Mac Mini - First Impressions

Maoltuile

Caved in and bought one in the O2 Experience Store on Grafton Street Friday afternoon for the family back home.

So:

- It's d*mned small, d*mned light, d*mned quiet and runs with a cool exhaust

- I love the smell of new Mac in the morning...

- function to transfer from old Mac too cool for words. Having to do the install of iLife '05 was a minor chore - iMovie HD wouldn't work until I installed the "registration" extras from the custom install menu, which was strange.

- with the stock 256MB, I found frequent stuttering in Finder, Dock and other apps. I cracked open the case and put in 512MB I bought in IT Direct for E99, which got everything running *very* smoothly now, thank you very much.

I had a purpose-bought mini-opener (a 'chisel' type paint scraper thingy bought on Capel Street), which I used to unlatch the internal hooks, starting from the back. The RAM came out easily enough (anyone looking for 256MB?) Putting it back on without breaking anything was a bit more tricky, and required a couple of tries.

blobert

Can you get one of these with 512mb Ram as standard or do you have to put it in yourself?

Maoltuile

blobert wrote:

Can you get one of these with 512mb Ram as standard or do you have to put it in yourself?

Online ordering on Apple.com (get the Educational discount if you can) nets you 512MB for about E75, or 1GB for I think about E300.

Both the O2 Experience Store and TheMacShop are buying the 'official' opening kits and training staff in installing RAM (O2 charge E190 for 512MB in their stores at the moment, but they *do* sell the mini for E10 less than list price - E499)

Gyck

I read a pretty good article on the 512 Meg sweet spot for the Mac Mini. How do you plan to use yours?

Maoltuile

Gyck wrote:

I read a pretty good article on the 512 Meg sweet spot for the Mac Mini. How do you plan to use yours?

It's for the family, to replace the old PC they have - for Word, email, Internet, iTunes, Region DVD-playing. It'll probably go in the sitting-room, under the wide-sceen TV ;-)

parsi

Mine arrived today - very impressed by the size ! Very quiet as well. Whole new world so expect loads of dummy mac questions.

Never realised that you can't just maximise windows - its a design feature apparently..

Hugh_C

Maoltuile wrote:

Caved in and bought one in the O2 Experience Store on Grafton Street Friday afternoon for the family back home.

So:

- It's d*mned small, d*mned light, d*mned quiet and runs with a cool exhaust

Did it come with the 5400 or (stock) 4200 rpm drive? which processor? bluetooth? airport? range?

Thanks,

Hugh (sorely tempted)

Maoltuile

hughchal wrote:

Did it come with the 5400 or (stock) 4200 rpm drive? which processor? bluetooth? airport? range?

It's the stock 1.25GHz/40GB model, so though it doesn't say on the hard drive I presume it's 4,200rpm as per the detective work elsewhere on the Web. I'll see how much has been put it (and what it's being used for) during the Summer and decide then if I'll put in my spare Hitachi 60GB 7,200rpm (or maybe one of those 100GB (5,400rpm) Seagate Momentus drives that people are raving about).

No Airport or Bluetooth installed - unless you order from Apple you'll have to wait for the mezzanine board kits to arrive in stock in one of the Apple dealers/repair centres in town (though 02 do say that they'll be getting BT models in soon). I have the ATi Remote Wonder control which I'll give the folks to go with it, and they've no real need of Internet so far, so no WiFi.

I've had it in work, btw - all these Windows users are *very* impressed ;-)

Maoltuile

parsi wrote:

Mine arrived today - very impressed by the size ! Very quiet as well. Whole new world so expect loads of dummy mac questions.

Never realised that you can't just maximise windows - its a design feature apparently..

(It's the green button in the window's top left corner ;-)

parsi

Maoltuile wrote:

(It's the green button in the window's top left corner ;-)[/QUOTE

ah yes.. that only seemed to enlarge them rather than full screen them (dragged them to full screen in the end). This link seems to say its a "feature" - http://www.xvsxp.com/desktop_windows/

I love the expose features - very impressive !

