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Old 03-07-2009, 06:11 AM   #10
BegeMoT

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
491
Senior Member
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They fall into what category? If you mean the cheap office market, they don't. By the time you have bought a mac mini, apple screen, keyboard and mouse you might as well have bought an iMac.

I just checked it out and I can't believe a basic Mac Mini is now £499 just for the box. You can get a full PC system with twice the power for that!

As for them being fine with photoshop....yeh they are to a point but again, compared to a Mac Pro they are no contest. I have a Mac Mini on my desk and an iMac in my receptionists room and 5 Mac Pro's in the studio so I have compared them on day to day tasks. Plus as I said, I was talking about heavy lifting like Final Cut Pro (video editing). The iMac's just aren't up to it. Neither are similar spec PC's.
Only if you go apple for everything. We use Mac Mini's exclusively for newer editorial and CSR work stations. When an older G4 was ready to be retired, we replaced them with mac mini's which would be good for a long time in office environment. Sure you can mix and match PC and Mac. But you run into serious issues with text kerning between the two platforms. Price wise, remember that a mac mini is 6"x6"x3" total. Even mini-PC's don't come near those physical dimensions. So its small on a desk.

Apple Cinema displays are good, but honestly way too good for anything but pre-press, imaging, and other graphic related work. We usually paired a mac mini with a cheaper LCD in the 19 to 20" range, and we had a surplus of KBs and Mice.

The only users who ever got Cinema or Studio displays in our building were the people who needed color accuracy as the Apple LCD's use some decent panels. Those same users also had top tier G5 towers and Mac Pros.

_____________________________

I benchmarked a 2ghz C2D mac mini with 2gb ram against a Powermac G5 2.3ghz dual CPU that had 2gb of ram and the C2D was JUST as fast in everything but 3d accelerated graphics where it fell behind, and it was slightly slower in HD performance due to the mini using a 2.5" drive vs the G5's 3.5". A considerable asset when a brand new Mini STILL costs less than an a used top of the line G5 Tower does today.

From an IT standpoint macs are WAY easier to deal with. Computer dies? Drop the HD in nother similar spec'd machine its JUST like it was before. Going from PPC to Intel based mac? Easy, use the migration wizard to import the user AND applications to the new hardware.
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