The video chipset in the mini and macbook can take as much ram as the firmware will allow it to, currently it is set to 64MB, but it could easily be increased with a firmware update

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Yeah, but that's today's technology. Have this dude get back to us whenever Vista comes out and see where the current Macs are at.

Fishes,
narco.

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My iMac 17" meets the requrements :)

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My iMac meets the requirements either, but this is crazy. This is a rip off people, who will have to upgrade their systems and they would be still at the entry level.
Thank God I switched (recently)!

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a 60GB HD as a min? Is that just to handle the OS? That's ridiculous. Let's say I get a fancy new Dell tomorrow and it comes with 120GB drive. Then I want to upgrade to Vista and, phoom, half my storage is gone? That's insane.

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Its a little high end. but my specs are good enough, or better.

I think microsoft just wants to take a big leap into the furture. Its gonna cost a lot for some people, but it will pay off. VIsta is beatutiful and so is office 2007 . They worked hard on them and you see it.

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Yeah, Ludwik - a real "rip off." Unlike releasing OS updates every 14 months at $129 a pop, eh?

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het guys lets just think for a moment. You don't have run Vista, DO WE !!

Use XP

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I would rather have the option to upgrade to a newer OS every 14 months then watch my OS rot in patch/security nightmare hell for 5 years. Pick your poison.

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Brent, at least we are moving forwards. Windows is very outdated in its current form (XP). I would much rather have OS updates every 14 - 18 months (and the gap between each 10.x is increasing) than to have the exact same OS for 5 years!

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people! you only need a 40 GB harddrive, and vista is only going to take 15 GB of that! please read the article before posting stupid remarks

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This is a pointless argument. Vista won't be released until '07 at the earliest. If you bought a plain old Windows XP PC now, you'd be crying that you would have to upgrade too. Welcome to the 21st Century of computers people! Steadily increasing minimum requirements are a way of life. Deal with it.

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This is a real dealbreaker for me. The MacBook is in a sweet spot of cost/size/performance and the potential to dual boot was really making me consider. But not being able to run Vista at its fullest means this laptop is not future proof enough for me. Oh well, guess I'll have to wait another year.

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who the hell wants to run Vista anyway? its currently awful, and will still be awful when it comes out.

i'll stick to dual booting XP for games and OSX for absolutely everything else.

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Just to clear things up...
The Mac mini and Macbook will meet vista's premium requirements (eye candy et al) if you upgrade the ram to 1gb.

The vista website says that you need a 128mb graphics card but it also say that if you are using a resoloution of 1,310,720 pixels (1280*1024) or less then a 64mb graphics card will suffice. The macbook's optimal screen resoloution is (1280*800). The Intel GMA 950 is DX9 ready and suports pixel shader 2.0.

As was pointed out earlier it would be very easy to increase the RAM allocated to the GMA 950 through a firmware update (in fact I'm pretty sure that some PC manufacturers allocate up to 256mb Ram to the GMA 950). So the GMA 950 could conceivably be a 128mb card which would allow it to support 2,304,000 pixels (equivalent to 1920 x 1200)... or even a 256mb card which would allow it to support even higher resoloutions.

Here's a video of the GMa 950 running Vista's eye candy http://youtube.com/watch?v=aTdTdTELZj4

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If you're not using an external display at high resolution the macbook are able to run Vista?:

Windows Aero requires:
DirectX 9 class graphics processor that:
Supports a WDDM Driver.
Supports Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware.
Supports 32 bits per pixel.
!!
Adequate graphics memory.
64 MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor less than 1,310,720 pixels
!!

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#14 is very informative...
I'd be very surprised if the MacBook/Mac mini can't run Aero ok... since they can run Quartz Extreme and all the Mac OS X eye candy.

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The fact is, even with 128MB RAM allocated to it, the GMA950 is still an integrated chipset, and therefore far less effective and powerful than a separate graphics card like the Radeon X1600.

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... or basically get a Mac and forget about Vista. Vista is just XP dressed up in Microsoft style eye candy...

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How about running Vista with the eye candy turned off? The first thing I do after re-installing XP is change it back to the Classic (Win98/2000) look and turn off most of the extra animations and stuff.

Sure, I like OS X's eye candy, but at least it (mostly) actually means something from a UI perspective, and it doesn't seem to drag down system performance as much. Plus there's no way to turn it all off :)

As for rip offs, and Apple's 14-18 month release cycle, given that each release of OS X runs faster on older hardware, rather than forcing an upgrade as WIndows updates always do, I don't think the two OSs are in the same league in terms of value.

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