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Mini's here

My MacMini arrived yesterday and I was playing the better part of the evening and a small part of the night (yawn) with it.

First impressions:

  • It’s small
  • It’s quiet (unless it get’s really busy, at which point the fan kicks in - and that’s one noisy fan)
  • Setup was very, very painless. I let my wife do it, and she went through the whole experience in a couple of minutes.
  • the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is immensely high
  • the kids loved the included games (which led to tears when it was bed-time)
  • connecting to sauron was a breeze
  • iTunes was about 5 times faster re-importing my 12000 tracks on a Samba fileserver, than the Windows version on my Dell Laptop
  • Connecting my iPod just worked - now I have to redo my smart playlists
  • Fast User Switching (or whatever it’s called on OS X) works very well
  • Installing / Deinstalling Software is easy
  • a 1024*768, 15" screen is just a tad too small. A 17" wide screen would be nice - why doesn’t Apple have one?
  • the “dead-slow”, “braindead”, “old piece of junk” graphic in the Mac Mini is absolutely fast enough
  • Amazing that the whole thing cost just 20 swiss francs more, than my 30GB iPod about a year ago
  • OS X is - just nice
  • thanks to byteborg, rsz and vowe for initial support

Open Questions: feel free to comment, I haven’t done much research on those yet

  • How do I automatically reconnect to a Samba Share (which has my music on it) and is configured to allow guest access (i.e. no password). So far I always have to reconnect by hand
  • Can I install the Mac Lotus Notes client once and have a separate data directory for my wife and me, and will this work with fast user switching?
  • Can I use the microphone in iSight for Skype? (That might be the way to go, instead of buying a USB headset)

I have the feeling, that this is not going to be the last MacMini (or Apple computer) I will be buying.

Jens-Christian Fischer

Maker. Musician