Apple Mac mini (M9686LL/A) Desktop
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- Operating System: Apple MacOS X
- HDD Size: 40 GB
- Installed Memory: 256 MB (DDR SDRAM)
- Processor: PowerPC G4 1.25 GHz
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Yawn
Pros
Cute Design
Cons
Slow and Expensive
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
Buy something else.
I hadn't had an Apple computer for 18 years so, after months of procrastination I went down to Compusa and bought a Mac Mini. I paid $499 plus $39.95 for a wireless USB mouse and $29.95 for a Kensington USB keyboard. With tax it all cost $618.68.
Setup was easy. It comes with a nicely designed monitor adapter. There is one firewire port, two USB ports, a base 10/100 Ethernet connector and a Headphone/Audio Line Out jack. Everything plugged in quickly to my PC based equipment. Apples software gets you up and running in a couple of minutes.
The Mac OS X operating system is Unix based, quite similar to any of the common Linux packages using a KDE interface. I have SUSE 9.1 running on another computer and except for the Apple logo on my screensaver and the finder, the look and feel basically is the same. The advantage of a Unix system is it can read and write to Windows formatted disks. Windows cannot read or write Mac formatted disks. The disadvantage of Unix systems is they are noticeably slower.
The Mini's 5400-rpm 40gb hard drive is slow and small. Apples 80g upgrade is a 4200-rpm drive that is even slower. Instead of that option, I bought a combination USB/Firewire mobile case from Compusa for $59.75 including tax. I took an old WD 7200 RPM 80g drive and installed it inside and ported over 35g's of my files from my PC. The Firewire port works very well.
Then I purchased a 1G DIMM for $100.00 and, following instructions available on the web, I opened the Mini's case, removed the old memory and replaced it with the 1G DIMM. The entire operation was relatively easy and took less than 10 minutes. The addition of the extra memory noticeably increased the Mini's performance by decreasing the use of the swap file. It also brought my total cost to $778.43.
Comparing it to my $499 HP Pavilion a730n and eMachines T3256, the Mini's sound is worse than the HP and eMachines, but not bad. It's 32 meg graphics displays perfectly on my NEC Multisync 97F monitor. The display is a bit dimmer then the either the HP or eMachines but that was easily corrected by adjusting the brightness control on the monitor.
I owned a Sharp A-1540cs copier that doubled as a printer and more importantly a scanner that automatically fed and scanned up to 100 pages at a time. It sent the data to Omnipage that performed Optical Character Recognition, opened up each page for editing and saved the document in Microsoft Word format. There were no Mac drivers for the Sharp and since the copier needed a new drum and toner cartridge, I replaced it with a Brother MFC-7420 5 in 1 machine that, in addition to the Omnipage Windows software, also came with Mac drivers and Presto Page Manager.
Eventually after using the Mac Mini for a few common applications, I finally found a great use for this beautifully engineered object d'art. I use it 24 hours per day to run SETI, a largely RAM based application. It sits there and crunches their work units and looks for intelligent radio signals from other galaxies. The Mac Mini is connected through a 4-port KVM switch so it can share the same keyboard and mouse as my $499 HP 3.0HT Intel based machine and 3.2g AMD based eMachines T3256. Here are the side-by-side results of the three machines expressed in "total SETI credit:"
HP Intel 3.0g: 6327.8
Emachines 3.2: 4370.7
Mac Mini: 2182.2
This means that while the 1.25 Mini has a processor that runs at 41.66% of the speed of my Intel 3.0HT based machine, it only processes SETI work units at 34.48% of the speed of the Intel machine. It's no speed demon but at least I am using it for something useful.
Is it worth it? That answer in a nutshell is probably no, unless your purchasing decision includes a reason where greatly reduced performance is not important. While it is fun and a bit easier to use than Linux, OS X locked up on me twice forcing me to do a hardware reboot. One of it's most detestable features is the software eject button for the CD/DVD drive. When it doesn't work properly it sometimes takes 15 to 30 seconds to eject the disk compared to about three seconds on a PC. But all in all, the Mac Mini reminds me of my 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Its technology is old and slow but beautifully engineered, very reliable and kind of fun to operate, but of little practical use in the year 2005. Save your money.
