No new Mac mini?

I was kind of hoping for a new improved cheaper/more powerful mac mini from this years WWDC. Doesn't seem to have happened or am I missing something?

If not now I guess autumn this year (or fall as the yanks call it). Any one know?

I saw a comment somewhere that with all the emphasis on software this time it was unlikely any hardware would get a look in.

Shame nothing interesting or exciting from Apple this year. All they have really done is play catch up with Android and dropbox/exchange sync, lol! I really can't understand what iCloud does that isn't already available elsewhere. Apple is getting boring.

But at least there's less stress on the credit card

Already got credit card stress so that's a good thing, thank you Apple!

I think there are cloud services around, but they aren't as well integrated as iCloud will be.

Yes dropbox does the file sync part although not integrated and therefore not (as) easy.

Contacts, calendar and mail are already synced between both my phones (work android and my personal iPhone) Google exchange takes care of that.

Looks like something has already changed in the app store as it now shows purchased apps and purchased apps that are not installed on this iOS device, you can then select for install.

Still I wanted a cheaper mac mini, probably going to wait for the raspberry pi now as that'll probably do what I need.

There was no reason for Steve to spend his two hour keynote describing new revisions of the Mac boxes to developers.

The WWDC is the Apple Developer Conference (the clue is in the initials). Developers may need to know about new hardware features they are going to have to program for, and *maybe* they'll be interested if Apple can demonstrate that new hardware will make a significant increase in the addressable market. Other than that, they need to know about the new OS features they will get to play with. And that means the emphasis is on software.

Recent rumours indicate that the supply chain for Minis and Pros is drying up. That usually implies an upgrade of the specs is in the wind. They wouldn't need a Steve-note to release them, though. Just a press release will do it.

whatever the next gen mac mini will be like, it certainly won't be cheaper

True but the current one will be cheaper as people flog them on eBay.

Not really. Mac Minis keep their price very well, even when new models appear. Even PPC Minis still sell for reasonably high amounts.

The Mac Mini is a lovely machine, but is spectacularly poor value. I love my PPC Mini, which was a retirement present. I'd never have been able to justify that expense out of my own pocket.

When I bought my Macbook pro it was the previous generation and so I saved about £399. That was three years ago and it's still going strong.

echo the above my MBA was reduce by almost 600 squid when the new model came out. I wouldn't have one otherwise

"spectacularly poor value"

Very very true of the Mac Mini but, unfortunately, also of other product offerings.

Here they come!

It's OK; anyone who feels that their year-old computers are now obsolete will soon be apple (oops, genuine Freudian slip) able to satisfy that spending urge.

I like the idea of a Sandy Bridge MacBook Air

There's a link there to the newer iMacs, including the comment:

If you�re still with me, let me confirm the worst: Apple�s iMac range continues to be the most preposterously expensive series of home computers known to man. Towards the top-end, the 3.1GHz quad-core i5 edition with 27in display is one of the most pernicious offenders, setting you back in excess of £1,600 for the shallow glam of brushed aluminium, unnecessary space-age design and the kind of performance that�s wasted on its target domestic buyer. In other words, it�s god-damned gorgeous.

Sums it up beautifully

I wonder if Thunderbolt will be the next big thing like... err... firewire was - before they killed it

Only if they make it cheap enough.

The big problem with any new universal bus it is will be up against USB3 which is the usual half baked cheapo PC bus standard.

In PC land they don't seem to give a toss about DMA and CPU usage. Have they not learned from the days of PIO and UDMA hard discs?

You may think a few CPU cycles is okay to lose, but when you want reliable low latency audio and realtime processing it really does cause problems.

Edited by deleted (Mon 20-Jun-11 17:58:46)

I wonder if Thunderbolt will be the next big thing

$49 for the cable to connect a peripheral to the computer - and you can only buy it from Apple. What do you think?

Have you even checked your information?

It's not simply a cable, so try not to be such a richard.

It's not simply a cable

Which might suggest that there is a fundamental flaw in either the technology or its implementation of the technology.

I have to say that I suspect Thunderbolt will make Firewire 800 look positively popular. Sadly, the basic idea Intel started with (an optical interconnect) sounds like a great idea, but being cynical the implementation sounds like a licence to print money by forcing users to buy extraordinarily expensive 'active' cables. One wonders why since the 'active' bit is in the plug why it shouldn't have been on the port instead which would have meant you then only needed cheap passive cables.

