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Mac mini Review At Macworld
lemonylimey writes "Macworld has the first hands-on review of the new Mac mini along with nicely illustrated step-by-step dissection.
It looks like the mini comes apart easily and (unsuprisingly) uses standard notebook components: a Panasonic DVD-R drive on 'SuperDrive' equipped models, Seagate Momentus 2.5" notebook ATA-100 hard drive and a single, nicely accessible 184 pin DDR DIMM socket. Upgrade options aside, it might not have the clock-for-clock power of the equivalent $499 PC, but you have to ask yourself - If you put them both on a shelf and ask your Mom* to pick one, which one is it going to be? (Yes, I'm sure your Mom is a Doctor of Mathematics and wouldn't buy anything she couldn't run Debian on. You know what I meant.)"
And here's a bunch of performance benchmarks pitting the Mac mini against a range of other current Macs--not just abstract numbers but real-world tasks (think "17 Meg file"). I wonder how PCs stack up, particularly with Cinebench and the iTunes rip test...
Had a nice conversation with the project lead for the mac mini this morning at the apple store in the Westfield mall. He said first day sales blew away any computer apple's ever made, by a sizable margin, although the shuffle blew the mini away for first day sales of any apple product ever. He said he was asked, can you make it this small? (10" square)... yes. Can you make it this small? (8" square)... yes. Can you make it this small? (7" square)... maybe. Can you make it this small? (6 1/2" square)... no. Okay, that's the size then.... oh crap! :)
Actually, Apple says not to do that.
I suspect it's mostly a wireless issue, and if you're building a mini-cluster, you'd probably rather use Ethernet to connect them anyway, and you probably won't be using Bluetooth. Either way, at least the top machine would have antenna access, so if you absolutely needed BT/802.11 you could have one of them do wireless and relay to the rest over Ethernet.
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
I agree. Currently, my main system is a P2 / 266mhz. I spend all my time programming games and stuff, works fine for me. Sure, I could go on one of the family PCs, which are P4's, but this one is in my room and runs fast enough. (Then again, half the stuff I do I have to move to another PC to test it, because either my CPU is too slow or GPU doesnt support some feature) I ordered a mac mini, can't wait (3 weeks till it ships, so says apple) xcode will be awsome.
I hope you got a laugh out of the other reply to your post, which was an ancient troll. He didn't even update the model numbers and mhz ratings he used, how sloppy was that?
But understand that there are two types of customer. One type, and I fear the most common, looks at the details of a product and tries to compare it to others using a laundry list of features. For instance, a computer with an 80gb hard drive is better than one with 40. One with 512mb is better than one with 256mb. This completely ignores whether the products are well designed and assembled, whether they run MacOS X or Windows, and so on. This type of buyer drives the market because he/she/it is most common. It's much easier to describe something in numbers than in depth.
People who appreciate Apple products tend to look more at the whole product than the specifications, and they realize that while Apple isn't the cheapest company in the world, it makes fabulous things because it sets out from the start to do just that.
The two types of customer really don't understand each other very well, and I think that's why there is so much passion between pro and anti-Apple factions. One point of view simply cannot understand the other.
One thing that does intrigue me is that obvious valid anti-Apple arguments are rarely seen. For instance, you have to re-purchase much of your software if you want to use an Apple computer to its full potential. If you have Office, you need Apple Office. If you have Adobe products, you need to upgrade them. And so on.
The best anti-Apple argument is that many people fear change and going to something different. I've known people like that and they are perhaps the hardest type of person to deal with. This is largely disregarded on Slashdot simply because most Slashdot people are happy to learn about new operating systems and user interfaces, but it is a genuine problem.
So yes, there are lots of trolls and they change but little over the years. Perhaps they are simply envious of the cohesiveness of the Apple community and its obvious love of the products. That's something very unusual in this day and age, and we should celebrate it. Don't kowtow to the God Steve, but don't ignore his virtues either.
D