Apple releases newly designed Mac Mini | Hacker News Reader

Apple releases newly designed Mac Mini

apple.com

94 pointslyime139 comments

And in the UK the price has gone up to £649 for the base model. The last version was £510. That is ridiculous.

Mac mini was the cheapest option for iPhone and iPad app submission as fas as I knew. Now it just got a lot more expensive to do so.

The extra £139 is because it's prettier?

I realize that’s sarcasm but why exactly would that not be a reason to increase the price?

Absolutely, this is how most markets work. Take women's fashion, for example.

No, that's not how women's fashion works. Maybe once upon a time, but price no longer corresponds even to prettiness.

Trust me, my ex was way into that stuff.

HDMI Output, SD Card slot, and the change in the power supply (no more brick) I think the HDMI is what kicks it up, along with an updated gfx card.

how is it prettier?

i liked previous design much better!

One reason it's prettier is because it is no longer accompanied by a huge plastic power brick that's almost half the size of the computer itself.

Yes. Same as comparing a generic $30 ATX case to a lovely $300 Lian-Li case. Apple isn't interested in selling the equivalent to the $30 case.

I would never for a second claim the price for a Lian-Li is just because it's prettier. It's a bad analogy.

For cheaper options, check out http://www.hackintosh.com/

I'm running Mac OS X on a Dell Mini 9 which I bought for about $200 on sale.

How does it run?

Pretty well. It's my favorite computer right now since it's so portable. I also installed xcode + the iphone sdk.

I am running Mac OS X on Dell Mini 10v and considering buying an external monitor [18.5"]; curious to know how does it perform on the larger display in extended mode?

With the caveat that the latest OSX releases broke Atom CPU compatibility and you've really gotta pay attention to what you're doing before hitting the 'Update' button.

I run OSX on a C2Q machine I built for $450. Works great with everything working 100% except it's not quite the same seamless experience a real Mac is (I've gotta fix my sleep mode nearly every update).

Yeah, it takes a little attention but if you can build a computer and do a little research you can get yourself a fairly inexpensive "Mac Pro".

Is the trouble really worth it to save $200? It has to be one of those "just because I can" things for most people who do this, right?

In evilduck's case, it's ~$200 more and 2 processor cores less.

I agree. A lot of people (myself included) buy "real" Macs precisely because they don't want to have to deal with this sort of stuff.

It's basically a hobby project. You could arguably save a few $k building a Mac Pro clone, but if you really need a Mac Pro level machine then you probably shouldn't rely on a Hackintosh. It certainly kills the "just works" aspect of Apple products.

Yes, it is quite expensive. But then again, the entire Mac range has become more expensive over the last year. You used to be able to get a macbook for about £750, now its £850. At these prices I struggle to recommend Macs to people to who they would be suited, over a £400 dell laptop.

yes, but why would anyone buy mini over say macbook? it costs almost as much, doesn't have display nor battery, hardware expansion options are very limited etc.

I'm guessing a major use for mini is some sort HTPC hooked up to your TV, and in that scenario the mini form factor easily beats a macbook.

Yup reading this via my Mac Mini connected to my LCD TV from my couch(wireless mouse/keyboard). I have one from 2007. I'm liking this new sleeker design and no more power brick on this new one!

Especially since the new model is even smaller and now has an HDMI out built in.

Apple is basically telling people the Apple TV is dead.

No its not. Apple can hardly sell the Apple TV concept at at their current price point, these are alot more expensive. People wont pay it.

I should imagine these cost more than most people's TVs.

> No its not.

it is. It might be reborn later using iOS, but the current system is dead, it's not even featured in the store's front page anymore.

> I should imagine these cost more than most people's TVs.

But it's far more flexible and useful than the Apple TV (it's a full HTPC, therefore able to stream e.g. Hulu or Youtube), and the addition of HDMI out removes the last big issue it had as an HTPC, compared to an Apple TV. The TV never found its place in the Apple ecosystem and with a smaller, more efficient and more powerful Mini that place just shrunk a bit more.

Dual external displays, $300 cheaper, physically smaller, same upgradability options as a MacBook.

In 2008 510GBP was around 1000USD. Now 500GBP is 750USD and 650GBP is a 1000USD. It's the exchange rate that's changed not Apple's price.

I understand that, but why then is the machine only $699 in the US? That difference (£307 according to XE.com) can't all be tax and import duty can it?