I'd have to agree with you that the difference between a "cable" and a "cable with active components" is pretty irrelevant to the average consumer. All they care about is that the gubbins that connects the device to the computer isridulously expensive.

Don't be so patronising. Of course I know that it has active components. So what? It's still (to anyone but a hopeless technonerd) a cable.

Which contains two 10GBps channels.

It's basically PCI express piped out of the back of the computer. Very fast and ideal for external storage. Serial ATA is only up to 6GBps at the moment.

However much you wave your hands about, this is still a cable (it's listed by Apple as a cable) that costs $49 (and pretty near as much in pounds). It may be wonderful, but that's going to put some consumers off.

If it needs active components, why not build them into the computer and/or devices?

The simple point is it is a professional bus for people who care about performance. If everything on a computer was aimed at low end users then servers would be running on wireless and using SATA hard discs without RAID.

I suspect there will be different cables for different tasks, so that is why the circuitry is build into the lead and not the computer. It saves having two different ports.

SCSI used to require some external components years ago, okay they were only resistors but sometimes high performance requires something a little different.

And look what happened to SCSI. It's still used, just about, but only in servers. There might well be a call for this new technology, but not (IMO) in laptops and low end desktops like the Mini.

WIth the core i7 CPU laptops there is plenty of CPU power and limited expansion.

I would argue that the laptops need such a port more than anything as a Mac Pro has expansion slots.

We'll see how it pans out, but USB3 and the last version of Firewire weren't keeping pace with SATA and PCI express. Since this bus is PCI express based it would be possible to put a graphics card in a box and link it up with a cable, that could be handy.

I ran quite a few things with SCSI over the years, a brilliant bus. Way better than anything the PC world invented. They were stuck with master/slave EIDE when SCSI had up to 7 or so devices.

In reply to a post by gilesjuk:

I ran quite a few things with SCSI over the years, a brilliant bus. Way better than anything the PC world invented. They were stuck with master/slave EIDE when SCSI had up to 7 or so devices.

SCSI was popular on PCs too but was more expensive than EIDE and cost won, Apple didn't have that issue.

I love my MBP 15" Core i7 and just waiting for a Thunderbolt to eSATA adaptor

Well PCs have always favoured the cheap rubbish. That's okay for most people but I expect more than that.

It's 2011 and USB (version 3 and previous versions) still sucks CPU cycles as the controllers are cheap and don't have DMA. There's no excuse for it as the Amiga in 1985 had DMA!

Don't be so patronising.

I was merely following your lead. You really aren't remotely in a position to criticise anyone for being patronising.

You hadn't done your research (again). For once, man up and admit it.

In reply to a post by gilesjuk:

Well PCs have always favoured the cheap rubbish. That's okay for most people but I expect more than that.

It's 2011 and USB (version 3 and previous versions) still sucks CPU cycles as the controllers are cheap and don't have DMA. There's no excuse for it as the Amiga in 1985 had DMA!

Agreed - USB is good for keyboards/mice and low capacity storage sticks - but for real data transfer you can't beat eSATA or Gigabit Ethernet - hopefully Thunderbolt will let me connect eSATA to my Macbook Pro eventually, as I've got a few drives about.

Anything is better than USB so long as it is an intelligent controller and not a CPU burden.

USB was a good solution to the problem of lots of legacy junk. But firewire should have taken off too, but the licence fees were too excessive.

I ran a SATA cable in my Mac Pro to a backplane with eSATA connector. It didn't work too well though. Might be an iffy cable.

Mac Pro with more than 2 drives was too noisy, the case is built too solid and not enough dampening. Although mine is a 2007 model and they may have fixed that.

Of course I can just slap in a few SSDs now, but I've only just stuck one in my laptop.

Edited by deleted (Thu 07-Jul-11 23:56:43)

In reply to a post by gilesjuk:

Mac Pro with more than 2 drives was too noisy, the case is built too solid and not enough dampening. Although mine is a 2007 model and they may have fixed that.

.

They certainly have just by including soft rubber washers for the drive caddy screws - that's if you suffered the same noise I did with vibration. The newer ones have a much different internal layout which seems to enable the fans to work less hard to keep it cool during processor intensive tasks.

The problem I had was as soon as you locked the case it would oscillate. But 7200 RPM drives are a bit noisy.

Even in an external case some drives are noisy. But you can at least place the unit on a cardboard box or a towel.

Yes oscillation was the problem I had, but I found it was all down to the tension of the drive caddy screws in my case, and once I'd got that right it was fine