Mac mini

So the Macworld Expo started yesterday. The big deal as I see it is the announcement of the Mac mini. That’s actually got me kinda excited. It’s a cute, little sub-$500 Mac that’ll run OS X. The dimensions on this thing are quite impressive (6.5" x 6.5" x 2"). That’s awful tiny. Comes with a 1.25GHz G4, a 40GB ATA HDD, DVD/CD-RW, 256MB DDR RAM, 32MB Radeon 9200 DVI, and the usual plethora of I/O (10/100 ethernet, modem, audio out, Firewire, USB2). No monitor, keyboard, or mouse. But who cares since it looks an awful lot like they’re targeting potential PC folk such as myself who already have that stuff and aren’t as likely to take the plunge and check out a Mac running OS X given the traditionally high price of admission. I have to admit, I’m tempted to get one for an additional box. Thing is, I don’t know much about Macs, so I don’t know whether I’d want any upgrades (there’s a 1.42GHz/80GB HDD version for $100 more, RAM can be bumped up to 1GB, and there’s an option for a DVD burner among other things). Hence, I’ll just have to wait for reviewers to actually get there hands on one and tear it apart to see how much of this stuff is user-upgradeable (ie the RAM in particular that I can undoubtedly get cheaper elsewhere if it’s an ordinary DIMM). Guess I’ll have to see if there are any good Mac review sites (ala Anandtech, et al) that perform in-depth hardware comparisons and so forth. Looks like it may be an interesting year for Apple though.