Why Save the Mac Mini
Peter Alcibiades
palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk
Sun Jul 15 15:40:00 EDT 2007
Oh dear, I have been biting my tongue for days on this one. And if only the
thread would stop, I'd have succeeded in keeping quiet!
Look, here is what I don't get: the combination of poor organizations,
running Rev, and Minis. In fact, it seems positively grotesque.
If what you want is to run Rev cheaply, as my poor charitable organization
needs to, an old PIII Compaq runs it very snappily. We paid probably 5% of
what a Mini would cost, and we spend the rest on the objectives of the
organization, a stance I have great respect for. Its a critical application
by the way, its just not spending any more than we have to on computing.
If what you want is performance at a price, as we once did for our office
machine, where we needed an Office application, you buy a whitebox Intel at a
quarter the price of an equipped Mini, and put Linux on it. And you spend
the money you saved on your clients.
Now, if what you want is an elegant box you can put in your handbag or jacket
pocket, and run MS Office on, fine. The Mini is for you. And if you have
the money.
But for poor educational or charitable sector organizations to buy Minis just
seems to me a totally disordered sense of priorities. Still more if a prime
purpose is to run Rev, which is (one of its pleasures) so remarkably
forgiving of low end hardware. I have had absolutely no, zero, complaints
about responsiveness on our 500Mhz machine running the Rev app. Its instant.
If we were teaching programming on it, using Rev, I think it would be
perfectly fine and at least as responsive as a Mini. The graphics are of the
same generation anyway.
So at least for the charitable sector, if it goes, it really looks like no
loss at all. In fact, a boon, if it stops them wasting their money.
I am not criticizing anyone who spends their own money on the thing. There is
no accounting for tastes. If however its money that is devoted to a purpose
that is being spent, and one is administering the funds, buying Minis strikes
me as fiscally irresponsible to the point of immorality.
Well, got it off my chest at last!
Peter
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