Why the Mac mini May Be Perfect for College Students
, 2005.01.14
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Apple has quite possibly found a new market for itself upon releasing the new Mac mini. I argued last week that people using older Macs might consider the (then unreleased) Mac mini a low cost upgrade to their older systems.
Now that it's been released and we see how small it is, it appears that the Mac mini may be ideal for another market - the college student living away from home.
While many college students commute to school every day, those who are away at school have to deal with a number of annoying aspects of being away from home, including how to transport your things back home for the summer. This is why, when it comes to buying computers for college students, a laptop is often ideal.
Many do have laptops, but many have desktops as well - often simply because they would rather work at a desktop computer than a laptop with it's cramped keyboard and small screen.
Typically the desktop machines students have are conventional minitowers. While minitowers are nice because they can be upgraded easily - new hard drives, video cards, and CD/DVD drives can be installed quickly and painlessly - they also take up a lot of room on your desk or floor.
Also, how many students really bother to upgrade their computer, beyond maybe installing more RAM? I'd guess that only a select few bother to upgrade their processor, add extra hard drives, or install a new video card.
This, of course, means that the Mac
mini would be absolutely ideal for students. It's a full-featured
desktop computer, however it is also small enough to put in a
backpack and bring home over the summer (along with your laptop, if
you'd like).
It's simple to set up, so even someone who's "computer clueless" could connect it to a monitor, keyboard, and mouse when they arrive home.
The nice thing about the Mac mini is that while it is so small, it can still be upgraded in order to meet people's needs in the future. More RAM can be added, of course, but with the FireWire port (something most PCs lack), you can easily add an external hard drive if you should run out of room on the internal one.
The built in DVI display connector means that if you should choose to upgrade to a flat panel display at some point, the Mac mini is ready for it.
The Mac mini is not without drawbacks. The built-in video card - an ATI Radeon 9200 with 32 MB of VRAM - is a bit lacking when compared with video cards available in stores today. For instance, in my PC I have a Radeon 9200 with 128 MB of VRAM, and that was the most basic one I could find.
For most users the 32 MB card in the Mac mini won't be a problem, but those who want to play some of the more graphics-intensive games would be better-off buying a low-end PC. Why? For the simple reason that the Mac mini doesn't allow you to upgrade the video card at all.
Many low-end PC's don't even have AGP slots (a friend of mine is dealing with this problem in his low-end Gateway), but you can at least add a better PCI video card to the system. Even though a PCI card won't deliver quite as much performance as an AGP card, it's still better than being stuck with a rather basic video card forever.
The same is true with the iMac and eMac, where you're stuck with the same video card forever.
But looking at the Mac mini's $499 price, you still end up with
an amazing value for anyone who doesn't need high-end graphics for
state-of-the-art gaming. 
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