My favorite fruit company no more.

My Indigo setup is running on a 2012 Mac Mini.

Probably the best Mini ever made: 2.3 GHz i7 CPU, four USB 3 ports, HDMI, Thunderbolt, SD card slot, Ethernet, FireWire 800, SPDIF audio, an IR control port, and a built-in power supply (I dislike wall transformers) . Easy to upgrade RAM and easy to put in an SSD.

If mine failed tomorrow, I find another one on Craigslist. In fact, I should probably buy one anyway for a just-in-case spare.

Apple have made some fantastic Macs over the years... and some real awful ones.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Macintosh_6200

The Mac SE/30 was the best Mac server Apple ever produced. Small(ish), fast (for the time), and reliable as hell. When I managed a team at NASA many (many, many) years ago, we had a rack full of SE/30s acting as servers of various kinds, and they never died or required a reboot. Amazingly rock solid.

I think the Mac IIsi was the worst, sorta the precursor to the 6200 series. It was a huge piece of crap engineering.

Indeed the SE/30 was astounding. Imagine a machine that size that could address 128MB of ram in 1989... I think my Mac plus had 1MB!

The IIsi was pretty bad but I think the 6200 has it nailed as the worst Mac ever made. Whoever decided that installing a rather strong speaker directly next to the hard disk and floppy drive was clearly mad. And the architecture of its motherboard essentially cut its processors ability to work by about 50%. Of course the LCII and PowerBook 5300 with its exploding li-ion batteries also should get a honorary mention..

PowerBook 5300 with its exploding li-ion batteries also should get a honorary mention..

Ahhh the good ole days I turned 40, my ex-wife (not ex then) gave me a surprise party and a PowerBook 5300 exploding laptop as my birthday gift... and within 6 months my marriage exploded; best thing that ever happened. The PB5300 was unscathed. All's well that ends well and my next laptop was a Wallstreet.

History: Ogrady's PowerPage got it's start from the powerbook 5300...

Ah o'gradys power page was brill back in the day. I never had a 5300 as luck would have it... had a 2nd hand PowerBook 520c with the exceptional rare PPC upgrade card. What a beautiful machine that was. One could argue that it set the design that all laptops still follow to this day. I still had it until a few weeks ago when I sold it to help pay for my shiny new Z-Wave door lock.

Kinda regret letting the old girl go now. I swear I could dismantle and rebuild a 500 series PowerBook blindfolded...

I guess you guys are too young to remember the days when it was almost impossible to find a long shaft TORX in order to get into the original "why 1984 won't be like 1984" Macs to replace the exploding cap in their power supplies...

Ah yes a 'case cracker'. I did have one.. one of the few things I wish I'd taken when I shut down my business.

Tomorrow is the big day... Apple announcing new Mac's.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/10/25/wha ... mac-event/
Although I expect little to nothing for the Mac Mini and all but one web-site is predicting the Mac Mini will not have any big changes... too bad.

What I would change on the Mac Mini to make this a great Indigo platform:

1) Form factor: Much smaller and round. No bigger than 5" diameter and 1.2" high.
2) More metal in the base unit and better cooling... allow unit to be mounted horizontally or vertically for enhanced temperature control (a nice feature for reliability in home automation).
3) USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 connections.
4) Low power modes on all models for users who don't require high speeds to enhance MTBF.
5) Performance if required but processor Turbo 2.8-GHz Skylake dual core processor on low end.
6) Internal power supply (no wallwart... this may already be the case).

I'm putting my odds at 0% on the form factor change, 5% on the USB-C and Thunderbolt changes, and 40% on a processor change/speed bump.
My concerns about MTBF and reliability are simply a reflection of my job title. I wish Apple would address these things for Home-Automation.

The minis have had an internal power supply since the aluminium models came out in what.. 2010?

My wish list for the mini would be to make it a bit bigger than it currently is, and have like 8 USB type C ports, 2 thunderbolt ports and I'd like a FireWire 800 port but I think that's pretty unlikely. Ideally it'd also have two 2.5" hard disk bays but that's unlikely.

We shall see tomorrow...

Mine's going to get buried behind an invisible panel, hopefully never seeing the light of day. I'd like to install it once and forget about it ... it just has to run cool. I'll cold plate the unit if needed.

My USB needs are pretty much 3 or 4 ports. One of them should be 3.0 for memory sticks. I don't think the insteon USB PLM or the Aeon Labs ZW090 Z-stick require USB 3.0 or am I wrong.

...Update or no update on the Mac Mini, I'm buying a new one before the end of the year. My Mac Mini is like 2006 vintage.... I was thinking it was older but the monitor is an old Dell 50" W5001 which didn't come out until 2006. 10 years... and still plugging away isn't bad but it's just time. I've got my fingers crossed for the "Hello again" apple event tomorrow. This is Apple's last chance to impress me before year's end, and so far, I'm not impressed. I'm obsessing about it... enough thought... time for action. What's it going to be Apple?

Tim Cook comes out on stage.. bores us with the usual updates.. then annouces that they're discontinuing Macs as frankly they're just not worth their time these days.

Tim Cook comes out on stage.. bores us with the usual updates.. then annouces that they're discontinuing Macs as frankly they're just not worth their time these days.

Probably right and it's so needless. You know, Cook is no Jobs... but if he just brought home the bacon then that wouldn't really matter.

I do miss the old days of the Stevenotes.. seems like he could make anything interesting. Except that one time he forgot to bring his RDF and he kept playing that love shack song over and over and over again. Boy that was boring.

... drum roll please...

Ok this touchbar actually seems genuinely awesome and useful. How long until they add it to a desktop keyboard? :/