I was never a huge fan of Macs until recently getting to mess around with OSX a bit. I absolutely LOVE it. I just watched The 2005 Keynote from apple and wow do they have some good stuff!
This is definately my favorite thing overall they revealed. This means I can actually buy a Mac!!! I am poor afterall heh. Hopefully this will be on my desk by the end of February! I’m going to go for the 80gig version of course and its gonna cost me around $650 with a new keyboard and mouse and $800 if I go for the Apple Care which I think i’m going to as new Mac’s tend to have some problems. Next we have the iPod Shuffle …
The iPod shuffle is Apples jump into the low-end flash mp3 player market. If you ask me I think they did an awesome job. Its simple, yet beautiful. A 1gig player for $150!!! Outstanding! I also like the whole “shuffle” thing. 240 new songs just by plugging the thing in. Also you can use this a thumb drive as well but you have to allocate how much of it you want to use for space and how much you want to use for music. Would be nice to be able to determine that on the fly but its not that bad I guess.
Among those were the new iLife ‘05 and iWork. iWork looks pretty awesome and iLife seems to have a bunch of stuff I will never use. They also previewed alot of the features from OSX Tiger and it has some really cool stuff! Spotlight in particular. Can’t wait to shell out $150 for it :)
So by the end of February hopefully I will be the proud owner of a new Mac Mini and iPod shuffle! Wish me luck.
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You are going to love your new mac…I don’t think I would go for the Apple Care though unless your CC company doesn’t offer an extended warrenty automatically. I have had 4 Macs in the last 15 years and I have never had anything go wrong with any of them. My original Mac SE circa 1988 is still running like a champ.
If possible, you should buy the Mini from an online retailer or licesenced store. You’re likely aware of their memory upgrade for an installation fee. Their memory is cheaper as well. It doesn’t matter where you buy and it will be much faster if you can add memory to the single slot inside at purchase. I am going to wait to purchase a new machine for Tiger to be released…likely in May or June at the latest. The new OS is spectacular and the last of the major upgrades for a few years. At $129 list it will be tough to swallow just after buying a Mini.
Best of Luck
If possible, you should buy the Mini from an online retailer or licesenced store. You’re likely aware of their memory upgrade for an installation fee. Their memory is cheaper as well. It doesn’t matter where you buy and it will be much faster if you can add memory to the single slot inside at purchase. I am going to wait to purchase a new machine for Tiger to be released…likely in May or June at the latest. The new OS is spectacular and the last of the major upgrades for a few years. At $129 list it will be tough to swallow just after buying a Mini.
Best of luck.
Phrogman: You may be right about the protection plan, but on a machine like this if anyone does go wrong, your pretty much screwed into paying apple to fix it. Its probably as compact and complicated as a laptop.
Robert Boylin: Yes I toally forgot about the memory upgrade. I was going to go for the 512MB upgrade and add another 512 of my own a bit down the road. The 512 upgrade is only $75 but the 1gig upgrade is an outrageous $425!!! And its two sticks of 512 not even a 1 gig stick. Which means they want $350 for 1 stick of 512MB standard DDR memory. I can get that on pricewatch for like $100. I was planning on buying my mini from the apple store, we have one here in town. And I see your point on waiting for OSX Tiger … but I have been wanting a Ma so bad for ever I really don’t want to wait any longer LOL
iWork looks pretty awesome and iLife seems to have a bunch of stuff I will never use.
You plan to go on a EuroTrip. Chances are, you’ll take lots of pictures or even videos. Digital cameras are cheap enough to bring on such trips. You can use iPhoto to organize your pictures and iMovie to edit your videos. If you get a Superdrive with your iMac Mini, you can burn them to DVDs. And of course, who does not use iTunes? The only thing you may never use is GarageBand, unless you have interest in music.
I have never had the burning desire to burn DVD’s, so I don’t think I will buy a superdrive. I haven’t used iPhoto but I do use other photo management apps for *nix, who knows I might want to switch :) and iTunes is freely downloadable and as far as I can tell there is nothing special about iTunes except you can buy music with it. So far my experience with it has been that its a resource hog.
BoBB
Thats 1 stick, not 2 :p
Don’t quite follow you on that one heh … Glad to see new people here though!!!
Zoran means that the Mac mini has only one memory slot. If you are not doing much multimedia editing or heavy multi-tasking then 512MB RAM should be sufficient. Otherwise I’d get the basic RAM configuration and buy a 1GB stick somewhere else and either install it myself or have an authorized reseller do it for me.
Wow really? I remember reading or hearing somewhere that it had 2 slots. Oh well, I suppose 512MB aint that bad, and I could always get a 1GB stick later if I needed it. I dont plan on doing much multimedia editing or anything.
What he meant is that the Mac mini’s only got one RAM slot. If you opt for the 1 GB, it’s a single stick that’ll replace the default 256MB stick. You’ll probably be fine with the 512MB upgrade, but if you want 1GB buy it on the open market and either install it yourself or have the Apple Store do it for $50.
Incidentally, don’t believe everything you read about user-installed RAM voiding your warranty. Apple has clarified their stand on this and said it will only affect your warranty if you break something during the installation.
Good luck with your new Mac and your trip preparations. Did a similar Euro-adventure myself … many years ago :-)
Ooops, sorry for the duplicate info. I shoulda refreshed before posting!