'd also lose on ethernet support, and need to get an adapter. I am not sure why rMBP lacks an Ethernet port in any case, this is supposed to be a laptop for professionals. Sometimes my job requires me to have Ethernet access.
I honestly don't care about making my devices thinner and thinner. My iPhone 4 is thin enough. My laptop may be heavy but it's more of a desktop replacement anyway.
If you lay your laptop flat on your desk. If you're using a stand, take care with your cable such that there's not adverse strain pulling down on the adapter. I'm just thankful that only cost me 2 TB-GigE adapters when I was using a Rain Design mStand with the fully specced out 15" rMBP from work (rather than killing the port itself).
I know I can use an adapter, but it's one more thing to carry around, lose, or get stolen. It's an extra cost to the user, and one more device dangling off my laptop.
> I honestly don't care about making my devices thinner
> and thinner. My iPhone 4 is thin enough. My laptop may
> be heavy but it's more of a desktop replacement anyway.
It's the same for me. My 2010 MBP is my primary machine, and I'd much rather a thicker laptop with user-replaceable RAM and storage. Apple spent a lot of time building laptops that were ~1" thick and had these options, so I know that they can do it. They just don't want to do it any more; they'd rather we buy new laptops every ~3 years than gradually upgrade our current ones to last twice that time.
And your Hackintosh will crash, make noise and draw too much power. To an increasingly large segment of the market, these cons far outweigh the possibility of a RAM upgrade.
It's not that bad as it was a few years ago. I updated mine today to Yosemite and it was painful but bearable. I bought my hardware with osx86 in mind, it doesn't give me much trouble.
No crashes. Noise and power consumption are dependent on what hardware you pick. I was waiting for the new Minis but seeing them I think I'll just keep my i3, RAM, SDD and get a smaller form factor motherboard and keep using the hackintosh.
I've built multiple Hackintoshes. They don't crash if you've been smart about part purchases. One of my last two was passively cooled, and I don't care anymore about noise because the machine itself can live in a closet (cable drops outside). And sure, my last Hackintosh drew a lot of power. It was also an i7-875K running at 3.5GHz, which I couldn't get in anything except a $3K Mac Pro at the time. (Total BOM for that machine, which is still in use albeit as a Windows PC: $800.)
But anyway, I don't care about the "increasingly large segment of the market". I care about me. So I don't know why you're fluttering about.
I agree. I was really looking forward to what apple would do with the Mac Mini as I wanted it to be my first apple purchase. To be fair,the update seems like a downgrade. Even on the keynote, the product seemed neglected.
It looks like I am going look for small form factor cases and stick Linux on them and probably get a Mac book Pro when I save up enough money.
Well .. we can vote with our dollars. I just kept my 2010 macbook and got my own ssd and 16GB of RAM. Also, keeping my old Mac Mini from around that time.
Intel NUCs are really interesting small form factor PC kits - a nice medium between completely from scratch (which can be a real pain in SFF) and completely prebuilt. i3/i5 Broadwell NUCs are announced for early 2015.
I think I prefer the slightly larger mini-PCs from Zotec. If I build from scratch, the AMD-based AM1 platforms are superb. $30 socketed miniITX motherboards and $20 chips are great.
I hate that move. It's possible that a lot of people were using them as servers, upgrading them, running them hard 24/7, and then getting free replacements via AppleCare? That's a pure guess.
I've come to the unquestionable conclusion that Apple doesn't want customers inside their computers. Full stop. Apple views the personal computer as a device to be used for its serviceable life (until a major component fails), then discarded, recycled, and replaced with a new one.
I'm not defending this stance, btw, just stating what I've observed. Our household recently experienced a HDD failure in an iMac purchased late 2010. At 4 years old, the HDD was due for a failure (based on my experience with spinning magnetic disks). No problem, I thought. I'm an experienced hacker; taking this thing apart will be no problem at all.
