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Comment by sauere | Hacker News Reader

The $699 model + the SSD upgrade sums up to a whooping $899.

I like the form-faktor and all, but really, with 900 bucks i am sticking to my custom ITX builds

Yes, that's long been the obvious stupidity in Apple's Mac line: the lack of a mini-tower. Mini-towers let you stick in a full power desktop CPU and as much disk space as you want.

Moreover, they dropped the expandable Mac Pro in favor of the new trashcan model which cannot be expanded -- except using thunderbolt which is just not as cheap as a drive bay.

That said, they're probably doing the right thing. The people who want the ITX build are hackers like us, and we just aren't that common.

as I said else where small mac shops when they get to 10-15 people start to need a mac midi if they want to stay in the mac ecosystem

Not sure that's the right number - I worked in a Mac shop (an engineering firm) with 20-30 users with 21" iMacs, served off a single Mac Mini server. If your users are just normal users, iMacs are fine. (Though the Macs did come under fire from the finance folks - taking the line that "equivalent" PCs are "industry standard" and a third of the price. I think this argument won out in the end, and the Macs all disappeared one day. It's a shame).

but 2tb is just to small and id want to use esxi to virtualise the server we have tools that run on Ubuntu

Why not use USB-3 storage?

Its another box to buy and manage

Of course, the finance folks all have Windows laptops that cost the same as Apple laptops, "because we're finance".

Kind of off topic, but I just purchased a used Mac Mini (2012 model i5 2.5Ghz) that the previous owner upgraded to 16GB for $575.

When I first heard they announced the new Mac Mini today I was worried that I should have waited, but it looks like in the end I got a great deal since there doesn't seem to be a huge performance boost. I only plan to use it for iOS development purposes.

I just went out and picked up 2012 model core i7, since I wanted quad core for server usage. The new model (dual core) isn't especially appealing.

Show us some of your builds!

The case i use is the Cooltek Coolcube Mini, photos and specs here: http://www.cooltek.de/en/cubes/coolcube-mini/14/coolcube-min...

Obviously it is larger than the mac mini, but still small enough to put on your desk.

Do you know of any good ITX hackintosh howto writeups? I might go that route too as I want small form factor and OSX, but do not want to pay an apple tax (even if their case is way prettier).

tonymacx86.com is a decent enough community. I've built 10+ machines using the site-promoted build tutorials (with some modifications) for myself and friends. The forums are hit or miss in terms of helpful information, though.

Replying to emocakes below, post is dead.

I was unaware of the theft, could you go into more detail? I read OSx86 sometimes but could never get chameleon installed on my own. The tonymac software was the easiest for to install. That's my fault for being lazy. This is disappointing.

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