Hopefully you haven’t tried this yourself!
Yesterday when I turned on my Mac Mini, which I use as media center for my TV, I for some reason could not connect to it from my MacBook Pro. After a quick inspection, I saw that the Mac Mini had turned off and no longer responded to my attempts on my power button. Completely dead.
Tried the usual stuff such as resetting the SMC, but to no avail.
It’s out of warranty so I feared the worst. A few hours after handing it over to the local Mac shop, they phoned me up and said i had a logic board problem. Damn. Just what I feared the most. Price to fix, including labor and parts: 196 euro. That’s around $240. It was an easy “yes, go ahead” from me, since I figured the Mac Mini with its current specifications (and if it was working) would be worth around €350. Buying a new Mac Mini was out of the question! Here in Europe, the brand new Mac Mini is insanely expensive compared to the US. Over there, it’s $699 for the small model and around $1033 here. How’s that for a price difference!
I’m still waiting for the Mac Mini to be fixed and return back home, but until then, being the TV show addict that I am, I had to find another solution. I quickly purchased MediaLink which allows me to stream and do on-the-fly conversion of all my digital TV shows and movies from the MacBook Pro over to the PlayStation 3. I tried the free PS3 Media Server first but I couldnt’ get it to work, no connection. MediaLink worked without any hassle.
Watching TV shows on a PlayStation 3 is just not the same as using Plex on a Mac Mini. Plex keeps track of what you’ve seen and what is unseen, it has episode data, titles etc. PlayStation 3 doesn’t have anything, it only plays the filename and that’s it. It’s simple, but it works. Fortunately this means I’ve been watching a lot less TV these past few days than I usually do. It’s kinda nice actually, so maybe this whole Mac Mini logic board problem might be a good thing after all (except the €196 cost), giving me a chance to modify my routine to something better!
Over to you! What’s your take on media centers and being a TV show addict? Leave a comment below, it’s free!
That is no good I am sorry you had to go through that. I was looking into getting one now I need to look for something different.
Hi Shane. So, you don’t want to buy a Mac Mini because my 4 year old Mini had a logic board problem? That doesn’t make much sense to me 🙂