I realize that this sounds completely insane, but Kathleen and I talked about my intention to buy a Mac mini and she said, “Maybe you should get the MacBook Pro you really want now instead of the Mac mini.”
Her reasoning is essentially that the Mac mini isn’t really that cheap when you look at all of the accessories that someone like me would want for it. Here are some examples:
- Since the Mac mini only has one video connector, I’d need to get a pretty good LCD display. The two that I have available in my home office are nice, but they have 1280 x 1024 resolution and they’re analog.
- Since all the keyboards and mice in the house are the old PC style or part of a laptop, I’d need a keyboard and mouse set that’s compatible with USB.
- Since the Mac mini steals main system memory to drive the display, I’d want the Mac mini maxed out at 2 Gigabytes of RAM.
- Since the Mac mini isn’t portable, I’d end up borrowing Kathleen’s MacBook from time to time in order to have a modern computer that I could carry with me for conferences or presentations.
If you add the costs of the items listed above to the high end Mac mini, you’re looking at $1300-1400 for everything. I could get a MacBook for close to that amount of money.
The problem with the MacBook is that the screen resolution isn’t really sufficient for the kind of web development I do. The resolution of the built-in LCD is 1280 x 800, which is great for personal productivity work, but is a little too small when you need to have a terminal open to a remote server, an FTP client, a web page from phpMyAdmin, and a copy of Zend Studio or Eclipse running at the same time.
The 15-inch MacBook Pro’s display is 1440 x 900, which is 25-percent more pixels. This is large enough for me to work with day-to-day. The standard MacBook Pro memory configuration is 2 Gigabytes, and the video card has its own internal memory.
The Mac mini that I intended to buy would be purely a stop-gap measure to get me a more usable machine than my underpowered PCs. We would end up spending additional money in six months or a year on a Mac laptop. After spending more than $1,000 on the Mac mini could I afford to buy a MacBook Pro, or would I have to settle for a MacBook and make a major compromise on screen resolution along with it?
As hard as it is to spend $2,000 on a laptop at this point, I think Kathleen is right that the most efficient use of our resources is to buy the machine I want fairly soon. The alternative is to make compromises by buying a Mac mini today, but we’d end up buying two Macintosh computers for me in less than a year.