They currently max out at 16GB of RAM and have an Intel graphics chip.

There are a lot of people for whom that is a show stopper, yet don't want to dish out over $2000 for a mac pro.

But the only thing between the mini and the pro is the macbooks.

Something about the size of a Shuttle but with the expected Apple quality and slightly more flexability for parts and priced at say twice the price of a mini would prevent me from having to solve that equation with a PC.

Get your dirty hands off my macbook!

(It's for testing, it's the only Windows 8 install I have, I swear!)

*Looks at sign*

Yes sir, you are in a designated fact-free zone, you may flame at will.

Exactly, I use an iPad with the Logitech keyboard cover and it's far more useful and powerful than anything I used in the 80's except it lacks the precision for graphics you could get in autocad (yes autocad is that old, I used it on an 8086 with an amber screen) and there are almost no onboard development tools.

Perhaps Orion will take care of that...

Yes, todays tablets. But in 1980 if you said that PCs would soon be on every office workers desks and within 15 years it would be possible for average people to instantly talk to anyone at a computer almost anywhere in the world they would have been equally puzzled.

And here we are 15 years after that and I bet your mom can now do it with her phone. (Current generation of smartphones is more powerful than the supercomputers of the '80s)

Never say never my friend. My bet is that 15 years from now the "PC" format will be back to the hands of the elite that had them in the early 1990's while everyone else is able to do EVERYTHING with their phone... or watch... or ... *sigh* glasses...

This.

Something between the mini and the pro where it's possible for us geeks to replace or upgrade drives and memory would be nice.

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat.

If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. Joyless tubes, full of gristle, floating in a sea of something hot and sad, stuck with a plastic pin in the shape of a chefs hat: a memorial, one feels, for some chef who hated the world, and died, forgotten and alone among his cats on a back stair in Stepney.

The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.

-- Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

Better idea,
    - get a hold of some of this surplus whale meat
    - add Ricin
    - label as Tiger Penis and Bear Gall Bladder
    - find an unscrupulous import/export inspector
    - ??
    - profit?

Hmm... social media in the cuniform era...

Has chipper.com been registerd?

This one? Not many of those out there, Compaq was struggling by then.

Compaq does not get a lot of love for it's machines from the '80s, but those of us that used them have a certain fondness.

All the ones I saw were 8086, (I have a clone we bought in asia in 1986, you have to re-seat the daughter boards every time you move it...)

Oh... if only you had actually been aiming for irony.

That was deprecated in favor of libopenmalware ages ago, do try to keep up.

Pervy Hobbit fancier!

I'm sure he doesn't, which is why I'm sure he hasn't noticed.