The Dell Mini 9 comes with a small solid state drive, not a massive amount of firepower and running Ubuntu, but for $199 starting you can change all that (and the color) and still get away with an inexpensive and ultra-light system for less than $500. The Mini 12 starts closer to the $400 range, but comes with a lot more features (and weight). Why should this matter much? Well, they’re now on the hackintosh list, meaning you can install 10.5.5 on them. Imagine a less pretty, less flashy MacBook air, 64 GB solid state drive, 2GB of RAM for about $400 (plus Leopard license).
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Solid State Storage for the Masses
I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal The new MacBook Air was introduced at MacWorld with the option for a 64GB Solid-State hard drive. Toshiba is also now offering Solid-State drives in sizes that are 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. The drives still seem to be lagging in adoption due to high costs, but they offer more durability, faster boot times and lower power requirements which should all lead to higher adoption over the next two years. Toshiba will also begin making Solid-state SATA drives in May that can be used in desktop systems.