It looks really nice, I wonder how well it handles the overheating with its smaller size.
No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.
No SSD ? No intel I3/I5 ? That's disapointing.
SSDs are good for boxes that are latency-bound or subject to vibration. For a box that sits under a TV set and spends most of its active life throwing 1Gb mpeg4 files down an HDMI cable, not so much.
- Less noise
- Less heat
- Smaller
- Faster boot time
- More bandwidth
- Less noise true, but peg a Mac Mini or MacBook Pro's hard drive to max and see if you can hear it from, oh, 5 feet away.
- This isn't a mobile device, so heat with regards to user comfort is not an issue. Until it presents a reliability problem, heat is a non-factor for a desktop.
- Smaller, and much more expensive per GB. Much more. Shaving another quarter inch off the enclosure also seems like a paltry gain for a much more expensive storage device.
- For a machine that reboots very rarely, this is moot. This is clearly meant as an always-on device (hence the low power usage to begin with) sucking down torrents all day or some such.
- It's a media-centric device. It will download stuff, listen to music, stream video... what kind of bandwidth does it need?
SSDs in a Mac Mini would be a Ferrari in a school zone - cool, and done purely for the sake of style, but let's not pretend that there are significant practical reasons for doing this.
Intel's fault, no license for NVidia and no OpenCL support in the i3/i5's GPU (and it's still a very, very crappy GPU indeed) means it'd need a dedicated GPU.
Reason why the entry-level 15" got one, by the way, and the 13" macbook pro is still using a Core 2.