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.
