Blade Watch

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/03/21/eating_our_words_apples_mac_mini_to_rock_on.html

Last Memorial Day, AppleInsider cited sources in reporting that it appeared to be the end of the line for the itsy-bitsy Mac, which had seen limited adoption and an uncertain role during the first 24 months on the market.

Since then, the product line has remained in a state of limbo, with subsequent updates consisting of minor component swaps that required little if any engineering effort.

For the first time in nearly a year, however, people familiar with the matter tell AppleInsider there’s new life in the Mac mini department, where a small team of engineers have recently been tasked with gutting the diminutive desktop and applying fresh internals.

I remain a big fan of the Mac Mini, and it’s good to see its production to continue according to the article. I wonder if the unit is updated if it would have a different onboard video card?

I still feel they’d make great grid engines, it’s not that I’ve got anything against blade servers for grid – in many respects blade servers are much more redundant, scalable and re-useable. But there’s just something about buying a bunch of low energy pc’s, putting them into a DataSynapse or Platform type grid, and using it for development/testing/uat? When or if the unit fails, we deploy another one like sweeties, – oh people will say cabling, storage, security, etc. But there is something about the ready availability aspect, that requesting more grid capacity for the developer community might not constitute significant investment, a cabinet full of Mac Mini’s running XP/Win2k3 with whatever layered components/grid tool we need.

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