Aw, man. Good news, bad news. The good news is that the Dell Mini 12 is now available. The bad news is that it starts at $549, the one gigabyte of RAM isn’t upgradeable, and your only choice for an operating system is Vista Home Basic.
There are three models available for $549, $599, and $678, respectively. The lowest-end has a 1.33GHz Atom CPU, 40GB hard drive, and a three cell battery. The other two have 1.6GHz processors, six cell batteries, and 60GB or 80GB hard drives.
Other than that, the normally-fun process of customizing your Dell machine isn’t too involved. I’ll go on record and say that the non-upgradeable one gigabyte of RAM and only offering Windows Vista Basic is going to keep plenty of people away from this machine. It’s a shame, too. I was looking forward to this little guy.
Still these computers are easy as pie to get OS X running on them and I’m sure some person will find that the two 512mb sticks that are likely in it are upgradable to 2 1Gb sticks or 2 2Gb sticks after opening up the case.
They aren’t sticks. The RAM is soldered onto the motherboard.
Well I suppose that’ll make it tougher. =P
Still, I’m sure some brave souls will unsolder those chips and replace them.
Sure, someone will probably give it a shot. But, this won’t be a mod for the masses.
Remember, it will be available with XP and Ubuntu options some time in December.
The chipset with this particular variant of the Intel Atom does not support more than 1gb of RAM. Solder away, but the chipset won’t see the result of your labor.