I currently only have a Macbook Pro from 2007. Since it has been a few years since buying a new computer I am looking into what my next Mac machine will be. My Macbook Pro does all of the day to day tasks that I am needing out of computer (except Mac OS X and Flash Player do not play YouTube as well as Windows – arg!!)

Since I have purchased a Samsung lnA550 40″ Television I have been watching my videos by hooking up my Macbook Pro to my HDTV. This has worked great but I want there to be a more permanent solution in place. My televsion is located in a Armoire so I have cable running out the front and down to my Macbook Pro. Needless to say, this looks a little messy.

Therefore my next Mac machine is going to be the newest Mac Mini. This is truly an impressive machine for its size. The following are the base specs of a Mac Mini:

• Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard
• iLife ’09
• Combined optical digital audio input/audio line in
• Combined optical digital audio output/headphone out
• Five USB 2.0 ports (up to 480 Mbps)
• Mini DisplayPort video out
• Mini-DVI video out – with adapter for DVI Cable
• AirPort Extreme (802.11n)
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (Enhanced Data Rate)
• Gigabit Ethernet port
• One FireWire 800 port (up to 800 Mbps)
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor with 128MB or 256MB of DDR3 SDRAM shared with main memory

The following are the options I would choose when customizing the Mac Mini for final purchase:

• 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor – Running video can be quite processor intensive so I would opt for the best possible chip
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2×2GB – I like to run lots of applications at the same time and some can be resource hogs – like editing video, using Photoshop, etc.
• 120GB Serial ATA Drive – this is a tough call, I would use an external hard drive interfaced with a Firewire 800 cable so I don’t think I would pay an extra $150 for 230 more gigabytes when the same amount could get me 1TB of external storage (what are your thoughts??) – I just realized that if you opt for the 320gb model the NVIDIA memory bumps up to 256mb maybe I would go with the 320gb version after all.

How Big is the Mac Mini

The dimensions of the Mac Mini are 6.5″ wide by 6.5″ deep and only 2″ tall! That should look nice with my Airport Extreme Base Station and Nintendo Wii. It will look even better to have all of these cables out of the way and have a permanent entertainment set up with a Mac.

Now I can just set my Torrent downloads of television shows up in the morning and they should all be ready to watch when I get home from work. I can also have my iTunes library and video and other media library stored on an external hard drive and I can access them from a home network on my Macbook Pro laptop if I want.

I currently have my external hard drive attached to my Airport Extreme Base Station via usb. This allows me to keep my iTunes on a remote hard drive and play them on my Macbook Pro on my network however this does not work very well for video. Being able to have a Firewire 800 connection straight to my Mac Mini will allow for volumes of video to be watched without having to download it to the hard drive first.

I will also move my iPhoto library and iMovie events to this computer so I should be able to free up a ton of space on my Macbook Pro.

Let me know what your ideal set up is and if you have any suggestions for mine!