New Mini!

I bought a PowerMac 9500 way back in 1995 (my first new computer purchase) and have since upgraded it a few times with more memory, larger hard drives and a 400mhz G3 processor. Since it can't run OSX, it was of limited use at my office and I was tired of spending additional money on something that couldn't run much of the software I relied upon.

At first, my plan was to buy an older G3 or G4 desktop and spend a few hundred dollars upgrading it with a faster processor, etc. I figured for $500 or so, I could get a machine that would run OSX fine and upgrade it enough that it would feel like a nice improvement going from my 667mhz G4 PowerBook. I browsed eBay for such machines but didn't got any further.

Much to my surprise, Apple introduced the Mac mini early this year and answered my need for speed and compatibility. For $499 plus extras, I'd get that faster computer, retire my 9500 (use to be determined) and live happily ever after. Although I would have liked to wait until a second generation came around, I bit the bullet and bought the higher end model and a few nice extras (1GB of memory, Apple keyboard and case for old 80GB hard drive). The clincher was the free Epson printer that Apple included. Although it was a bare bones model, the printer replaced an older Epson that had seen better days and required much patience to get good prints from.

In a matter of days (five counting the weekend) I had the new Mac and printer delivered to my doorstep. I took a large LCD monitor home for the night to use with it, and proceeded to unpack it and install software. I already have an external DVD burner so the mini came with just a CD-RW and DVD reader. I also finally decided I didn't really need the Airport wireless capability since it was a desktop computer and would be near a network port of some kind. I'd heard a few bad things about the brightness of VGA CRT's hooked up to the mini, so when I brought it to my office, I was anxious to see how it would perform. While not as bright at my laptop LCD or a CRT connected to my laptop, the brightness on the mini's CRT is acceptable. I'd prefer it to be another 10-15% brighter, but it isn't a big problem. The LCD (using a VGA adapter) connected to the mini produced a very acceptable image.

After a week or so of use at my office, I've now got it hooked up to the printer, my burner and a couple external drives. I ran Xbench on it to test its speed and quickly realized that the external Firewire 80GB drive was about three times faster than the mini's internal drive. I'd heard the mini's drive was slower in speed, but wasn't sure how it would compare to an external Firewire drive. Just today I decided to install OSX on a partition on the external drive and run the mini of it. I've not run any real stressful routines with it so far, but I'd expect some disk-heavy operations to increase in speed now. One of my considerations when choosing the higher end mini was the Xbench results I saw online for that model. It came in as quick or quicker than dual 1Gz G4 Macs in several processor tasks and the hard drive was the main limiting factor in poorer scores.

So, the mini is working out just fine. It's very quiet as advertised and should help me relieve some of the stress on my PowerBook. I'm looking forward to seeing how it runs some of the 3D, video and audio software that pushed my laptop to it limits.

I expect Apple is going to sell alot of these small but powerful machines. I just hope they don't improve it too quick that I regret snatching one up so soon!