Are the new Macmini’s value for money?

Apple have just updated the Macmini, by essentially putting the new MacBook guts into it. But does buying one make any sense?

I’ve never quite understood the Macmini, it’s rather a curate’s egg. What you are buying is a basically a laptop, but without a screen, keyboard, mouse or battery. By the time you have added a decent keyboard, mouse and screen, you’ll have spent as much as the base iMac, more than the cheapest MacBook, and with neither the beauty or portability of either. Some may argue that it’s the cheapest way to get the Mac experience, but at over £600 it’s not a very appealing solution to Windows switchers or the Mac faithful.

The only configuration that makes any sense to me is the Macmini with Snow Leopard Server. For small businesses looking for a small, quiet and RAID protected server, it makes a great deal of sense. If you added an external RAID array, like a Drobo, into the mix it would make a very inexpensive Mac OS X server solution for small to medium size design agencies.

But for consumers I find it very hard to recommend it to a customer without feeling like a complete fraud…