When my wife first told me that she wanted to get a Mac Mini, back in 2005 when we were still living and working as ESL teachers in South Korea, I was sceptical. Up until that point, I had been introduced to Macs mostly through her, and grown to really like OSX and had begun to use it for almost everything (except gaming). However, other than our old Mac laptop that I admittedly had had fond memories of, I had up until that time generally disliked options for Mac PCs. When briefly considering iMacs, for example, I preferred to pick my own monitor or monitors and disliked the idea of it being made a part of the all-in-one design. I saw advantages to all-in-one designs in cases of portable machines, and even for desktops to a point, but had always felt that Apple went too far (for me and my tastes) with computers like the iMac.
I quickly grew to like that Mac mini, though. It became our media machine and our computer for everything except gaming. When we moved back to Canada, it was no trouble to pack it up and bring it with us. In 2009 we replaced it with another Mac mini (early 2009 model) and we are still using that computer to this day. Ive been aching to replace it, more for the lack of Thunderbolt ports and an HDMI port than anything else. It still works for what we got it for. The potential of a future upgrade, of maybe Iris graphics and a significantly better processor, has kept us waiting. I never cared that the optical drive was removed in later models. We actually have a much better external DVD drive connected to our 2009 model, and these days we almost never need to use that either.
For me, the current 2012 mini struck a very good balance between what is desirable to be made a part of an all-in-one design. Everything you need to have a semi-portable computer is there. On the one hand, something easy and light to gently toss in a bag and take between one sit-down workstation and another (two places where there already are keyboards, monitors, external DVD drives, external hard drives for extra storage). Its not a laptop, but these days my iPad mini adequately handles anything I would need a laptop for while on-the-go anyways. I do almost all of my heavy computer work when sitting at a desktop setup and when I use my work-provided laptop I always connect it to external keyboards and monitors (pretty much negating the clamshell design). On the other hand, the Mac mini also encapsulates almost everything I tend to replace these days when I upgrade a non-gaming PC, and it leaves everything that I dont want to replace, want to continue using, and not repurchase (monitors, keyboards, disc drives, extra storage drives, etc.) as separate. I know you can do that with towers, but I haven't torn apart and reassembled a PC tower in years. Even these days, we havent once upgraded our current Windows PC gaming machine since we got it. Gone seem to be the days for us of needing to swap out for a new video card in order to play the new years crop of games. Then again, we might just be out of it and not as much into gaming these days. It seems with the Mac mini, you can be good to go for a long time.
In a way, the Mac Pro was within my taste spectrum, and the new 2013 Mac Pro might be moving even more towards my kind of preferred desktop machine. However, for that kind of money, it did and still does remain outside of any realistic computer purchase for me. Its too expensive for us. The Mac mini on the other hand gave me considerable bang for my buck, even if it was a modest computer when compared to some.
Currently, I still need a desktop machine. Maybe that will someday change, but it hasn't yet. The Mac mini has been a great choice for me and my wife for that purpose. If it someday had processing and graphics capabilities (either intrinsically or through Thunderbolt add-ons if they can make that feasible someday) to handle the occasional high-end game or more intensive software applications, then we would not need anything else for a desktop.
So long as the computer landscape remains the similar to how it is now, the Mac mini is not only
THE computer my wife and I want to buy from Apple, its quite frankly the
only desktop PC we wish to buy from Apple. So, I hope they keep it going
Now, if they can re-invent it. Make it even better? Thats something Id like to keep an open mind about.