699 USD in GBP = 474.413 (on xe.com at time of writing)

474.413 * 1.175 = 557.435 (for current vat)

So the actual current difference is £91.56 They will put that down to shipping & handling costs, administrative costs of operating in the uk.

The iPad has a difference of £52 for a similar priced item (once you take into account vat).

thanks edd

This is something I always wondered.

How can you add extra s&h and sg&a? This stuff goes from Asia, you ship it either to US or to UK (or whereever). You don't ship it from Asia to US and then to UK. The shipping should be about the same to US and UK.

Similarly with sg&a. The US operations does not have it already included in price? Or the UK (EU, whatever) customers pay for that twice?

I would imagine that that £91.56 price difference edd quoted is not for "extra s&h and sg&a", but rather a cushion against currency fluctuation. Apple does not want to start suddenly losing money on their products in the UK if the dollar suddenly gets stronger.

Of course Apple could change the price based on exchange rates, but price hikes anger consumers, and there may be laws that make it difficult to suddenly raise the price anyway, especially if they have advertised them in catalogs, etc. And that's not to mention all of the third-parties that would have to sync up with Apple on these changes, and all the wrath they would face from consumers, etc.

So I think that their strategy is to set a price that gives them a currency fluctuation cushion and round it to an attractive number that ends in 9.

I'm sure Apple uses currency derivatives to hedge against currency fluctuations.

It's gone up substantially in continental Europe, too. Weak Euro and Pound (versus USD) to blame I'd have thought.

I was able to snag a 17" iMac with better specs (4GB RAM) from craigslist < the new Mac Mini cost.

Looks like Apple has finally acknowledged what drives probably a very large percentage of their mac mini sales: Techies who want a mac-based bittorrent box hooked to their home theater. Now, if only it had Blu-Ray...

Mac Minis make terrible HTPCs. I replaced a Mac Mini + Drobo with a Windows Home Server + External DVD drive and I've never looked back.

Could you elaborate on why they are "terrible"? I've been quite satisfied with my Mini + Plex setup.

That's what I use, plus Vuze and FireFox (for Netflix watch instantly... because it's currently broken for me in Plex).

The only issue I have is most of my files are on an external FW800 drive, which isn't as quiet as the mini's drive. So, I put the drive enclosure into the cabinet under the TV. Also, Mac OS X is aggressive about putting the external drive to sleep, and because of this I had to set the cache seconds in Plex to 15 just to make there are no pauses in playback.

EDIT: forgot to mention that the superdirve in the mini is so loud that it can't really be used to watch a movie. Sounds like a 747 taking off. However, this is not a big deal for me, because I rip the DVD's to get rid of the menus and unskippable crap at the beginning of the disc.

An "off the shelf" windows home server, or custom box? Off the shelf typically has no video card, no? My HP doesn't anyways.

Agreed - I won't buy one until they add a blu-ray drive.

Never going to happen. You can buy an external one for $100+ if you're so inclined, but Apple is clearly gunning for a future where physical media are irrelevant. It's the content that matters, not the delivery method.

Modern Blu-Ray titles are stamped out using the cheapest methods available anyway, there's no experience when using their product. It's a disc in a case with some cover art work. Very thrifty, cheapening the product considerably.

This is nothing like the old Criterion-style treatment with a nice box, some accompanying materials, and a sense of owning a piece of something important.

The future is downloads, Bittorrent or iTunes store or otherwise. It's the only method that will scale to the future. When Red is making a 28K camera, when Apple produces screens with 300+ DPI, you know Blu-Ray is only a stop-gap.

I don't know if that's true. The bitrate of a low-end Blu Ray movie is about 15 Mbps. I bought Glee in "HD" on iTunes, and that has a bitrate of about 150 kbps. So we're talking a 100x jump in bitrate.

Bandwidth would be a big problem. But storage is an even bigger problem. And if you trade away storage requirements for higher bandwidth consumption, you have even more bandwidth problems and people are going to be pissed they can't watch their movie on the plane.

Now, you could argue that there's no perceptual difference between X kbps and Y Mbps, but I have seen articles that differ with you on that if that's the position you choose to take. Is there possibly some happy middle ground in there somewhere? For sure. I don't think removable media is going away soon though.

I knew I couldn't be the only person waiting for a blu-ray mini. There are aftermarket options, but I'd rather not go there...

