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It's been a long road getting from there to here.
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This new mini form facrtor is exactly what we should have expected - except it's not as small as I would have thought Apple could produce.
Yes, this is the mini I thought we might get and hoped we wouldn't.
I thought that Apple would change the external appearance of the mini if they were going for the non-user upgradeable assembly methods.
But apparently they aren't concerned about making this the "thinnest mini we've never made".
That's just as well. They'd probably have trouble with the number and placement of ports if they tried to make it much thinner.
For me, the real sticking point is the $699 price tag for the second tier minis. The cost of going from 8G to 16G is about the same as buying RAM from our sponsor. But you get Iris graphics as opposed to the HD 4000 in my 2012 mini. Even the base mini now has HD 5000.
As for the storage situation, that's pretty much a non-issue for me and most other mini users. It's a small percentage that would crack a mini for an internal storage upgrade. I had wanted to but external drives work just fine.
While I can appreciate a lot of DIYers are mourning the new build methods, and some will rightfully lament the lack of an i7 quad-core, most of us (which might not include any of you) would probably benefit from the improved graphics alone.
I hope we see some tests comparing graphics performance with the 2012 mini.
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For all we know there could be other reasons Apple is not motivated to make the Mini smaller. A lot of people may still have a bias against it due to the perception that something that small couldn't possibly be a 'real' computer.... it took me a while to overcome that perception even after I bought my 2009 Mini....
Maybe someone at Apple snuck some market research in there....