Poll: What do you use your Mac mini for?

This poll really should have allowed multiple responses. Mine is hooked to a TV, but it's also my home server in addition to being a media server.

I have an EyeTV hooked up to a 17" PowerBook G4 in my kitchen. Mostly this is convenience, because that's where the other cable jack is at, and watching TV in the kitchen is nice while cooking, and HDTV looks pretty darn nice on a 17" Apple widescreen display. But it also does all my recording, and I don't necessarily want to watch my recordings in the kitchen. So...

Function #1): DVR. My Mini, hooked to my Samsung HDTV via HDMI, runs the EyeTV software. An rsync script running hourly via cron on the 17" G4 syncs over all my recordings to the mini.

Function #2): Media server and CD player replacement. All of mine, my wife and my child's iTunes are sync'ed to the iTunes library on an external 500 GB FireWire hard drive. I used to use scripts for this magic, but the Home Sharing features of iTunes 9 is GREAT for my situation. So we can listen to our music on our laptops, or from the Mini hooked to the HDTV and our home stereo. Other people may want more from iTunes Home Sharing, but it is a dream come true for me. Also, the three of us dump our digital photos into a shared folder on a 500 GB USB2 drive attached to the Mini. This is more of a manual process; I'm waiting for Apple to add something like Home Sharing to iPhoto to automate the consolidation of multiple iPhoto libraries.

Function #3): DVD player replacement. We will rip DVDs via Handbrake usually so that we can play from a hard drive, but occasionally will watch a DVD just by popping it in the drive. In any case, we have no need for a standalone DVD player anymore.

Function #4): Development server. My Mini runs MAMP, with local copies of my various web, PHP and MySQL projects. Combine this with Panic's Coda on my laptop, and local development that can be uploaded to the production server has never been easier.

Function #5): Home web server. Kind of goes along with #4 above, but I have several PHP/MySQL-driven personal web apps running on the Mini. The family calendar, the to-do-list, even the shopping list are all small web apps that I've written and run on the Mini.

Function #6): File server and backups. When we want to share files in the house, we've all got our shared folder on the Mini. For very important files, they also get copied here. Not an ideal backup scenario, since the backups are not off-site, and they are on hard drives--which can fail just as easily as the laptops' hard drives--but it's worked out great for our backup needs. I'm looking into getting a 1 TB external drive so that we can have a true TimeMachine server.

And that's just the main things. I find all kinds of uses for our Mini, like burning CDs and DVDs when needed. It's a late 2007 model, with a 2 GHz Core 2 and 120 GB internal HD. It may be the best $799 I've ever spent on a Mac.

My mini is hooked to my TV. With it, I:
- play DVDs and other video files
- show off my photos
- listen to my tunes
- run CentOS in a VMware VM (my mini is my mail server)
- run other VMs (NeXTSTEP 3.3, OPENSTEP 4.2, Windows XP, and more)
- watch Hulu

I use Remote Buddy and have my Logitech Harmony Remote programmed as an Apple remote. It's very cool.

I use mine at work as my QA and validation machine to test our web sites on a mac platform.

We have a 4 Mac-Mini After Effects render farm... works great

Your choices should have been set up as "select all that apply". I'm on my second mini (primary computer), so the first one is connected to the TV and stereo, along with a big external drive for music and video files. That one also is the "guest" computer so visitors have one to use. The Logitech DiNovo wireless keyboard with the built-in trackpad is perfect for that use.

I use my Mac Mini with an audio mixer and a projector to use it as a media center for ambiance music and occasionnal presentation.

I broke your poll: I don't own a Mini but I voted just to be able to see the results. Lots of people do this unless you give them some option to see the results without affecting the results. Why don't you do so?

Tuaw, why don't you include a way for us to see the results of a vote without actually voting? Or at least include an voting option that would apply to everyone. I just voted for the "mini connected to tv" option to see the results even thought I don't own a mini. Granted, if I had a mini that would be what I'd do with it, but my situation didn't actually fit into any of the answers and certainly skews the results. Easy fix: put a button that says "Show results without voting".

Anyone else relate with me?

I take my Mac Mini with me everywhere I go ... it's my carputer!

http://www.wiifatmarathon.com/2009/07/mobile-race-command-center.html

I use my Mini for two things:
1) to run some Classic software under Tiger (Fontographer, old games)
2) to power my Mac SE X (a Macintosh SE case upgraded to run OS X, with a B&W CRT and a Mini inside it).