I suspect that taken together the niche uses add up to a tidy market, well worth serving. A thousand here, a couple of thousand there, and before you know it you’re talking about real sales.

In fact, arguably less so, unless it’s improved a lot since the white plastic Intel models.

I’ve replaced the optical and magnetic drives in mine, and it was deeply unpleasant; a Mini is much more user-upgradeable, despite being less so than a Pro or a non-Apple PC.)

I plan, sometime in the future, to assemble a digital entertainment hub around a mass storage device. Originally I was considering an Apple TV for the head-end, but settled on a Mac mini instead. Since I don’t shop on the iTunes Store (yes, such people do still exist), I can get along fine with Front Row alone—and maybe, before I get around to buying it, Front Row will be updated with iTMS support. I wouldn’t consider any other Mac for the purpose.

I’m totally replacing my Late 2006 iMac (1.86ghz) with one. Probably this year.

Half the price of a new iMac, and, hey, I can spend about 1/3 of the price difference on a new HP w2207 to go with the one I already have on the iMac. Apple’s monitors are nice, but they’re not that nice.

(Expandability means little to me; I’ve noticed that I simply don’t use expansion slots on modern computers, and only sometimes put in a second hard drive. And given the FW800, and that the iMac has no room for another drive… no win.)

Same basic processor as last gen iMac that my wife has (20″). What more do I want or need?

My current machine is a dual 2 GHz G5, bought in May 2005. That is, just a couple of weeks before Steve Jobs announced the switch to Intel. Despite how easy he said it was to create Universal apps using Xcode, these days there is more and more Mac software coming out that is Intel-only. Including the upcoming Snow Leopard. If not for that, I wouldn’t be thinking of getting a new machine yet. My last Mac was 6 years old before I replaced it, and my current one is plenty snappy. But I feel like I’m getting left out in the cold by having a PowerPC-based Mac.

I already have a monitor I really like. It’s 20 inches at 1600×1200 pixels. I like it because it’s *not* widescreen. It seems like nobody’s making non-widescreen monitors with more than 1280×1024 pixels any more. I like my monitor, so that rules out an iMac.

And here’s the thing: Apple’s cheapest Mac Pro is $2500. They simply don’t sell a sans-monitor machine for less than that, besides the Mini. In the Adrian Kingsley-Hughes article that the Macalope linked to, he lists “People with a sub-$1,000 budget” as a target for the Mini. How about people with a sub-$2000 budget, who don’t want a machine with a built-in monitor? I’d happily buy a Mac Pro if it were $1500, or consider buying one at $2000. But $2500? I’d be willing to spend that much if I were replacing a 6-year old machine, but I’m not willing to spend so much so soon after the last time.

And I can’t imagine why I’d need a Mac Pro. Expansion slots? I can’t remember the last time I used one. Quad core? I don’t do anything that demanding. I’d rather just pay $600 or $800 to have a Mac that can run Intel-only software, and doesn’t have anything I don’t need.

The mini makes a great little box for testing web apps because it ships with everything you need, from Apache to all the most popular development languages (Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Java)