Tonight I finished cleaning all of my personal data off of my first Apple Macintosh.  The hard drive was wiped, and the operating system reload is in progress.  It’s time to put the little beastie up for sale, and get some more modern hardware!

This was a big purchase for me back when I started messing around with my Canon HF100 HD video camera.  iMovie ’09 worked great with my video camera, and it made sense to purchase a Mac Mini (and then upgrade it) to handle all of my video editing and storage duties.

The machine I purchased was a Mid 2007 Mac Mini, which had an Intel Core2Duo 2.0Ghz processor, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB internal hard drive.  I immediately upgraded the system to 4GB of RAM and installed a 500GB Western Digital 5400RPM SATA drive.  Massive improvements in speed, video editing capabilities, and storage in one easy afternoon.

The system has served me well as a workstation in general, and working with video through iMovie.  Sadly, the time has come to upgrade to something more modern, with a little more RAM and some more CPU power to handle the longer videos I’d like to shoot.  Also, the 500GB drive was full, and I’d rather not try to stuff a 1TB drive in the system.  External drives work great, but are much slower.  I have outgrown this system.

What will I get to replace this system?  I doubt I will get another Mac, since video editing capabilities under Linux have caught up to (and surpassed in some areas) iMovie, and i can get a LOT more storage space, CPU, and RAM by building my own system instead of paying for another Mac.  I’ve had a lot of success editing the raw files from my video camera under a couple different video editors in Linux, so I’m comfortable leaving the Mac behind at this point.

Not sure what the specs will be on the new system.  I have to sell off the Mac Mini first to help fund the new hardware.  That will be another blog post in the near future.  :-)