Mac

The hunt for a Mac Mini

When Steve Jobs announced the Mac Mini at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco on January, 11th 2005, it caused quite a stir. People all around were excited about this new toy, the "cheapest Mac ever". And after having sold my Apple iBook a couple of months ago in favour of a Thinkpad T41p, I too decided to get a Mac Mini, not to be shut out completely from the Macintosh platform.

Unfortunately, getting a Mac Mini was not as easy as one would expect. The Apple Online Store scared off potential buyers with a "3 - 4 week delivery". Other stores carried similar warnings. I was hoping to get one somewhere by mid February and did not order at that time at all.

But as it turned out, Apple obviously could not deliver. The shipping time frame of "3 - 4 weeks" on Apple's website remained the same throughout January and February, and other online stores (that had availability dates on their web pages at all) kept shifting them to the future again and again. Most didn't even bother to tell their customers that they in fact didn't have a single Mac Mini to ship.

At the beginning of March, I called Cyberport and spoke to them about this situation. They confirmed my assumptions: It was, they said, not possible to make any definitive statements regarding the availability of the Mac Mini. Again, this was in March 2005, eight weeks after the announcement.

I just ordered one on the Apple website on March 10th, expecting it to arrive some time in April at the earliest.

I got it a week later.

First impressions

Unpacking a computer by Apple is a little bit like Christmas. Whatever one may think of their products, at least they're all beautifully packaged.

The Mac Mini is no exception to this rule. It comes in a tastefully designed small white-and-grey box, featuring a plastic handle at the top, just like the iBook box did. Inside this box, there isn't much to be found: The A/C adaptor, the Mac Mini itself and a DVI->VGA converter, plus a brief instruction manual and two DVDs, one with Mac OS X and additional software and the other with Mac OS 9. To be honest, I haven't checked if the latter is indeed a DVD, it could very well be a CD-ROM only. I have no use for Mac OS 9.

So, what were my first impressions after unwrapping the Mac Mini? Boy, is this thing small. And beautiful. And small. Did I mention it is small? It seems hardly believable the Apple designers managed to stuff a whole computer in this tiny -- and cute! -- case. But they did, obviously: Turning it on, the familiar Apple-chime comes from the internal speaker, way too loudly for my tastes. And the machine boots up the first time.

A word about the A/C adapter: This thing is nearly half as big as the Mac Mini itself. Its annoyingly big. On the other hand, it lives well hidden under my desk right now, so this doesn't bother me all that much.

Mac OS X

I have worked with Mac OS X on my iBook before, so there's nothing new for me here. Mac OS X is, all in all, a decent operating system any Unix guy can find himself at home in quite easily. It has its minor quirks, some of which can be taken care of by installing 3rd party software (the Terminal App comes to mind), some of which one just has to put up with (it is certainly not as stable as Linux).

Human-machine interaction

I had ordered the Mac Mini 1,42 with 512 MB RAM. This seemed to be the best deal to me; I have a Bluetooth USB dongle lying around that I had bought for my iBook and could not see a need for WLAN connectivity for a desktop computer. Also, more than 512 MB RAM certainly would have been nice, but Apple's pricing regarding memory is so ridiculous it didn't seem to make any sense.

I also didn't order a mouse or a keyboard. After all, Steve Jobs himself said something along the lines of "you can use your existing keyboard and mouse with this". And that's what I tried. And failed. Miserably.

There's no way anyone is going to really work with a Macintosh computer without a keyboard specifically made for Macs. Apple, in their wisdom, use a different keyboard layout than IBM compatible PCs do (at least they do for the German version of their computers). Using a keyboard that has all the wrong characters printed on in the wrong places will drive you mad in no time, believe me.

So out I went and bought an Apple Wireless Keyboard for ¤59. And while I was at it, I also got an Apple Wireless Mouse, for ¤59 as well. Pretty hefty prices they have, consdering I got my regular mouse, a Logitech MX900, for ¤54 and my regular keyboard, an IBM Model M PS/2 original, for ¤12 (used, on ebay, I must say). Both of the latter are of a much higher quality than what Apple has to offer. The most annyoing thing about Apple's Wireless Mouse is that it lacks a docking station. I'm not using the mouse all that much right now, but I don't expect the two AA batteries to last very long. This could become and expensive and annoying experience, I'm afraid.

