Calling Mac Mini owners

[Andy B]

I'm seriously considering migrating from PC to Mac.

I'm sitting here looking at a cracking 8 month old PC widescreen and a prefectly good keyboard and mouse and thinking, do I really need a full blown iMac until such time as I need to upgrade other parts of my system and feel confident about the move I've made?

My only concern about going the Mac Mini route is its spec and whether I will still be able to do things such as edit HD video footage without it falling over.

All advice gratefully received!

 

[Andy B]

Bump!

Has nobody out there got one?

 

[llotse]

Never had a Mac mini but have 3 Mac laptops and a powermac core duo in the house. I think you need a high end Mac to do really fast HD video editing, I suppose it depends on how much you do and if you feel you can afford the extra time on a slower mac. You wont regret it, once you go Mac you never go back

 

[ianf]

I've had 3 of them, fine for most tasks. I'd recommend you use a fast rpm external Firewire drive for video editing, as the internal drives are only laptop quality.

Go play in the apple shop, get 4gb of ram if you do go for it. It is possible to upgrade it yourself, but not for the faint-hearted.

 

[mr_magicfingers]

I've had 3 of them, fine for most tasks. I'd recommend you use a fast rpm external Firewire drive for video editing, as the internal drives are only laptop quality.

Go play in the apple shop, get 4gb of ram if you do go for it. It is possible to upgrade it yourself, but not for the faint-hearted.

Exactly what I was going to post, good advice.

I have a recent mac mini I use as a media center, runs a picture frame /monitor and my HD projector, streams media all over the house to the other machines and has a firewire 800 external 1Gb drive for all data storage/media production work.

Current models are quite capable of playing and processing HD video. However if you're looking to do serious editing with something like final cut I'd recommend a heftier machine.