In the meantime HP came up with their small PC - s3100y that I almost bought for $200 + $70 S/H. The deal was too good to be true and as always Office Depot didn’t have a computer to sell me (they were sold out for one, but apart from that delivery was 40 days out), so realistically s3100y could be picked up without $250 rebate, but say with $150 for $299+$70 S/H~$350 - $400 with 15” monitor and a printer. So what $400 vs. $600 would buy apart from a monitor and a printer? 32-bit 1.6GHz Core Duo in 775 socket on 800MHz FSB with no TV-out, but SPDIF, same Gig of RAM and 160GB SATA drive. Asus motherboard could be run at 1066MHz which made that HP box interesting, but as is the box has about “half” the CPU and twice the disk space (DVD-RW goes without saying). Upgrading to Core Duo 2 2.2GHz E4500 processor would cost $140 from HP or MicroCenter, thus Mac Mini rival from HP would cost $500-$550 or the same as Mac Mini with $50 rebate. HP differential to upgrade from 15” LCD to 24” is $470 and from 15” to 22” - $200 or the same as buying either 24” or 22” Acer monitor, so as always, the only thing that would come with HP for free is a printer.
The bottom line is that I should wait for Leopard to be bundled with the Mini after it is released in October, but I guess I would be buying just when Amazon would slap $50 rebate on it. First however I need to ebay Apple’s DVI to Video Adaptor ($19+$4 from Apple Store) to hookup Mini to TV using either composite or S-video..
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