I was right in that taking the iMac apart would be little challenge for me. Honestly, the iMac is a miracle of serviceability for such a compact computer. All of the connectors unsnapped as expected while using the correct tools. Nothing was terribly inaccessible, with the exception of the LCD driver cable. That connector terrifies me, but everything else was cake.
What killed me was the HDD thermal monitoring system. Apple uses the internal HDD thermal sensing equipment. Ostensibly (and probably true), monitoring via SMART requires an interrupt, which momentarily halts HDD communication. I/O on a HDD is bad enough without these interruptions, so hats off to Apple for prioritizing performance.
The down side of this is that there is no standard for the thermal sensor pins in the connector provided on the HDD. You have to 1) make sure to buy a HDD of the same make as the one you're replacing, and 2) cross your fingers that it isn't a WD HDD, which apparently went through a running change, which A) flipped the thermal sensing pins, and B) changed the connector subtly.
I experienced two challenges. First, my connector had a "nub" on one side, which fit in to a slot in the port on the OEM HDD. The new WD drive had no such slot. Second, my HDD temperature sensor cable had an 8-pin connector. In the article above, you can see that the connector is a 6-pin connector in an 8-pin hole. Because my connector was 8-pins, I couldn't simply flip it, because that shifted the cables by 1 column. I ended up hand filing the nub off the connector, then literally grinding and filing one column of the pins off the connector, turning it in to a 6-pin connector, so that I could flip it.
The moral of the story is that Apple makes zero considerations for end-user serviceability. None whatsoever. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they intentionally make it difficult, just that when faced with any decision where the choices are A) benefit the design or profitability of the device in some way or B) retain end-user serviceability, factor B never even gets considered.
the other dick move is requiring you to buy the top end mini before optioning to a SSD larger than 256g. Its one helluva up charge to go from the mid model to the top one and the only difference is a slightly faster processor; 300 bucks. Add in the cost to add a larger SSD and its just not remotely attractive
I admire Apple systems a lot, but having grown up in a country where the average salary is 400€, I never managed to convince myself to buy their systems.
Specially since I value technical features and flexibility to change hardware over design.
I can live with soldered-on RAM - there is a bit of an Apple premium to the RAM they sell, but at least you can get the configuration you want. I'm much more disappointed by the lack of a quad-core option. I was planning on picking up a high-end quad-core Mac mini when they updated the line, but after the announcement on Thursday I ran down to the nearest Apple Store and bought a 2012 quad-core Mac mini instead.
I wish I could have bought the 2.6GHz quad-core as opposed to the 2.3GHz, but that was a build-to-order option only. Still, the 2.3GHz is much faster than the top end 2014 Mac mini when it comes to multithreaded performance:
The problem with the current Apple approach is that it forces you to make the decision about how much RAM you may need beforehand, and charges you extra for the privilege. Making the RAM on a desktop machine non configurable is a greedy move, and allows them to announce that their machines are affordable, while disguising the fact that most people have to buy the more expensive options.
That's exactly my problem with it. Every machine I've ever bought, I've upgraded the RAM later in life when I genuinely needed the upgrade and benefitted from much lower pricing. Now, that cost is needlessly frontloaded; either I pay much more for the RAM I won't need for at least a year or two, or I live without it and potentially have to upgrade sooner. It's definitely a greedy move on Apple's part.
> there is a bit of an Apple premium to the RAM they sell
You're just paying for the brand and the convenience of not having to put it in yourself. RAM from Apple has to have one of the worst price/performance ratios.
In comparing the low and medium end minis, I'm reminded of the below Arstechica article about the then-new low end iMac. It seems as if it's primary purpose was to meet a price point and make the next jump up look good. It'll be interesting to see how the various benchmarks turn out.
Even for a lot of server workloads, ECC is just not that crucial.
Let's say you're building the next Twitter. It just doesn't matter that much if one out of every million tweets gets a bit flipped now and then. A lot of (most? nearly all?) online services are like that.
Would you notice if Twitter flipped a bit in one or two of your tweets a year? Or if YouTube flipped a bit in a few of the videos you watch every year?
