I am also preparing to develop some Mac based kiosks...but for a retail market. I have not ordered one yet but plan on ordering one for testing purposes from here-
They even offer an extended 3 year warranty on their product. If I may ask, what app are you considering for your kiosk? I finally found one of the few (if any) mac based kiosk apps from here-
I'm currently developing a touchscreen application to control television broadcast equipment using a Mac Mini (OS v10.5.2) and an Elotouch screen.
Both units fresh from China or wherever they're built.
The USB touch driver (v04.00.02) works fine when first installed.
But when the OSX Software Update is run, the touch driver fails.
I don't know why... might have something to do with those Elo clowns putting their stuff in a folder at the root of the hard drive. Who knows.
"Removing this device" (the red arrow in the elotouch UPPD Console App) and "adding" the device back made it work again. It required a reboot and running the Elo recalibration utility.
and now my 2 cents worth:
Mac Minis are great for custom applications that are typically put on embedded boards. The low cost per unit, ease of development and relatively tiny form factor make them the perfect "stick up" device that you can wedge just about anywhere.
The location I'm installing this particular solution specifies Mac or Linux OS. Due to security concerns, Windows boxes aren't allowed unless there is no other option available for a particular application.
I'm building 2 identical units for a 24-7 system. So if/when the first one smokes itself in 1-to-5 years, the 2nd one gets swapped in. Using an external net share to hold a few K of data, the control system comes back on line in a few short minutes.
Dirt cheap redundancy (compared to the other NASA-like gigabuck systems in place here.)
Mac Minis rock. As long as they keep making them, they will continue to be my first choice for "embedded" systems (that require fancy interfaces.)
I read something at another forum where some secret govt agency is thinking about using battery powered Minis in conjunction with the control aircraft engines; 1 for each engine in the plane(s). No touch screens here, but the poster was some sort of engineering type seeking data on vibration and thermal factors.
