Please advise on which Mini to get

[Raelthorne]

Hi folks,

I'll be touring the east coast in May and finishing up in NYC before flying home to Europe. I've decided to get a Mac Mini but now I'm slightly confused as to which one to get. As I'm not a US citizen & don't have a US credit card, I have to purchase from an authorised reseller or in an Apple store. At the moment I'm leaning towards B&H.

I'm mainly a PC user and have very powerful, high end machine which I built myself. I use this machine for gaming, converting music, videos etc. I also have a 24" 1920X1200 Dell monitor.

My intention was to get the Mini to put my iTunes library onto and to learn how to use OS X. In essence, I plan to use this machine as the hub for my Apple devices. (iPad, iPod) Other than that, it won't be used for gaming, encoding etc. Just web browsing, office docs, watching vids playing music from iTunes etc etc.

Being an IT person I originally looked at the mini from a specs point of view and decided on an i7 2.7Ghz cpu, a 750GB 7200rpm HDD and AMD 6630M GPU with the intention of upgrading it to 8gb of Ram myself. This option would cost me $1048.95.

Recently I've been thinking that this is overkill (I've also heard about the i7 running hot in the Mini) and the i5 2.3Ghz CPU with the 500GB HDD and Intel 3000 GPU (for watching 1080P content) would be okay since I won't be using it for any intensive work. This option would cost $568.95, which is a big difference.

I think it would be better to have the 750GB HDD but the price differential between the two is ridiculous. Considering it wouldn't be my primary machine, I could easily take a spare 2TB drive I own and use it in an external enclosure to provide additional storage for the Mini.

Can you please give me your opinions? Any and all help is appreciated!

 

[chuckd83]

My intention was to get the Mini to put my iTunes library onto and to learn how to use OS X. In essence, I plan to use this machine as the hub for my Apple devices. (iPad, iPod) Other than that, it won't be used for gaming, encoding etc. Just web browsing, office docs, watching vids playing music from iTunes etc etc.

Get the cheapest Mac you can find. Why upgrade anything if you don't need it?

 

[philipma1957]

Hi folks,

I'll be touring the east coast in May and finishing up in NYC before flying home to Europe. I've decided to get a Mac Mini but now I'm slightly confused as to which one to get. As I'm not a US citizen & don't have a US credit card, I have to purchase from an authorised reseller or in an Apple store. At the moment I'm leaning towards B&H.

I'm mainly a PC user and have very powerful, high end machine which I built myself. I use this machine for gaming, converting music, videos etc. I also have a 24" 1920X1200 Dell monitor.

My intention was to get the Mini to put my iTunes library onto and to learn how to use OS X. In essence, I plan to use this machine as the hub for my Apple devices. (iPad, iPod) Other than that, it won't be used for gaming, encoding etc. Just web browsing, office docs, watching vids playing music from iTunes etc etc.

Being an IT person I originally looked at the mini from a specs point of view and decided on an i7 2.7Ghz cpu, a 750GB 7200rpm HDD and AMD 6630M GPU with the intention of upgrading it to 8gb of Ram myself. This option would cost me $1048.95.

Recently I've been thinking that this is overkill (I've also heard about the i7 running hot in the Mini) and the i5 2.3Ghz CPU with the 500GB HDD and Intel 3000 GPU (for watching 1080P content) would be okay since I won't be using it for any intensive work. This option would cost $568.95, which is a big difference.

I think it would be better to have the 750GB HDD but the price differential between the two is ridiculous. Considering it wouldn't be my primary machine, I could easily take a spare 2TB drive I own and use it in an external enclosure to provide additional storage for the Mini.

Can you please give me your opinions? Any and all help is appreciated!

buy the base 2.3 mac mini add 8gb ram. use the internal 500gb hdd and read this thread



https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1317577/


B&H sells this


http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/841887-REG/Seagate__500GB_FreeAgent_GoFlex_Pro.html


consider it and decide if you want it.

 

[chickenwingfly]

Being an IT person I originally looked at the mini from a specs point of view and decided on an i7 2.7Ghz cpu, a 750GB 7200rpm HDD and AMD 6630M GPU with the intention of upgrading it to 8gb of Ram myself. This option would cost me $1048.95.

I'm also an "IT person" and I'll be buying that choice of yours, except for the 7200 RPM (don't have any benefit for it, believe it or not).
HOWEVER, I'm what you could say a former PC user, because after tasting Hackintosh on my "High End PC", I decided to make Apple richer...
So, in my case, I will be using it as my main machine, but no gaming (PS3) except for a couple console emulators.
It won't be as fast as my old (now sold) i7-2600, but I don't care I love OS X now and I don't think I sincerely need a server machine to be happy (used to think so, before smartphones, PS3, tablets existed).

But as you can see, my needs are "high".

If you just wanna have a taste of OS X and maybe enjoy iCloud with your iDevices and whatnot.. then... go for the cheapest cheapest cheapest option, because the one I'm getting will be a total overkill for your purpose, having in mind you'll keep the PC.

 

[frank4]

It's very likely a new MacBook, iMac (maybe big redesign), and Mini are coming out one after another in spring/summer so if you have minimal cash invested, such as in a current base Mini, it makes it easier to switch to one of those systems if that looks worthwhile.

Personally I find the base Mini is plenty fast, and the money saved can pay for other stuff, such as external hard drive, software, TV, phone, tablet, AAPL shares, ... the list is endless.

 

[Raelthorne]

It's very likely a new MacBook, iMac (maybe big redesign), and Mini are coming out one after another in spring/summer so if you have minimal cash invested, such as in a current base Mini, it makes it easier to switch to one of those systems if that looks worthwhile.

Personally I find the base Mini is plenty fast, and the money saved can pay for other stuff, such as external hard drive, software, TV, phone, tablet, AAPL shares, ... the list is endless.

I'm thinking of using the cash I'd save to build a Synology NAS as a backup for all my media, pictures, ebooks and personal documents, therefore I could see all my files from both PC and the Mini. Furthermore, I could do all the heavy encoding on the PC and upload the files to the NAS, taking any load off the base Mini.

Can anyone tell me if I can store my MP3s on the NAS and just run iTunes from the Mini and sync my devices when necessary? In essence, no files on the Mini, just on the NAS.