I know, I know, it's gross. We're engineers. Thinking about bits getting flipped on us gives us the chills.
What if twitter flipped the high bit in your advertising bill? I bet you'd notice that.
Anyway, that's not really how memory errors work. In aggregate, if you consider all of the memory on the planet as a whole, the bit error rate is extremely low. However, any given chip that's prone to bit errors will have them very frequently. Without ECC you have no way to detect this, and with OEM-provided, soldered-to-motherboard memory chips you also have no way to qualify your memory, either. You'd have to qualify and reject the entire box using something like a periodic memtest86+.
However, any given chip that's prone to bit errors will have them very frequently.
Yes, but ECC is not going to help you much with this kind of memory issue.
That's not the purpose of ECC. It's not "RAID for memory"; it's not designed to keep you up and running when your memory is physically failing.
ECC "can detect and correct errors of a single bit per 64-bit 'word' (the unit of bus transfer), and detect (but not correct) errors of two bits per 64-bit word." ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory#Pros_and_cons_of_ECC (yeah, I know... Wikipedia)
A failing ECC memory chip's errors are going to overwhelm the ability of ECC to correct it - they're almost always going to be more than 2 bits per 64 bit word.
Where ECC shines is, as I said, correcting the occasional flipped bit. Which happens way more than any of us would really like to think about - cosmic rays, electrical interference... it happens. Soft errors.
with OEM-provided, soldered-to-motherboard memory chips you also have no way to qualify your memory, either. You'd have to qualify and reject the entire box using something like a periodic memtest86+.
Yes. Soldered-on memory sucks, aside from the fact that it can offer form factor benefits. (Which is a really dubious benefit when it comes to the Mac Mini. The 2012 Minis used replaceable DIMMs in the same form factor as the 2014 models)
Your understanding of this topic seems to stem from something other than operating servers at large scale. Single bit errors are extremely common in the absence of multiple bit errors. One of the reasons that memtest86+ is so thorough and weird is because these marginal bits are access-pattern-dependent. With the right access pattern certain defective drams will always yield SBEs without ever causing an MBE.
That's interesting to know; thanks for posting that. I've never seen failing RAM give SBEs but not MBEs but, like you said, I have not operated servers at large scale. It's good to know that can happen!
The news about the non-upgradable RAM is tough to swallow.
About the only remotely positive spin I can put on it is that, relative to the 2012 Mac Mini, the "Apple tax" you pay for 16GB of RAM on the 2014 Mac Mini is somewhat offset by the reduction in the price of the base hardware.
The Mac Mini matters to me, because they make nice servers - companies like MacMiniColo and MacMiniVault will host your Mac Mini for $50 a month or less.
From a pure "computing horsepower per dollar" perspective, it's superior to virtual hosting - try hosting a 200GB database on a virtual host with 16GB of RAM and virtual CPUs anywhere near the performance of those in the Mac Mini. It gets real expensive real fast.
Obviously, virtual hosting has a boatload of other advantages, and it's the right solution for most situations. But Mac Mini hosting fills a niche for small companies with data < 1TB.
Limited upgrade possibilities, tiny storage, poor airflow, not ECC RAM, no redundancy in network interfaces or power supplies, no remote console and you have to bastardise the things to get two disks in.
You can do a lot better for $50/month without the initial up front cost of the machine!
I've always considered using Mac only software a risk, because I have to depend on a single company. That's why I've mainly used software that is either free or available on cross platforms (Except of course software like XCode). What if my Mac suddenly stops working? I need to get another Mac to continue working. With non-Mac Computers, I can at least get a cheap temporary replacement to continue working. This move makes me even more dependend not only on their software, but now also much more on their price policy. For instance, say I need at least 16 gig of RAM for serious web development with VMs. Now I can't simply replace my broken MBP with an Mac Mini and upgrade with cheap RAM but I have to completely buy in. What if they suddenly hard solder HDDs as well? I can't even replace my broken hard drive quickly. As a freelancer, this dependency is too dangerous and I really hope that this move leads other customers to consider their dependency on a single vendor.