At least, both the mouse and the keyboard from Apple are nice to look at.

Noise and Power Management

The Mac Mini is extremely quiet. Even when it is compiling larger projects for a while, it remains barely audible in the environment I work in. And that's with my two main workstations turned off, having only the server/router running four metres away from my desk. Noise certainly isn't an issue, or at least it is not if you're used to standard PCs and the racket they usually bring into your home or office.

The power management features of the Mac platform are stellar. There's no suspend to disk at all, but you're certainly not going to miss it in a desktop computer. Suspend to ram works like a charm: The machine is up and running within a second or two after you press the on/off button -- which is exactly what ACPI on the IBM-compatible side of the world has always promised and so far failed to deliver, be it on Microsoft Windows or on Linux.

Performance

Honestly, I was not expecting too much. And certainly, the Mac Mini didn't overdeliver in the performance department: It is okay, but nothing spectacular.

The GUI is usable, but far from snappy. Comparing it to my iBook, this is a huge improvement: At least I can resize windows without getting the impression of bringing the whole machine to its knees.

The Mac Mini compiles Lighthouse within something around 10 minutes. That's a huge improvement, too: The iBook took over 40 minutes for the same task (a task my two workstations, each a Pentium IV, finish using distcc in about three minutes).

I guess performance-wise you really get what you pay for here. I have never had the opportunity to try out a dual G5 PowerMac, but I assume these machines perform just a little better. :-) The Mac Mini is certainly not meant to be a development machine. For your usual day-to-day tasks like surfing the web, reading and writing email, watching a DVD or the occasional letter to write it's without a doubt more than adequate.

Video and sound quality

I had read and heard terrible things about the analog video quality before I got the Mac Mini, so I was surprised to see that, at least for my eyes, the picture quality when using the DVI->VGA adapter to plug the Mac Mini into my Eizo L768 is tolerable. Sure, the picture is definitely not as crisp as it is when using DVI directly, but I can live with that.

The sound quality from the internal speaker is abysmal. I suggest either turning off all sound completely or using external speakers. The internal speaker is definitely completely useless.

Conclusion

So, is this the machine Apple will conquer the world with? Maybe it is, maybe not.

I'm too lazy to look up the exact quote, but Steve Jobs said something like "use it as your second computer, and soon you will find you'll be returning to your first computer less and less often." And this is exactly what I think will not happen -- at least not for me.

It is a beautiful machine. It is quiet. It has an appealing form factor. It is nearly instantly turned on and off with its execellent power saving abilities. All these things are a huge plus. And, like I said above, if you're looking for a computer to do your web surfing, email writing, office application running, non power-user stuff, the Mac Mini is without a question a strong contender.

For me, however, it has its major deficiencies: Aqua as a GUI is, though cute to look at, nowhere near as powerful as KDE. And the Mac OS X kernel, Darwin, proves again and again that it is not up to par with Linux when it comes to stability. In the few days I have the Mac Mini, I already encountered a number of crashes or program hangs that only a reboot could solve.

The whole mess with the different keyboard layout is hugely annoying. It's hard enough to remember where, to a programmer, crucial keys like '{', '~' or '[' are, but if Apple even thinks it's unnecessary to print these characters' locations on the keyboard -- well, that leaves one wondering. Maybe if you use Macintoshes day in, day out you do not care. If you are, like I am, accustomed to an IBM PC keyboard layout, this is irritating and distracting.

Then, there is the compiler. Or what Apple made of gcc by patching it to death. But that's a story for a different article, I believe.

So, the bottom line for me is: I'm afraid, the Mac Mini will remain nothing but a toy. A cute and quiet, not too powerful, while at the same time also not too expensive, toy. And a small one. Did I mention it is small?

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