mech wrote:If you can get student/education discount, that chops 10% off the price.
And good luck building a PC that is anywhere near the size, speed and quietness of a mac mini. Yes, you can build an HTPC that will run everything and be reasonably small for half the cost, but it won't be able to match all those qualities, and it's not nearly as simple and elegant. 13W power consumption, 2Ghz Core 2 Duo, built-in IR, slot DVD-burner, 802.11n, gigabit ethernet and can run (non-hacked) OS X or any OS you like. And it's as big as a few CD cases. It's the perfect HTPC. The money you save on power consumption alone should help pay back a fair chunk of its initial cost - I worked it out that it should cost me about $300 a year less than my old server.
The machine only uses 13w while idle which would be great for usage as a server. Although the figures change while the machine is being used. Not sure about other people, but i would only ever have my HTPC turned on while i intend to use it. It might sit in idle for a couple of hours here and there... but for the most part i would turn the machine off when not in use. As for speed... wtf? You can EASILY build a PC that's much quicker, has more RAM, better video card etc. for half the price.
That said, it's still missing one thing that the perfect HTPC needs. A blu-ray drive. The best part of a HTPC is being able to use it as a region free blu-ray player.
![thumb up :up:](./images/smilies/thumb.gif)
I'm sure that you could use an external blu-ray drive, but then you have an add-on that's about the same size as the machine itself, possibly bigger. Making such a small machine pointless IMO.
That said it really depends on what needs you have from a HTPC. My HTPC was built primarily because i wanted to be able to play Region A blu-ray movies. I was looking at importing a US PS3, but found it was cheaper to build a HTPC.