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Comment by arviewer | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the Mini a much better alternative? You can replace the disc, and don't have to spend money on an expensive screen.

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The Mini hasn't been updated in 2 years, and was already slow on release. For normal users it's the better option, but if you're a developer and need to actually get something done, a hackintosh is a very attractive alternative to $4k or more for a similarly beefy iMac / Mac Pro.

Sad that this is what Mac users have to resort to now.

So true.

I have a mini and after upgrading to an SSD (the HDD was a terrible terrible mistake) I'm happy with it. For just coding, torrenting, and movies, it's great. Picking my own monitor was a huge plus. I went with a 34" ultra wide screen, which is perfect for coding and movies look amazing since they fill the whole screen without any letter boxing. No problems with my current setup.

It always depends on what you do. If you do graphic/GPGPU intensive processing, the Mini just won't cut it, and my own Go projects would need over a minute for every compile pass.

A docked rMBP was the best compromise for me as of two years ago.

Personally I'm going to hold out for the new rMBP with the touch bar function keys.

It depends on what you need it for. For me, 5K screen and a very fast graphics card are important. Top of the line iMac is the only Mac that works with Oculus Rift.

But if you're only looking to do web development, for example, Mini should be fine.

For less than the price of a mini I got an old aluminum-tower 2010 Mac Pro on craigslist, swapped in a used hex core Xeon, 32GB of ECC, raided SSDs, and a GTX 750Ti. It does use kind of a lot of power, but watching node compile in a minute or two (about 4X faster than my iMac at work, sigh) is nice. It Geekbenches just below a 'bottom end' new Pro.

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