I've also been looking for a HTPC sort of solution, and came across the Dune Player which looks promising - blu-ray drive plus network streaming running on Linux:

http://www.duneplayer.com/shop/item.asp?itemid=2

I would have seriously considered the new Mac mini for that sort of duty otherwise.

This is cheap ($229) and people report that it's quite capable of playing HD content.

http://amzn.com/B002O3W44Q

Buy an external BluRay, and you're set.

Here is the deal: - 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU - 2GB of RAM - 320GB HD (no ssd afaik) - HDMI out (finally) - SD-slot (which is also very "un-mac")

In terms of computing power, its overprized. But as a product that sits in your livingroom, problably not making any noise and runs under 10W, then I will actually call this a fair deal. May I add that its ridiculously small.

How is the SD-slot"un-mac"? It's on almost every machine, and iPhoto comes bundled on all computers?

because the way I see apples products is not with a bunch of outputs and memory card slots of all kind. They are very conservative in adding anything in which they don't support all over their product-line. Apple got a very holistic product profile so of speak.

Apple intro'd built-in SD card slots with the last round of unibody Macbook Pros. The secret sauce is that the SD card is bootable -- you can install OS/X onto an 8Gb card, add some stuff like Techtool Pro, and use it as an emergency boot device.

Use case: your laptop's hard drive fails so you yank it, shove in a new one, boot off the SD card, and use your Time Machine backup -- you've got one, right? You're one of the Saved, right? -- to restore onto the new drive. Total elapsed downtime from hard disk crash to up-and-running again: 1-2 hours plus however long it takes to source a replacement drive.

(The fact that you can get photos off your digital camera is an accidental bonus. Because, hey, your camera is an iPhone in Apple-land ...)

> Apple intro'd built-in SD card slots with the last round of unibody Macbook Pros.

Previous, not last (last is mid 2010, SD slot appeared on mid 2009 machines)

Speaking as someone not intimately familiar with Apple's desktop line, what's "redesigned" about it? From the website, I gather that it now has an aluminum casing rather than plastic, a less archaic GPU, and +$200 on the price tag?

Did the old ones have an HDMI output and SD Card slot? I think that's what new in this model... The re-design is essentially the internals I think

I have no idea. As I said, I'm not too familiar with the previous-generation offerings.

The SD card slot is a yawner, since you can do that with a USB reader. HDMI out makes it potentially interesting as a entertainment center device, but at a $700 price tag, it's difficult to imagine justifying it over other more flexible solutions, unless the form factor is a big deal to you.

The previous model had a mini-DVI port instead of HDMI - I assume the HDMI port also carries an audio signal now, otherwise the two would be equivalent. (mini-DVI might even support dual-link, which HDMI definitely doesn't)

However, I think relatively few Mac Mini users are hooking theirs up to 30" displays. I'm guessing that most users either have them hooked up to a small screen for a kiosk, use it with an older keyboard, monitor & mouse as a cheaper upgrade path to an Apple (thinking of doing this for my mother), or hooked up to a 1080p display like an HDTV or a projector.

The previous generation model started at $599 -- gotta go back 5 years to the PPC Mini for the $499 price tag.

Ah, my mistake. How many generations of the Mini have there been at this point?

There were three iterations of the G4 variety, and so far six on the Core/Core2 platform. They release these about once every nine months.

Oh, and the power brick... what a monstrosity that was. Instead of an external power brick that was roughly half the size of the mini itself, the power supply is internal, which makes this mini much more conveniently portable.

That's a big deal when you're selling its design. I have the previous generation Mac Mini sitting next to my flat screen TV, and the power supply was a pain to hide. It's part of my living room. Design matters.

I can't wait to see a tear-down on how they did that. The power supply from before was really huge. It's been the same size since the G4 and always weighed a ton presumably due to the iron in the transformer coil.

That's a really nice feature, since the form factor is such a bullet point for the product.

Cheapest new model in Finland (and many other european countries) is now 799€. Previously you could get the cheapest one for 549€.

Apple seems to think that 150€ price raise won't affect the sales, but I think it will hurt them.

Some bad calculations by me, of course the price raise is 250€, not 150€ :) Even worse...

It seems like no geek here from Europe had noticed this: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=EURUSD=X

Euro is 1.22USD from 1.5USD months ago. Electronic components prices are given in USD. China yuan is pegged to dollars too.