Setup was easy. It comes with a nicely designed monitor adapter. There is one firewire port, two USB ports, a base 10/100 Ethernet connector and a Headphone/Audio Line Out jack. Everything plugged in quickly to my PC based equipment. Apples software gets you up and running in a couple of minutes.
The Mac OS X operating system is Unix based, quite similar to any of the common Linux packages using a KDE interface. I have SUSE 9.1 running on another computer and except for the Apple logo on my screensaver and the finder, the look and feel basically is the same. The advantage of a Unix system is it can read and write to Windows formatted disks. Windows cannot read or write Mac formatted disks. The disadvantage of Unix systems is they are noticeably slower.
The Mini's 5400-rpm 40gb hard drive is slow and small. Apples 80g upgrade is a 4200-rpm drive that is even slower. Instead of that option, I bought a combination USB/Firewire mobile case from Compusa for $59.75 including tax. I took an old WD 7200 RPM 80g drive and installed it inside and ported over 35g's of my files from my PC. The Firewire port works very well.
Then I purchased a 1G DIMM for $100.00 and, following instructions available on the web, I opened the Mini's case, removed the old memory and replaced it with the 1G DIMM. The entire operation was relatively easy and took less than 10 minutes. The addition of the extra memory noticeably increased the Mini's performance by decreasing the use of the swap file. It also brought my total cost to $778.43.
Comparing it to my $499 HP Pavilion a730n and eMachines T3256, the Mini's sound is worse than the HP and eMachines, but not bad. It's 32 meg graphics displays perfectly on my NEC Multisync 97F monitor. The display is a bit dimmer then the either the HP or eMachines but that was easily corrected by adjusting the brightness control on the monitor.
I owned a Sharp A-1540cs copier that doubled as a printer and more importantly a scanner that automatically fed and scanned up to 100 pages at a time. It sent the data to Omnipage that performed Optical Character Recognition, opened up each page for editing and saved the document in Microsoft Word format. There were no Mac drivers for the Sharp and since the copier needed a new drum and toner cartridge, I replaced it with a Brother MFC-7420 5 in 1 machine that, in addition to the Omnipage Windows software, also came with Mac drivers and Presto Page Manager.
Eventually after using the Mac Mini for a few common applications, I finally found a great use for this beautifully engineered object d'art. I use it 24 hours per day to run SETI, a largely RAM based application. It sits there and crunches their work units and looks for intelligent radio signals from other galaxies. The Mac Mini is connected through a 4-port KVM switch so it can share the same keyboard and mouse as my $499 HP 3.0HT Intel based machine and 3.2g AMD based eMachines T3256. Here are the side-by-side results of the three machines expressed in "total SETI credit:"
HP Intel 3.0g: 6327.8
Emachines 3.2: 4370.7
Mac Mini: 2182.2
This means that while the 1.25 Mini has a processor that runs at 41.66% of the speed of my Intel 3.0HT based machine, it only processes SETI work units at 34.48% of the speed of the Intel machine. It's no speed demon but at least I am using it for something useful.
Is it worth it? That answer in a nutshell is probably no, unless your purchasing decision includes a reason where greatly reduced performance is not important. While it is fun and a bit easier to use than Linux, OS X locked up on me twice forcing me to do a hardware reboot. One of it's most detestable features is the software eject button for the CD/DVD drive. When it doesn't work properly it sometimes takes 15 to 30 seconds to eject the disk compared to about three seconds on a PC. But all in all, the Mac Mini reminds me of my 1963 Volkswagen Beetle. Its technology is old and slow but beautifully engineered, very reliable and kind of fun to operate, but of little practical use in the year 2005. Save your money.
