Mac mini

I finally cracked and bought something I’ve been secretly coveting since it was introduced: a Mac mini. So far I’m very pleased with it, and whilst it is not perfect, it is a massive improvement on the big old Windows box that it has replaced in the front room.

Good points:

• Small. My wife said “Is that it?” and as a gentleman should alway refrains from making crude jokes in female company, I didn’t reply.
• Quiet. Completely unscientific tests show that it’s utterly inaudible from more than about a foot away, whereas its predecessor, upon which I lavished many expensive noise-reduction gizmos, was always reminding us of its presence with constant gronks and twitters.
• Pretty. Gosh, it’s shiny. Why are all computers other than Apple’s so unlovely? They can’t have all the good designers; I really don’t understand, but there it is.
• Adequately powerful. Running one’s 3D animation company on a fleet of Mac minis is probably not going to put you at an advantage against the competition. But if you’re just doing what most people do, bar gaming, you’ll be laughing.
• OS X: the awesome power of UNIX, without the awesome ugliness of UNIX GUIs. VNC is built right into the OS. SSH is built right into the OS. Apache is built right into the OS. Perl is… you get the picture. And there’s all those other nice little applications that do boring, normal-user things like email and word processing, all thrown in for free.
• Front Row is stupidly simple. It’s just like a big iPod interface, very nice and easy to use.

Bad points:

• Front Row is stupidly simple. Actually it’s a bit over simple, and I’m probably going to end up annoyed with its limitations.
• The DVD drive is not region free, or hackable to be region free. I hardly have any foreign DVDs, it’s just the principle of the thing. It’s like the copyright notices they make us sit through, and DRM, and all the other garbage foisted on us by idiots in suits who think that value can only be measured in dollars paid to them.
• The 80GB disk is not really big enough, but that’s my fault for not ordering a bigger drive.
• The single DVI video-out means you have to shell out for a VGA splitter if you want to run a monitor and a projector at the same time, like I do.
• It looks a bit sad with my ugly old bits of PC hardware. But that’s easily fixed by buying a ton of shiny new kit. Actually, from that perspective this is a good point: more gadgetry!

1 comment 2007-02-15 14:05 Categories: Computers, Consumerism, Geek Stuff, Reviews