That's actually okay for me, because that's something the customer benefits from, since it uses less space which is crucial for mobile hardware. Soldered RAM and possibly HDDs don't serve an obvious customer benefit and if they do, Apple should communicate them.
I like Apple a lot, but I find it more and more tiresome the fact that, if I want an OS X desktop that doesn't try to squeeze underpowered, overpriced laptop components into a tiny chassis, I would have to buy a Mac Pro. The fact that you can't even replace the RAM on these newest models is pretty grotesque.
I can't help but think this offering is designed to make people not miss the Mini when it's discontinued in a year or two.
This article read really positive despite basically saying the Mini is a terrible purchase. If you want a toy Mac with no concern for performance, most models from the past few years will suit you if you can find a good deal on Craigslist.
I was on the fence because I really wanted a Mini and the new $700 version didn't seem terrible, but now with the knowledge that they put tamper-proof screws on it and bundled it with a 5400rpm HDD ($200 minimum to get an upgrade), I feel like they're not interested in customers like me.
Non-flame question here: what does running Mac OS as a server buy you?
I love my apple hardware and depend on my mbp as my primary computing device, but don't see the appeal of mac os X as a server environment. The things that make the mac great (for me) don't add value -- and in fact get in the way. I'm much much happier using Linux on my servers and much much happier NOT using it on my day-to-day machine.
I can imagine there could be some specialized cases in which running services on the mac make sense but I am astonished there are enough that macminicolo can make a business of it (and congrats to them for this by the way!). I assume this is a failure of imagination on my part, thus my question
My assumption was that these Macs were primarily used for automated headless testing of iOS applications; as a (relatively) cheap Mac that is able to run the simulator and whatnot, this could make sense.
As a replacement for something like a Linux web server, it makes very little sense at all. That's thinking of it in the wrong context though. If you have a business, and you run Macs as your employee workstations, OS X server can make life very easy for you. There are management tools that automate things like updates and software installation. There are network imaging utilities, netboot servers, and all sorts of goodies that sysadmins want in a workplace IT scenario.
For most people, there's not much benefit, unless you're using Minis to do OSX-specific stuff like automated builds or testing of iOS/OSX-native software.
Some people run big images/video batch jobs on OSX machines. You can create pretty nice workflows for that stuff with Automator/Applescript. That may grow in popularity a bit now that Yosemite can be scripted with Javascript. I don't know how common that is.
Mac Mini /hardware/ is popular with some people who use them as servers for other operating systems. This is attractive because some companies (MacMiniVault, MacMiniColo) will host Mac Minis /really cheaply/ ($35/month) since they sip power and they can cram 96 Mac Minis into a single server cabinet.
Theoretically this could also be accomplished with compact boxes from Dell or anybody else. There's nothing innately special about the Mac Mini's hardware. But since the form factor of the Mac Mini doesn't change too frequently, a small cottage industry has formed around hosting Mac Minis.
Virtual hosting is great and is probably the right answer most of the time, but Mac Mini hosting fills/filled a nice niche -- virtual hosting gets expensive fast if you need a fast CPU, 16GB of memory, and hundreds of GB of storage.
For a home server, consider the Dell T20 instead. $299 for low-power version, $499 for quad-core Xeon & 4GB ECC, officially supports Linux, no OS bundled.
As for size, unless you're living in an RV, put it under a desk. Just Say No to being hypnotized by shiny rectangles.
Consumers and small businesses can have an affordable server with incremental upgrade to many TBs of storage and 32GB RAM, plus OSS software to take low-latency, surveillance-free advantage of all that computing power and local storage/cache. HP and Lenovo sell similar models. With virtualization, it can run more than one operating system, replacing several boxes.
Why settle for a neutered and overpriced shiny rectangle?
