[Wyatt]

As you may know, I've been lusting over Macs for nearly 7 months now, but I've yet to pull the trigger for various reasons (mostly financial). I plan on buying a stock 1.25 mini and upgrading the RAM to 1GB. As you may have noticed, Apple has recently started selling refurb minis online, and they have the original (256MB RAM) 1.25 selling for $429 and the original 1.42 selling for $499. My question is, how risky is it to buy a refurb? What's Apple's reputation on refurb items, and how much should I trust a refurb? I could pull the trigger on the 1.25 within the month, and I'm trying to figure out if that's a good idea or not.

[Brad]

Apple refurbs generally have a great reputation.

They have the same standard warranty as regular units and are sometimes in *better* condition than new units because they have any bad parts replaced and have to undergo additional testing before being sold again. Many refurbs are just returned units that users didn't want but that Apple can't sell as "new" any more because of that.

That's not to say you *can't* get a lemon of a refurb unit; I believe the chances are pretty low, though.

[Wyatt]

Wow, thanks for the quick reply, Brad. I'll definitely look into the 1.25 refurb, then. The 1.42 is tempting, though, especially since the hard drive is much bigger. However, I think I'll stick with the 1.25, upgrade the RAM, and add a Firewire drive later (I have a 200 GB drive I'm not really using, so all I'd need to do is buy an enclosure).

[scrouds]

good plan, have fun with your new mac. and the external drive is a great idea, and will bring the speed of the computer up, as the mini has slow laptop drives.

[Wyatt]

Originally Posted by scrouds good plan, have fun with your new mac. and the external drive is a great idea, and will bring the speed of the computer up, as the mini has slow laptop drives.

I just ordered the 1.25/256/40 mini for about $455 (with taxes), and I'm so excited! I'll order the external enclosure in a few weeks. For right now, it looks like I'll just be using a 40 GB external, though (I'm leaving the 200GB in my Windows PC, which I am re-purposing as a DVR/MediaCenter). I can't wait to get my mini!

[Luca]

You need more RAM. 256 MB isn't enough... even Apple has finally realized this.

[rasmits]

I'm still using 256 MB with Tiger, and it's fine. If you're trying to save money, 256 MB will be plenty sufficient. If you decide you need more, you can always add more later.

[Franz Josef]

It will really run alot faster with more - I was very surprised at how much difference extra RAM made.

[Koodari]

My personal experience is that 256MB to 384MB is a big jump in how the computer feels, and 384MB I think is good for light use (couple web browser windows, Mail, iTunes, occasionally opening Word or a movie player, quitting apps when you don't use them).

I tend to have around 30 windows including 15-20 Firefox tabs.. but doubt if I would see significant slowdown if went down from 768MB to 512MB. Wouldn't go below 512MB for my own use.

edit: all this in Panther. Haven't used Tiger.

[ast3r3x]

512 is the bare minimum for speed. I have open Safari, Adium, iTunes, Mail and Azureus. I am using 664MB of RAM!

Believe me, Apple always does the bare minimum, and they are doing 512 now, what does that tell you? Yeah they just upped it from 256, but that just means that their computers were shit before they did that, now they are just barely adequate.

[Wyatt]

Originally Posted by Koodari My personal experience is that 256MB to 384MB is a big jump in how the computer feels, and 384MB I think is good for light use (couple web browser windows, Mail, iTunes, occasionally opening Word or a movie player, quitting apps when you don't use them). I tend to have around 30 windows including 15-20 Firefox tabs.. but doubt if I would see significant slowdown if went down from 768MB to 512MB. Wouldn't go below 512MB for my own use. edit: all this in Panther. Haven't used Tiger.

You can't do 384 in a mini, but if you guys had read my original post, I was planning to upgrade to 1GB anyway. From that perspective, there was no reason for me to buy the model with 512 (which was only $20 more, but since I'm going to upgrade soon anyway, I didn't see any reason to spend $20 more on RAM that I'll probably throw out anyway).

It'll be a few weeks (probably a month) before I upgrade the RAM, but I can tolerate 256 until then.

[Luca]

Tiger's more RAM hungry than Panther, especially if you use Dashboard (where each widget, no matter how small, uses 15-30 MB at all times even when Dashboard is not in use).

384 MB is not possible in a Mac mini because it only has one RAM slot. You have to use either 256 MB or 512 MB. The price of 512 MB is so low (under $50 for a 512 MB module) that there is no reason not to buy it.

In my experience, 256 MB is not enough at all. It's not fine, it's not enough, it's not sufficient. Sorry rasmits, I'm not trying to insult you, I'm just saying that I disagree with you in the most matter-of-factly way possible. When I first set up my mini, it had problems with only one application open... and that application was iChat. It was choking on iChat with only 256 MB, and I'm not joking. It was beachballing for three seconds every time I added a contact to my contact list. I had to quit iChat to flush its RAM and reopen it every few dozen contacts. That's how much of a joke it is to run OS X on 256 MB of RAM (or less; remember that Apple was shipping many computers with OS X and only 128 MB of RAM until about a year ago!).

Here's how I see it from a cost-saving perspective - that extra 256 MB of RAM is so important that if you don't get it, you may as well buy a much less expensive used machine that has enough RAM. So you can either spend $500 on a new mini with 512 MB of RAM, or $450 on a refurb and add a $50 RAM module yourself, or you can spend maybe $300 or $400 on a used PowerMac G4 tower and another $50 to up the RAM to reasonable levels once you get it. I bet a G4/533 PowerMac with 512-768 MB of RAM would provide just as much (if not more) performance for general use in OS X as an equally priced Mac mini with just 256 MB. This despite having less than half as much clock speed.

Good to hear you're ordering more! I hope you can tolerate the mini until then! I only had to wait about a week for mine but it couldn't have come soon enough.

[Wyatt]

Originally Posted by Luca Good to hear you're ordering more! I hope you can tolerate the mini until then! I only had to wait about a week for mine but it couldn't have come soon enough.

lol, I wish I could order it sooner, but I do have to eat

[Bryson]

Rather than create a new thread, I though I'd add onto the end here.

I've just had a very dissapointing refurb experience. Having just sold my girlfriends 12" Powerbook, we bought a refurb 2.0ghz Macbook to replace it. It arrived looking lovely, but there was a problem with it from the start. It hung 4 times on the grey Apple screen on bootup. When it finally got into the OS X startup routine, the blue screen revealed that there was some kind of mounting problem with the screen. the top ad bottom left-hand corners had a white blobby line in them - it looked almost like a fluid of some kind was trapped behind the screen. Also, the whole left side of the screen was unevenly lit, and there were 4 dead pixels in the top left corner. Also, the left hand side of the screen wasn't dead straight - it seemed to wave in and out by a pixels width along that edge.

We called Apple and they said all they could do was offer a refund, so we got the RMA number. It's going to take 2 days t fetch the item, and then the refund will take a further 5 days after that.

I just think its a shame. the faults with the machine were very, very obvious. I'm amazed that they weren't caught by the "testing process"

I'm not really sure what to do now. My Girlfriend is (obviously) reluctant to go down the refurb route again, and really needs the computer right now, not 2 weeks from now! But a new machine will be out of the price range. Very, very dull.