The Macalope (Subscription required):
We are talking about the same Mac mini, right? The one from Apple? The company whose logo is an apple with a bite out of it? Because, reading this, one might get the impression that you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.
The mythical beast is in a mood today.
The Macalope is referring to a scathing editorial posted at DealMac which talks about the new Mac mini. Jeff Somogyi knocks the Mac mini’s weight, its expandability, its use of an HDMI connector and makes a host of other complaints.
Curious what the heck the original complaint is, but can’t tell since it’s behind a paywall….
Yeah, paywall makes this post useless. No clue what they’re talking about.
Sorry, I didn’t realize it was behind a paywall.
I’ve added some additional info for context. Couldn’t agree more with the Macalope on this – I had already tagged Somogyi’s inflammatory editorial for this week’s Angry Mac Bastards.
This from a guy who shills cheap crap on a daily basis, counterfeit Apple hardware and basically every cheesy piece of junk on the planet.
I look forward to reading the free version of the Macalope on Saturday morning.
(Edit: And yes, I see the irony of that last sentence.)
Ah thanks. Yes, after reading the DealMac editorial, I agree, Somogyi appears to have no idea what he’s talking about….
Hey, folks,
I use my older gen Mac Mini as the center of my home entertainment system.
While I know there are much less expensive solutions (eg: Apple TV), my wish is to have a real computer fulfill that function, because there is a great deal more I wish to do with my home entertainment system than simply stream audio/video from another computer on my LAN.
At the top of the list, I wish it to be the storage medium for a pretty large audoi/video library; attaching a couple of whopping big drives to a mini fills that need and also allows backup on a second drive. Ya ain’t gonna do that with the Apple TV, and my other computers are notebooks, and their drive sizes don’t allow for that magnitude of storage.
The second thing I want from my home entertainment system is ability to rip audio/video from CDs and DVDs. My current Mini serves this purpose nicely, and this need brings up my one real complaint about the new Mini – no stinking DVD drive!!! I raised this complaint to someone at the Apple Genius Bar, and his response was, “Well . . . CD/DVD drives are going away”. Yes, that has some truth, however, in the realm of home entertainment, it’s going to be many years before DVDs and CDs go away. So, the new Mini has lost its appeal to me for my particular needs (and I suspect for a large number of other users”. Apple should not be eliminating optical drives. If anything, they should be upgrading them to BlueRay drives.
“So, the new Mini has lost its appeal to me for my particular needs”
But the new Mini is $100 less and you can get an external drive from OWC for $60. And it’s a drawer-load which is faster and more reliable than the slot-load in the old Mini. Ok, you have another box so it’s not quite as svelte–I’ll give you that. But for $40 less and a better drive it’s an acceptable trade-off in my opinion.
Also, why does it have to be the box next to the TV that has the drive with the files? They can be anywhere on your home network and it’s effectively the same.
The Mac mini is an excellent small-scale application server. Great database server. FTP server. File server. Et cetera. Small, reliable, inexpensive, and can reuse existing smaller monitors and old, paid-for keyboards.
Much better choice than either the iMac or the Pro, where the needs are more broad than deep.
Hey Macalope, what part(s) of the article is(are) wrong?
With inexpensive BluRay burners in external enclosures combined with new processors in the Mini, the Mini can be a high performance full entertainment system and computer. The burner in my Minis are crap anyway and don’t meet the component quality expectations I have of Apple hardware. OWC has it figured out. Apple does many things well, but OWC usually improves on it a bit beyond that. Look at their newest SSDs, for example.
The implication that you can’t upgrade the RAM and disk. The implication that you could upgrade the CPU in other Mac models as opposed to the mini.
Then there’s the assumption that people upgrade their computers anyway. 90+% do not.
He also doesn’t address what people use the mini for. His article is click-bait with no substance.
If you have the MacWorld Daily Reader app, you can read the article for free.
What an unbelievable idiot Somogyi is. How can anyone not see through him?
“With inexpensive BluRay burners in external enclosures.”
Let me stop you right there. While it’s true you can get a Blu-Ray burner in an external enclosure, it’s suitable for storage only, not for the playback of Blu-Ray Disc media. That requires system-level decoding technology that Mac OS X, in all of its incarnations, simply lacks. If you want Blu-Ray Disc media playback, your only alternative is to use another device.
Didn’t Somogyi used to be someone of substance in the Mac community? His last name rings a small bell.
Thanks for the context, I really didn’t know what this was about.
Sweet Jesus, I want to be on this weeks AMB to tear this guy a new asshole.