Those Dells would be better than Mac Minis for a lot of things, but not others.
Clearly the Dell is more expandable and potentially more powerful depending on config. 32GB RAM ceiling is fantastic too, especially for virtualization.
Physical size is an issue for some applications but not others. Either one of these would be fine as a workstation, but I know which one of these boxes I'd want in my living room. Size also matters if you're racking these things up, or having one colo'd somewhere.
The Mac Mini kills the Dell in terms of performance/watt, especially when you move past the base CPU models of either the Mini or the T20. That alone can erase the price advantage of the Dell (over several years of ownership) if you're using them as always-on servers and you factor in the cost of providing cooling for them as well. Again, this is an issue in some scenarios but not others.
If the priority is performance-per-watt, then an Intel NUC offers user-upgradeable disk and RAM, plus a range of processors from low-power Bay Trail Atoms to i7 vPro, at a smaller size than the Mac Mini.
The next version of the NUc will support Broadwell (Core) and Braswell (Atom) with a much-reduced power envelope that beats the Haswell processors in this "new" Mac Mini. And it will support 4K graphics with integrated GPU.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadIn this case, the Mac mini is the same size as the previous generation, which had had user-replaceable RAM. Soldering it on the RAM in this new generation is just a dick move on Apple's part. It's hard to think of a legitimate reason for them to do this except to make more money from you.
In comparison, the rMBP has a perfect display, but I will need to get the most expensive model. I'd also lose on ethernet support, and need to get an adapter. I am not sure why rMBP lacks an Ethernet port in any case, this is supposed to be a laptop for professionals. Sometimes my job requires me to have Ethernet access.
I honestly don't care about making my devices thinner and thinner. My iPhone 4 is thin enough. My laptop may be heavy but it's more of a desktop replacement anyway.
Building a Hackintosh has been hassle free for a good while now. I've been running mine since Lion (2011).
No crashes. Noise and power consumption are dependent on what hardware you pick. I was waiting for the new Minis but seeing them I think I'll just keep my i3, RAM, SDD and get a smaller form factor motherboard and keep using the hackintosh.
But anyway, I don't care about the "increasingly large segment of the market". I care about me. So I don't know why you're fluttering about.
It looks like I am going look for small form factor cases and stick Linux on them and probably get a Mac book Pro when I save up enough money.
I think I prefer the slightly larger mini-PCs from Zotec. If I build from scratch, the AMD-based AM1 platforms are superb. $30 socketed miniITX motherboards and $20 chips are great.
I'm not defending this stance, btw, just stating what I've observed. Our household recently experienced a HDD failure in an iMac purchased late 2010. At 4 years old, the HDD was due for a failure (based on my experience with spinning magnetic disks). No problem, I thought. I'm an experienced hacker; taking this thing apart will be no problem at all.
I was right in that taking the iMac apart would be little challenge for me. Honestly, the iMac is a miracle of serviceability for such a compact computer. All of the connectors unsnapped as expected while using the correct tools. Nothing was terribly inaccessible, with the exception of the LCD driver cable. That connector terrifies me, but everything else was cake.
What killed me was the HDD thermal monitoring system. Apple uses the internal HDD thermal sensing equipment. Ostensibly (and probably true), monitoring via SMART requires an interrupt, which momentarily halts HDD communication. I/O on a HDD is bad enough without these interruptions, so hats off to Apple for prioritizing performance.
The down side of this is that there is no standard for the thermal sensor pins in the connector provided on the HDD. You have to 1) make sure to buy a HDD of the same make as the one you're replacing, and 2) cross your fingers that it isn't a WD HDD, which apparently went through a running change, which A) flipped the thermal sensing pins, and B) changed the connector subtly.
For some context, have a look at this article:
http://blog.macsales.com/19617-diagnosing-2009-2010-imac-fan...
