Personally, I think the Mac Mini + Thunderbolt display is a better option for me. ![]() Speaking of displays, you now get a better one with the iMac than you would with the Mini. The Mini also has an advantage in that when newer models come out, it'll cost you $600 or $800 to upgrade if you keep the display, rather than dropping $1800 or $2000. The Mini has user-upgradeable RAM and with a little DIY you can upgrade the hard drive as well, even adding a second drive. However, once you pick your iMac specs you're stuck with them. ![]() You can push the iMac to significantly higher specs than the Mac Mini, which seems like a no-contest. Where things get trickier is when you look at upgrades. However the extra $200 for an iMac gets you a significant performance bump, going with a quad-core i5 instead of dual-core, a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive instead of a 500GB 5400RPM one, and you get a discreet graphics card instead of Intel integrated graphics. If you go with the base level stuff, the Mac Mini approach is the price leader at $1598 instead of $1799. Looking at the specs, it's actually a pretty tough call. ![]() I was talking with a co-worker today about this, since I'm probably buying a new Mac desktop in the near future to replace my aging C2D 24" iMac. I thought this would make an interesting discussion.
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