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.)"

Comments

PC competition for the Mini-MAC?

[Anonymous Coward]

When MAC announced their "Mini", it caught my eye. Wanting to buy/build a small computer for my already cramped breakfast bar, I started pricing out similar hardware. The results startled me. Most of the configurations I found were more than the humble US$499 of the "Mini", often much more. To match price I had to configure with a much bigger shuttle-style case.

My question is this. What PCs are currently on the market to compete with this? When my wife asks for the "cute little MAC", what real computer can I buy instead?

Re:PC competition for the Mini-MAC?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

My Mac sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:My Mac sucks

[Jerry Smith]

>>8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM
Nice machines, http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/powermac/sta ts/powermac_8600_300.html but if there has been little or no maintainance in 7 years: yes, grinding halts happen.
I feel sorry for the machine. And for you, having to work with it. Poor bastards.

Re:Can Mac Mini run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are the one who is confused. That is one of the reasons why it is so cheap.

Re:iDVD question

[TheOnlyCoolTim]

So Apple says you should only be able to burn DVDs with their drive?

It really mystifies me why people think Apple is better on some moral level than Microsoft. At least I don't have to buy a Microsoft CD-R drive to use XP's built in CD burning...

Tim

Where's the PS/2 connector?

[amichalo]

No troll here. I am excited for the Mac mini, but it there some technical reason uncovered that helps explain the whole port fiasco?

The Mac mini is supposed to be either a "Switcher's Mac" or a Mac for IT pros who are going to hook it to a KVM, or lastly a home entertainment server. In any of those cases, the ports standard on the Mac mini (DVI/USB) are a bad choice.

Where are the VGA out and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports? I see that for $20 you can buy a DVI -> VGA adapter, but I don't see any PS/2 keyboard -> USB adapter. Why doesn't it just COME WITH these things in the box. Could such items cost more than a couple bucks per unit to include?

Switchers only have VGA and PS/2 devices. Only high end KVMs support DVI and USB. What the hell is going on in Mission Control?

Re:Imagine...

[pyite]

You do realize that none of the pre-built Xserves include a video card, right? I don't think people are buying them so they can have a GUI 'adduser.'

Get one free

[drewpc]

I saw this link on macslash.org (I think) and thought I'd pass it around. Apparently, you sign up for one offer (like a 30-day free trial of eFax) and get 10 friends to do the same, and they'll send you a free mini mac. If you're interested, use the following link to sign up:

http://www.freeminimacs.com/?r=14209873