Got my Mac mini / quick first impression

[spihunter]

My mini finally arrived yesterday. The box/packaging is very stylish and small. The mini is almost to small! I have my external firewire drive sitting on top of it and its actually hanging a few inches off the back!

I got the $499  1.2 ghz G4 w/ 256mb model.

The first thing I noticed when I booted it up was how sluggish OSX was on the lowly 256MB of ram. Its not to bad but its a little slower than I'm used to. I've got a 512 ram stick I'm going to put in when I get a chance.

Ilife '05 is almost worth the price of the machine itself. Garageband is one of the most straight foward music editing/recording programs I've used in quite awhile. It actually comes with some really nice samples. I had 8 tracks of samples going with no skips or problems.

I havent had any problems with the speed of the laptop hard drive yet. I hooked up my video camera and captured some footage with Imovie and it didnt drop a single frame.

Overall I'm having a good time with it. For now I'm going to use it as my main internet / audio editing computer.

Paul

[Matt_H]

It does look like a fun machine. I'd throw Linux and MOL on mine if I had one. Unfortunately, I have no need whatsoever for any more computers, and should such an opening appear, it's reserved for a MicroA1, or maybe a Peg. ;-)

One of my roommates has the high-end model on order. He's a big-time Mac user and is really looking forward to it. Apparently, the backorder queue is so long that it won't reach him until March.

[spihunter]

@Matt_H

Yea, I ordered mine from the Apple store the day they came out and I just got it yesterday.

I was going to dual boot linux on it but I read that the onboard sound is not working on linux yet :-( .

[Waccoon]

Anyone know how speed compares between the Mac Mini and last year's "Sno-Globe" iMac?  I did have a chance to use OSX on an iMac.

[Floid]

The 'trick' to the boot time is to reboot as little as possible, and use the power saving features offered; once it loads, it'll swap out most of the things you're never going to use in daily life, at which point it's almost like having a computer.

Said features usually work right under 10 -- you'd kind of hope they would, what with the very small array of hardware involved -- but you'll occasionally hear a horror story.  (Of course, that mystery problem with the Maxtor drives, which may or may not actually exist or be solved by now, apparently didn't rely on power saving actually being *enabled,* so..)  Also realize that, while 'stable' and 'BSD-based' and so on, important parts of the system are proprietary code, and the rest hasn't been shaken down quite as far as the more popular projects, so your risk of panic does possibly increase as uptime accrues.

(This is far more likely to be a problem with weird hardware and flaky video drivers, but rebooting before you embark on any horribly important deadline-pressed work might not be a bad habit to make.  Just in case.)

[1337DOG]

Waccoon wrote:

>Anyone know how speed compares between the Mac Mini and last year's >"Sno-Globe" iMac? I did have a chance to use OSX on an iMac.


The OS X's snappiness is more affected by RAM than the processor speed. Even a G5 with too little ram will slow because of heavy paging to the HD. One needs about 512 to quite paging or even more if doing heavy multitasking.

To answer your question performance of the GUI will be very similar to the iMac if the amount of RAM is same and all other things are in order.

[Dan]

Cool mac mini mods 8-)
In regular pc-case
http://www.appletalk.com.au/articles/miniserver/

In Mac SE
http://www.byodkm.net/gallery/showphoto.php/photo/29

[Wilse]

Garageband does look like a very nice little programme.
I'm thinking of getting a Mac myself for audio work,

[MarkTime]

I sold my powermac G5 and bought a mac mini instead.

Of course the mac mini is a less powerful computer, but I wanted to do it, the mac mini is just a fun computer.

I bought the 1.42ghz model (hey, I don't want to truncate off my last .02gh either!)...and I upgraded the RAM to 512mb and upgraded the hard drive to a 7200rpm 60gb toshiba.

My impression is, it is noticeably slower than the G5 it replaced...by that I mean, launching times here and there are a bit less snappy.

However, I'm not disappointed in the machine, not at all.  For once I get a new computer and essentially get paid about $500 to buy it (the difference between selling the used G5 and buying the new mac mini)!

for the guy that wants a comparision to an imac, see www.barefeats.com , they've compared it to all kinds of mac models.

I agree with what others have said...the less than stellar hard drive, doesn't really take away from the enjoyment of the machine.

I would not recommend my 7200rpm toshiba...the fact is, the internal drive interface just isn't going to keep up, and you won't notice the speed up (maybe I do have a 30% speedup, but I added $150 to the price of the machine).

OK, if you want the best hdd for the mini, get a really fast, really big external firewire...as you can see from the barefeats article, the fastest hdd speeds can be obtained via the firewire interface, not via the onboard IDE.

What's great about the mac mini, is it really does parallel an A1200...not just in the use of a laptop hard drive, but already the 'hardware hack' community is out in force, with overclock instructions, replacing hard drives, attaching desktop 3.5" drives, putting it in a new case...and more are being added each day.

[spihunter]

@Mark Time,

The A1200 hacking thing is going to be in full effect with this machine. :-D

I cracked my mini open today with a putty knife and upgraded the ram to 512MB w/ a stick I pulled from one of my PC's.

I've been doing some recording with Garage band. The built in "amplifier" settings are really cool.

I also installed X11 today so I could use the latest version of Open Office and try out some PPC unix apps.

I've never been a big Mac person but this little machine is fun.

[JKD]

Check out some benchmarks:

Mac Benchmarks

Steve