I experienced two challenges. First, my connector had a "nub" on one side, which fit in to a slot in the port on the OEM HDD. The new WD drive had no such slot. Second, my HDD temperature sensor cable had an 8-pin connector. In the article above, you can see that the connector is a 6-pin connector in an 8-pin hole. Because my connector was 8-pins, I couldn't simply flip it, because that shifted the cables by 1 column. I ended up hand filing the nub off the connector, then literally grinding and filing one column of the pins off the connector, turning it in to a 6-pin connector, so that I could flip it.
The moral of the story is that Apple makes zero considerations for end-user serviceability. None whatsoever. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they intentionally make it difficult, just that when faced with any decision where the choices are A) benefit the design or profitability of the device in some way or B) retain end-user serviceability, factor B never even gets considered.
Specially since I value technical features and flexibility to change hardware over design.
I wish I could have bought the 2.6GHz quad-core as opposed to the 2.3GHz, but that was a build-to-order option only. Still, the 2.3GHz is much faster than the top end 2014 Mac mini when it comes to multithreaded performance:
http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/19/mac-mini-2014-benchmark/
You're just paying for the brand and the convenience of not having to put it in yourself. RAM from Apple has to have one of the worst price/performance ratios.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/07/1099-imac-review-lose-5...
It's one of the reasons I do a lot of my work on a proper machine with ECC and SAS disks.
Due to some duff RAM a few years ago I lost a week of work. It silently corrupted filesystem buffers.
Let's say you're building the next Twitter. It just doesn't matter that much if one out of every million tweets gets a bit flipped now and then. A lot of (most? nearly all?) online services are like that.
Would you notice if Twitter flipped a bit in one or two of your tweets a year? Or if YouTube flipped a bit in a few of the videos you watch every year?
I know, I know, it's gross. We're engineers. Thinking about bits getting flipped on us gives us the chills.
Anyway, that's not really how memory errors work. In aggregate, if you consider all of the memory on the planet as a whole, the bit error rate is extremely low. However, any given chip that's prone to bit errors will have them very frequently. Without ECC you have no way to detect this, and with OEM-provided, soldered-to-motherboard memory chips you also have no way to qualify your memory, either. You'd have to qualify and reject the entire box using something like a periodic memtest86+.
That's not the purpose of ECC. It's not "RAID for memory"; it's not designed to keep you up and running when your memory is physically failing.
ECC "can detect and correct errors of a single bit per 64-bit 'word' (the unit of bus transfer), and detect (but not correct) errors of two bits per 64-bit word." ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECC_memory#Pros_and_cons_of_ECC (yeah, I know... Wikipedia)
A failing ECC memory chip's errors are going to overwhelm the ability of ECC to correct it - they're almost always going to be more than 2 bits per 64 bit word.
Where ECC shines is, as I said, correcting the occasional flipped bit. Which happens way more than any of us would really like to think about - cosmic rays, electrical interference... it happens. Soft errors.
Yes. Soldered-on memory sucks, aside from the fact that it can offer form factor benefits. (Which is a really dubious benefit when it comes to the Mac Mini. The 2012 Minis used replaceable DIMMs in the same form factor as the 2014 models)About the only remotely positive spin I can put on it is that, relative to the 2012 Mac Mini, the "Apple tax" you pay for 16GB of RAM on the 2014 Mac Mini is somewhat offset by the reduction in the price of the base hardware.
The Mac Mini matters to me, because they make nice servers - companies like MacMiniColo and MacMiniVault will host your Mac Mini for $50 a month or less.
From a pure "computing horsepower per dollar" perspective, it's superior to virtual hosting - try hosting a 200GB database on a virtual host with 16GB of RAM and virtual CPUs anywhere near the performance of those in the Mac Mini. It gets real expensive real fast.
Obviously, virtual hosting has a boatload of other advantages, and it's the right solution for most situations. But Mac Mini hosting fills a niche for small companies with data < 1TB.
Now if you said 1U, 1amp, and 10TB of metered bandwidth, then $50/mo sounds more like it.
[1] - http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=131
OVH pricing gets you pretty close.