Maoltuile

parsi wrote:

Maoltuile wrote:

(It's the green button in the window's top left corner ;-)[/QUOTE

ah yes.. that only seemed to enlarge them rather than full screen them (dragged them to full screen in the end). This link seems to say its a "feature" - http://www.xvsxp.com/desktop_windows/

Opera and a couple of other apps (like the Apple Pro ones, IIRC) full-screen, whereas most 'remember' the dragged-size in the green button.

love the expose features - very impressive !

Yes - that, the Dock and Fast User Switching make people go "wow" ;-)

Some more suggested extras - I recently bought an Iomega USB floppy disk drive/flash card reader all-in-one in town for about E45, which is great. Also, there're some USB Bluetooth dongles around, which cost about E30.

(There's sure to be a lot of audio and video gizmos along in the near future to go with this, from Apple (Google for 'Asteroid'), Griffin etc.)

parsi

The floppy sounds like something to keep in mind. I bought a dongle off shabbyroad during his clearout and it works excellently - cheaper than having it builtin.

Curious to see what audio stuff comes out though I can certainly imagine Griffin going into overdrive ...

Gyck

It's for the family, to replace the old PC they have

I'm so envious. If it weren't for the fact that I've a sprog on the way and need all the money I can save I'd have to get one right now! I think they're an (almost) most perfect blend of functional and visual design for a living space. They're not yet perfect, but I haven't yet seen a media center that looks as good. A little more development by Apple and they would clean up: better integration of TV and a better base spec.

RicardoSmith

I think the first thing you'll need is a USB hub. Theres not enough ports on them.

eirlink

Just got my mini set up..collected it today from courier depot.Its got 1.25 gig processor/512 memory/80gig hd/superdrive/apple keyboard and apple mouse.

Brilliant little (and i stress Little) machine for the money.Had a spare Lcd monitor I picked up at xmas from Lidl so I now have a very nice system for reasonable money.

Its worth it alone for the freedom from Spyware/adware/viruses etc.
The op system is very intuitive and is easy to use.I opened up every application and left all running to see if it would crash.....NO !!....it did seem to pause a little when switching apps but no crash.

As for usb ports,the keyboard has two on the back which are free,as well as two on the mini which accommodate the mouse/keyboard.you will need a hub for any more.

Overall very happy

Eirlink

RicardoSmith

Ah you ordered a keyboard and mouse as extra's. Nice keyboard, but I wouldn't be mad about the mouse. The Logitech MX1000 works better with OSX so I hear.

Maoltuile

RicardoSmith wrote:

I think the first thing you'll need is a USB hub. Theres not enough ports on them.

There's a (silver) Belkin 7-port USB2.0 hub up on the Applestore for €50 which looks good...

WUSBDesign

THere has been user reports of the Mac mini not being able to drive the analogue VGA port sufficiently - white appears as grey. Anyone experiencing this grief?

Oh, and by the way, you can get 1Gig of RAM for the Mac mini for just over USD170 or EUR130. Check out http://eshop.macsales.com .

RicardoSmith

WUSBDesign wrote:

THere has been user reports of the Mac mini not being able to drive the analogue VGA port sufficiently - white appears as grey. Anyone experiencing this grief?

Oh, and by the way, you can get 1Gig of RAM for the Mac mini for just over USD170 or EUR130. Check out http://eshop.macsales.com .

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21629

parsi

WUSBDesign wrote:

THere has been user reports of the Mac mini not being able to drive the analogue VGA port sufficiently - white appears as grey. Anyone experiencing this grief?

Oh, and by the way, you can get 1Gig of RAM for the Mac mini for just over USD170 or EUR130. Check out http://eshop.macsales.com .

Yes.. I suffered from it.. later reports suggest its the adapter at fault but I used the excuse to upgrade to a 17" DVI TFT..

The Real B-man

windows user for many years the mac mini is very affordable and makes me want to try something new may well get one of these little babys to compliment the ipod & airport