Sorry, that makes no sense. For around $1200 you can buy an 1RU supermicro with 6-core i7, 32G Ram etc. that will smoke your mini ($1500, 4 cores) on every metric. If your rackspace is precious you could fit two of them into one RU with a half-sized case or by leaving out the case altogether (not much more esoteric than stacking mac mini's imho).

I love the mini (I have one under my desk!) but suggesting apple consumer gear (including the apple tax) would be a cheaper alternative to generic x86 consumer-gear is a little nuts.

Where did you get that price? I just did a server build out and couldn't put together a good 1U i7 for that much.

Well, "good" is a relative term when you use a non-ECC board for a server. ;)

I just summed up the component prices for similar servers that we have built - that's the ballpark if you are willing to assemble it yourself (takes around 45mins when you're not doing it the first time).

For a pre-assembled box google found me this (first hit): http://www.nixsys.com/products/intel-rackmount-servers/intel...

That comes out at $1735 for a 6-core, 12G Ram, 128G SSD or $1385 if you use the 4-core equivalent to the mini.

Rather expensive but in the ballpark and already cheaper than the mini (if you buy RAM and disks separately you can probably shave another $300 off).

I can get a MicroCloud chassis for $500 per server (x8), with the rest of the hardware working out to around another $700-800 per node (x8 again). Slightly lower density, but not too bad.