If there isn't one, I'll take two! Cheaper than Azure!
Limited upgrade possibilities, tiny storage, poor airflow, not ECC RAM, no redundancy in network interfaces or power supplies, no remote console and you have to bastardise the things to get two disks in.
You can do a lot better for $50/month without the initial up front cost of the machine!
I have a somewhat weird feeling that this is going to happen in a couple of years.
I base that on MacSales.com offering storage upgrades for all 5 generations of MBA.
This article read really positive despite basically saying the Mini is a terrible purchase. If you want a toy Mac with no concern for performance, most models from the past few years will suit you if you can find a good deal on Craigslist.
I was on the fence because I really wanted a Mini and the new $700 version didn't seem terrible, but now with the knowledge that they put tamper-proof screws on it and bundled it with a 5400rpm HDD ($200 minimum to get an upgrade), I feel like they're not interested in customers like me.
I found an Asus form factor prefab (http://www.amazon.com/Asus-VivoPC-VM40B-02-ASUS-Desktop/dp/B...) that should handle the HTPC/Plex/quiet/price/value minimum requirements I have in case anyone else was looking for alternatives.
I love my apple hardware and depend on my mbp as my primary computing device, but don't see the appeal of mac os X as a server environment. The things that make the mac great (for me) don't add value -- and in fact get in the way. I'm much much happier using Linux on my servers and much much happier NOT using it on my day-to-day machine.
I can imagine there could be some specialized cases in which running services on the mac make sense but I am astonished there are enough that macminicolo can make a business of it (and congrats to them for this by the way!). I assume this is a failure of imagination on my part, thus my question
Some people run big images/video batch jobs on OSX machines. You can create pretty nice workflows for that stuff with Automator/Applescript. That may grow in popularity a bit now that Yosemite can be scripted with Javascript. I don't know how common that is.
Mac Mini /hardware/ is popular with some people who use them as servers for other operating systems. This is attractive because some companies (MacMiniVault, MacMiniColo) will host Mac Minis /really cheaply/ ($35/month) since they sip power and they can cram 96 Mac Minis into a single server cabinet.
Theoretically this could also be accomplished with compact boxes from Dell or anybody else. There's nothing innately special about the Mac Mini's hardware. But since the form factor of the Mac Mini doesn't change too frequently, a small cottage industry has formed around hosting Mac Minis.
Virtual hosting is great and is probably the right answer most of the time, but Mac Mini hosting fills/filled a nice niche -- virtual hosting gets expensive fast if you need a fast CPU, 16GB of memory, and hundreds of GB of storage.
http://www.techradar.com/us/reviews/pc-mac/peripherals/serve...
As for size, unless you're living in an RV, put it under a desk. Just Say No to being hypnotized by shiny rectangles.
Consumers and small businesses can have an affordable server with incremental upgrade to many TBs of storage and 32GB RAM, plus OSS software to take low-latency, surveillance-free advantage of all that computing power and local storage/cache. HP and Lenovo sell similar models. With virtualization, it can run more than one operating system, replacing several boxes.
Why settle for a neutered and overpriced shiny rectangle?
Clearly the Dell is more expandable and potentially more powerful depending on config. 32GB RAM ceiling is fantastic too, especially for virtualization.
Physical size is an issue for some applications but not others. Either one of these would be fine as a workstation, but I know which one of these boxes I'd want in my living room. Size also matters if you're racking these things up, or having one colo'd somewhere.
The Mac Mini kills the Dell in terms of performance/watt, especially when you move past the base CPU models of either the Mini or the T20. That alone can erase the price advantage of the Dell (over several years of ownership) if you're using them as always-on servers and you factor in the cost of providing cooling for them as well. Again, this is an issue in some scenarios but not others.
The next version of the NUc will support Broadwell (Core) and Braswell (Atom) with a much-reduced power envelope that beats the Haswell processors in this "new" Mac Mini. And it will support 4K graphics with integrated GPU.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/188533-intels-nuc-2-0-l...