People here seems to think that 150€ is benefit for Apple. Is not.

You could even get a G4 at 499€ in 2005

There's been a steady increase in the price of the Mini, unlike the Macbook. You had an iBook G4 for 999€ just like you can have a Macbook now for 999€. The Mac Mini went from 499€ to 799€.

The Mac Mini's pricing strategy is weird.

As I've said before, drop the dvd drive and gimme a 3x2x2" aluminum soapbar for $299 and it'll set the world on fire.

I don't think it's the DVD drive that is making this bigger. All those parts needed for a comp requires around 7 inches already and they may be just decided to have a DVD drive too.

Parts can be shrunk (see iphone, ipad) but a dvd has a fixed size you can't shrink so there you have the weakest link.

Btw, it was 3x2x1" what I meant. The perfect size.

Why did they put the SD card slot on the back?

Because it'd look like crap on the front, probably. The back is already crappy black plastic. Also, the logic board is probably around there so that avoids having to route some kind of cable from front to back in a cramped enclosure.

That was my first "wtf" reaction. Although they don't show it in the photos, the back of a mac mini isn't exactly a fun place to have to poke around all the time. Cables etc. Especially because (at least in older models) the cables tended to get loose after a year or so and could be easily knocked out. I wouldn't want to be reaching around there to pop the card in/out. It also limits the places you can mount the computer relative to where you're using it from. Seems stupid. They should've left it out. However, I guess it provides a good utility for doing occasional tech support (boot from SD etc).

How often would you slide a disc into it? Thus, just have the back facing front if you intend to access that part more. You'll need the back more too, it seems, since that's where On/Off is too.

Fair comments, but I'm still not liking it... I've had my existing Mac Mini for about 6 years and I don't really ever turn it off (it now mainly serves media). I would leave the back facing the front, but then I might as well buy a Dell.

I love Apple's visual and industrial design, but sometimes the focus on aesthetics impacts the user experience, which I think is more important (and generally something they completely nail). Example: the USB ports on my macbook are too close together to support most flash drives sitting next to any other USB peripheral. I think that this will prove to be another example.

This is where aesthetics fails over functionality in a big way.

The inclusion of a HDMI port is interesting. Probably useless to most people (who have existing monitors or will buy a normal computer display) but does this suggest this might run the new Apple TV service?

You're absolutely wrong about the "useless to most people bit", but right about the Apple TV thing.

The point about HDMI and the 10w power consumption and the lack of a spare power brick is that this device is being positioned as a living room device, not a desktop machine. Add bluetooth keyboard and mouse, FrontRow, optionally an Apple Remote, and a big TV set and you've got: DVD player, Apple TV substitute for streaming movies/TV via iTunes, household iTunes streaming hub (streaming video to iPads in other rooms, streaming music to Airport Express-driven active speakers in other rooms -- controlled via Remote.app running on your iPhone), and if you enable internet sharing and use Cat5e to your DSL/cable modem you've got a servicable wifi hotspot as well.

This isn't being positioned as a desktop, it's being positioned as a replacement for the Apple TV box.

And for those of us who're into getting stuff done rather than sacking out in front of the telly, there's th slightly more expensive model with no DVD, more hard disk (RAID 0 or RAID 1, anyone: OS/X has software support for RAID), and a server-grade OS.

It's a somewhat odd replacement for Apple TV in that it's three times the price.

I have an Apple TV, because at £200 it was perfect or my needs. I certainly wasn't going to spend £650 for a media centre when I can get a movie streamer for vastly less than that.

Im thinking Apple is not repositioning the Mac Mini to be an Apple TV replacement. It's way too complicated to connect a Mac Mini to a LCD TV and use a wireless mouse and keyboard to navigate when compared to the Cable TV experience. Not many in this post seem to be using a Mac Mini for such purpose (I am) and there is no way the avg PC/Internet user would ever think about doing such as it's too complicated over clicking power button on and channel up and down.

You use the Apple remote and frontrow to navigate.

And if you're doing that, what's the point in having this over an AppleTV or similar device at a third the cost?

I'm not actually sure. This reads discs, but Apple's never been much into discs anyway. Also I know a low of underspeced devices have trouble with decoding HD content at acceptable speed, but I;m not sure if that applies to the AppleTV or not.

You can play WoW on your 60" HDTV and stream movies from netflix ect. The old Mini was right at the edge of playability but with 2x the graphics it should work just fine.

