I have an interesting little setup at home - the whole network, not just the computer.
All of the equipment is older, at least five years, with the possible exception of my wife's notebook and her father's.
Cable modem service from Time Warner with an Apple Airport Extreme 802.11a/b/g/n router. The USB port on it sends data to a Canon multifunction, just decent, nothing special, but it gets the job done. I can print from any computer, but still have to be physically connected via USB for scanning.
There's three notebooks. The oldest is mine, the first and only Apple MacBook "non-Pro" to have the 13" scren with the aluminum unibody shell and I maxed out the RAM at 8 Gb. After my model year, it was shifted into the MacBook Pro line, leaving just the polycarbonate models as MacBooks, and now they stopped making MacBooks altogether with the drop in price of an entry-level MacBook Air. The others are polycarb MacBooks from maybe three or four years ago. Oh, and my parents-in-law use my WiFi for a IPTV setup in their living room so they can watch Russian TV channels.
The heart of the operation is in the bedroom.
I have a cheap Mac mini connected to a 40-inch HDTV. The TV is, naturally, the monitor, though I had to do some adapter jury-rigging - mine came out just before they started putting native HDMI output on the minis. The mini has an optical drive and a small HD, only 160 gigabytes, and I have no idea how much RAM since it's never been an issue (probably one or two Gb) - but it has a series of four external drives connected to it. First, is a self-powered pocket HD using two USB sockets and storing 320 Gb - this is the Time Machine drive for the mini. Second is a 500 Gb drive running Time Machine backups for my 250 Gb drive in the notebook. Third and fourth is a pair of one-terabyte drives running as a one-terabyte RAID, simultaneously saving data to both drives as if they were the same drive - this isn't quite the same as protection using a backup, since a bad file saved to one drive will be the same bad file saved to the other, but it does provide excellent protection against a hardware failure - if one drive stops functioning for any given reason, the other continues without a pause.
"What's stored on that hard drive array?," you're wondering? I set up the mini to function as a media server - I store movies and music on that drive for playback on the TV, as well as using it for Netflix streaming. For BluRay playback, I have a PlayStation 3 - it came out before the slim models but after the discontinuation of support for PS2 games, though I do have a Bluetooth remote for video playback - readable, sensible buttons instead of game controllers. I also have the mini and my notebook set up for full file sharing and screen sharing, so I can remotely operate one from the other. The pièce de résistance would be the Time Warner Cable TV website, so I can watch TV and use the computer at the same time without fussing with PIP controls. But I never do that, since the notebook works just fine.
I also have a compact Sony 5.1-channel surround-sound home-theater-in-a-box, but I put it into storage when I moved in with my wife. The system was a little too overpowered for the small apartment and there wasn't any room for real channel separation with everything being so close together. So until we get a larger space, that sits in storage. The Mac mini, however, is capable of surround sound playback via a minijack-sized digital audio output socket.
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