The good news from Apple kept on coming for the first half of the week. On Monday, Apple beat the Street on earnings; Tuesday was new hardware (more later) and today thanks to Tuesday’s announcements, we’re getting a new Mac to host KMAG (the stream) and Picayune (this site).
Firstly, those new backlit-LED iMacs are really sweet, especially the 27′ model. For a desktop I would prefer a MacPro but the iMacs really make it hard to choose. The bigger surprises were the Mini-based server solution and the revised MacBook. The former is tempting to have in place of what we did choose (price being a major consideration) yet I would encourage a small business to consider it over running Snow Leopard server on an iMac or spending more for a minimal tower. Meanwhile, the new MacBook received a bigger overhaul than I anticipated. Once the aluminum unib0dies appeared, I figured the MacBook made of white plastic would stick around as a low-end workhorse to entice people with a cheaper portable. Now it has the LED backlighting, better battery life and it’s curvier.
With this good news out of the way, we went forward on purchasing a new entry-level Mac Mini, not the server which felt like too much computer for what we’re doing. Originally we were going to buy it two weeks ago, then the shipping time on them went from 24 hours to a couple days. The delay tends to mean the product is discontinued or headed for an upgrade. We received a better deal. For the same amount of money the new Mini will have double the RAM and a processor of 2.26 GHz. This saved us around $200 which I can then put toward a larger internal hard drive, the default 160 GB is puny for hosting Somara’s pictures, KMAG (30 GB alone) and I’m not sure what Picayune consumes. We’ll then make the transition to Snow Leopard server to handle the iCals on our iPhones.
Keep watching for warnings when I have to take the old G4 offline.