PS: You can buy a 60" 1080p TV for 800$ so if you can afford this you can afford an huge TV.

The type of consumer that wants to stream Netflix and play games on their TV is just going to buy an Xbox 360 or a PS3. The demographic you're talking about isn't the type that's going to want or care about having a full fledged computer in the living room.

You can't play most MMO's on a PS3 or Xbox 360 and MMO don't need great graphics so it's really a fairly low handing fruit. Most of them also support digital downloads so lacking a DVD player is not an issue.

Anyway, I have a Mac mini, play WoW, have an HDTV and I would really like it if I could use it to play on my TV.

PS: Targeting the MMO market with overpriced stuff can work. These cost 150$ and seem to be doing well http://www.creative.com/soundblaster/worldofwarcraft/press/w....

AppleTV is not the web which provides endless amounts of streaming content as well as reading Hacker News and other sites from comfort of my couch.

Also you can get a used Mac Mini for under $500.

I have this exact setup. I bought a cable to connect my previous generation mini to the DVI input of my T. I have a bluetooth keyboard and mouse for the times when I need to do something a little more complicated than use FrontRow. iTunes has all my music and I have a 2GB TimeMachine with all of my video content. It's fast enough to play even 1080p movies over the network.

The new model would be even better for this application.

+1: I'm doing almost exactly this with an old Macbook, with a good quality outboard DAC to drive my amp/speakers.

So I appear to be target market for this product...

I disagree. Its too expensive as a TV only box, and thats a market that is still very new and small. People (well everyone I know who has one) look at this as an entry level Apple desktop machine.

It looks really nice, I wonder how well it handles the overheating with its smaller size.

No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.

Yeah, a G6950 (core i3 2.8ghz 32nm) would have been ideal for this form factor.

Why do you need an SSD in a machine targeted at the media player/home hub market?

SSDs are good for boxes that are latency-bound or subject to vibration. For a box that sits under a TV set and spends most of its active life throwing 1Gb mpeg4 files down an HDMI cable, not so much.

Several reasons at random :

- Less noise

- Less heat

- Smaller

- Faster boot time

- More bandwidth

Cost/benefit doesn't work out in this use case:

- Less noise true, but peg a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro's hard drive to max and see if you can hear it from, oh, 5 feet away.

- This isn't a mobile device, so heat with regards to user comfort is not an issue. Until it presents a reliability problem, heat is a non-factor for a desktop.

- Smaller, and much more expensive per GB. Much more. Shaving another quarter inch off the enclosure also seems like a paltry gain for a much more expensive storage device.

- For a machine that reboots very rarely, this is moot. This is clearly meant as an always-on device (hence the low power usage to begin with) sucking down torrents all day or some such.

- It's a media-centric device. It will download stuff, listen to music, stream video... what kind of bandwidth does it need?

SSDs in a Mac Mini would be a Ferrari in a school zone - cool, and done purely for the sake of style, but let's not pretend that there are significant practical reasons for doing this.

For an always-on device you would actually fare better with an SSD than a 2.5" laptop hard drive. Laptop hard drives are not meant to be always-on. The bearings tend to wear out very fast unless they spend a fair amount of time spun-down. 3.5" desktop hard drives, 2.5" server drives, and SSDs have much better mechanical reliability in that respect.

> No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.

Intel's fault, no license for NVidia and no OpenCL support in the i3/i5's GPU (and it's still a very, very crappy GPU indeed) means it'd need a dedicated GPU.

Reason why the entry-level 15" got one, by the way, and the 13" macbook pro is still using a Core 2.

Where is the kensington lock thing? I have a Mac Mini (the previous generation now) and one thing I absolutely need is a way to lock down my stuff. My last laptop was stolen directly from my office because it wasn't locked down.

Sounds like you need a new job too.

I'm in South Africa. I also carry a 9mm. But a 9mm doesn't work when I leave my office for 5 minutes and somebody comes in and grabs my computer.

Their claim to be the most energy efficient desktop seems a bit unlikely, since you can get computers that are basically Atom netbooks in desktop form.

They footnote it with "Claim based on energy efficiency categories and products listed within the EPA ENERGY STAR 5.0 database as of June 2010" but I don't really know what that means.

I imagine anything ARM-based would blow this out of the water, but I'm not sure if there are any mainstream ARM-based desktops.

