The perfect media PC that no-one needs
The Mac mini has been the red-headed stepchild of the company for some time now, only a step above the bastard child, the Apple TV, and now that the Mac mini has been updated I don’t think the Apple TV is long for this world.
What Apple has done is take the existing Mac mini, add an aluminium case, make it easier to replace the memory and then squash the whole thing down to the same size and footprint of an Apple TV. We now get, among other things, an HDMI port making the Mac mini the perfect media centre PC. Or does it.
When the Mac mini was released in 2005, there weren’t exactly a lot of options available for people wanting to connect their TV to some sort of media storage device. The combination of Apple’s Front Row technology and the remote that shipped with every Mac mini made it ridiculously easy to access the media you had stored on your PC.
We need to remember that in those dark days the amount of people ripping video to their machines was quite limited. The machine itself only had 40GB of storage on the entry-level machine and was released before Apple made the switch to Intel processors.
People used them for home theatre systems because they were small and quiet, but today the market has caught-up to and overtaken Apple in this market.
Not only can you buy small form factor PCs – some of which are smaller and quieter than the Mac mini – and install either Linux or (heaven forbid) Windows on it and use it as a media centre, the market has moved beyond the media centre PC.
Today you have a range of options should you want to consume your media from hard drive rather than optical disk. Some of these are rather rudimentary, basically just an external hard drive with some additional software and audio and video out, with others being more sophisticated.
For my money the best system for combining functionality and price is using either a PS3 or an Xbox 360 as a media centre. Both of these are massively powerful systems with pretty easy to use menu systems and in reality using them as a media centre is a bit like calling out the trauma surgeon to treat a scraped knee.
You can also buy a PS3 or 360 and a 2TB hard drive and still have change left over from the R7 000 it would cost you to buy a Mac mini.
This is even before you start getting into discussions about whether the Front Row interface that you would be using is up to the task.
The pretty, new Mac mini is, like many Apple products, an engineering feat. It looks great and is probably the best desktop PC on the market today, if you are focussed on aesthetics. But that is a big if.
Spending R7000 on one of these is something only those that don’t look at the price before buying would be happy to do.
In fact I can think of few good reasons to buy a Mac mini. If you want a home Mac and already have a killer screen is probably one of them.
But if your aim is to play digital media direct to your HDTV then buy a stand-alone unit or use your console. They may not be as pretty but they cost a lot less and get the job done just as well.
Mac mini discussion << give your views
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