I'd measure efficiency as energy vs. work performed. Their C2D at 10w is going to run circles around even the latest Atom processors.

Drives me crazy, Apple is the _only_ company that sells a computer at 10w with this performance. Not one big manufacture has something that competes. They are all stuffing atoms and calling it a day. So I am going to buy a mini to run linux on...

There was an article on HN a while back about a developer who switched from a desktop to a mac mini and the savings on his electricity bill covered the cost of a mac mini after 18 months

I like it, the internal power supply is a great feature also worth mentioning (the old one had a block attached almost as big as the device itself). What I don't like is the pricing, why do I have to pay 799 EUR (=$975!) here in the Netherlands when you can get the exact same device in the US for $699. That's a $275 difference!

The US price is without VAT while the Euro price is with VAT. Remove the VAT from the Euro price and the difference is only about $120.

It looks like the old Mini mated with an AppleTV; could this be a sign that Apple may be giving up on the AppleTV "hobby"?

It's probably safe to say the x86-based, Front Row-displaying AppleTV is over.

As for an ultra-thin, A4 ARM-based AppleTV running iOS... I'd watch that space.

It's amazing what they're doing. Just as the Newton has come back to beat Microsoft at their own game, maybe the Pippin will rise from the ashes of obscurity!

Still no ECC RAM on the server version, I see. Shame.

Intel only supports ECC RAM w/ its Xeon chips, in contrast to AMD where almost all of its chips support ECC (w/ the appropriate motherboard of course).

One reason the Mac Mini might not have i3/i5 has a very poor integrated graphics chip. Macs are often hurt by their poor video performance, so that may be the reason we haven't seen the i3/i5 on Macs that don't have an additional graphic card.

But.. this Core2duo mac mini isn't using an integrated graphics card anyway? It has an embedded nvidia geforce.

yes, but its better.

So in order to have dual monitors on this new design one would have to have both a miniport to DVI and a HDMI to DVI adapter I take it?

Or monitors that have miniport and HDMI ports.

It's interesting that they ship a version with Snow Leopard Server, that wasn't available at this price point before, was it?

They released the server model in late 2009, with an extra harddrive instead of the superdrive and OS X Server.

Yup, and they've consistently marketed it on the website as a server option for small business. (That is, places that don't want to buy or support a full Apple Xserve.) From the site, "Mac mini means business. Small business."

I wonder what their numbers are for it. I see zero advertising for this option, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places. And the mention on the Apple site is clear, but not exactly huge. I imagine it's a niche market, but I wonder.

Hmm... Looks like they made the memory easier to upgrade, but the hard drive more difficult.

I dont think they made it harder. In the old model it took a putty knife to open - now you just have two screws.

So those two hex screws they show in the circular access panel are the only things preventing the guts of the mini from being removed through the back? That sounds pretty slick, actually.

HDMI .. about time! now i can replace my Dell Zino HD with this for my HTPC.

Ah, so this is why there was a line outside the Apple Store today. I didn't think iPads were still that popular.

iPhone preorders are why there are a line apparently, not this.

> And even though Mac mini is ultracompact, there’s no shortage of ports.

I don't see any eSATA ports.

I need to fork out another $100 to upgrade from 320GB to 500GB?? for 5400 rpm hard drive?

Welcome to Apple. If you upgrade the CPU and RAM too you'll be at $1049 in which case you might as well get the $999 model.

the biggest benefit of this upgrade is you can now (hopefully) drive 2 monitors.

AFAIK, you could already do this (mini-DVI out and displayport).

That's correct, I'm using the previous model of Mac Mini (2.53GHz 4GB 320GB) and two great 20" samsung widescreens. I have to say it's a really awesome way to work!

Hmmm, I tried putting 4GB in my Mac Mini, but it wouldn't boot (now running with 2GB). Did you have to do anything special to make it work?

The last revision gave you two video ports, too. With the right adapters (Mini-DVI -> DVI, MiniDP -> DVI) you can drive two screens. It works very well. More screen real-estate than a MacBook pro, a fraction of the Mac Pro price.

Finally, they changed the case! It is annoying having to support minis because you can't easily tell any of the different ones apart! at least this one can be easily differentiated.

All the same... nifty, but an extra $200 for an update they should have delivered years ago for no price boost? Not digging it.

Keep in mind that they'll use this case for the next four revisions...

that is 1 sexy looking machine. it'll go nice in the entertainment center

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