Mac mini a great system for certain users
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Mar 8, 2005 at 12:05am
Apple’s Mac mini is an excellent system for certain users, though not necessarily Yours Truly. But it wasn’t created with folks like me in mind, at least not for our primary computing systems (I’m writing this on a 20-inch iMac G5).
However, for its target audience – Mac users on a budget, those way overdue for an upgrade (but reluctant to do so), Mac users wanting a second desktop and newcomers/switchers to the Mac – the Mac mini is an fantastic bargain, despite a couple of caveats.
First, let’s look at its two strongest points: price and size. The Mac mini comes in US$499 and $599 versions, which make definitely make it the least expensive Mac ever. You’ll want to budget some extra moolah for more memory (more on that in a moment), and Apple assumes you already have a keyboard, mouse and display if you buy this baby. It comes with none of those.
The second astounding thing about the Mac mini is the size. It makes the gorgeous, but ill-fated Cube, look positively huge. The mini is just two inches tall and weighs about three pounds. It takes up very little desktop real estate and is almost ridiculously transportable. If you have separate displays, keyboard and mice at home and office locations, you can easily carry the Mac mini back and forth with you. And, as you might expect, the Mac mini isn’t just eye-popping due to its size, but due to its crisp, streamlined design.
It comes with a great bundle of software, including Mac OS X 10.3 (“Panther”) and iLife ‘05, which sports the latest versions of iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes and GarageBand. (We’ll start our multi-part review of the iLife ‘05 suite tomorrow). Not enough? Okay, how about iChat AV desktop video conferencing, Mail, the Safari Web browser, Sherlock, Address Book, QuickTime, iSync, iCal, DVD Player, the Classic environment, Quicken 2005 for Mac, Nanosaur 2 and MarbleBlast Gold. You may notice that AppleWorks isn’t on this list. Evidently, Apple is hoping that folks will fork out the US$79 price tag for iWork ‘05, which was announced in January along with the Mac mini and iLife ‘05.
On the hardware size the Mac mini comes with either a 1.25 GHz or 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4 processor and ATI Radeon 9200 graphics with 32MB of dedicated DDR memory. Both models come with a slot-load combo drive for watching DVD movies and burning CDs, and up to an 80GB hard drive for storing digital media creations.
The Mac mini includes one FireWire 400 and two USB 2.0 ports. It also provides a DVI interface that also supports VGA, so you can connect to a variety of LCD or CRT displays. The teeny mini includes built-in 10/100BASE-T Ethernet and a 56K V.92 modem for Internet access, and offers optional support for an AirPort Extreme Card for 54 Mbps 802.11g wireless networking, along with an internal Bluetooth module for the latest in wireless communications.
As you can tell by the specs, this isn’t the computer for serious gamers or multimedia mavens. For example, its graphic card is certainly entry level – but at least it isn’t forced to share memory with the main processor as low-end PCs do. And for basic computing tasks (e-mail, word processing, Web browsing, etc.) the Mac mini has plenty of oomph. It can also handle the iLife apps pretty well – or at least it would if Apple didn’t ship the systems with an unacceptable 256MB of RAM. They should come with twice that (even if it adds a few bucks to the price tag or nips the profit margin) if Apple expects newbies to the Mac to be impressed by the elegance of the iLife components.
If you want to check out some specs on the Mac mini’s performance compared to other Macs, cruise on over to the Bare Feats site. They have some tests on CPU intensive tasks, graphics intensive tasks and disk intensive tasks. Basically, it boils down to this: if you can get by on the power of an iBook or eMac, you’ll do fine by the Mac mini. If you need G5 power, this baby ain’t for you. And as Bare Feats points out, the Mac mini’s weak point is hard drive speed since it uses a 4200rpm 2.5 inch “notebook” drive – although I’ve heard reports that some of the systems are shipping with 5200rpm drives.
Some folks have complained that Bluetooth and AirPort aren’t built-in right out of the box. But I think Apple has made a wise move in this area. Customers of the Mac mini are going to be watching the bottom line and may not care about such niceties, especially if they’re new to computing.
Still, even the cost conscious may want to spring an extra hundred bucks for the “higher end” Mac mini. It packs a bit more power and an extra 20GB of storage, which can really come in handy once you get addicted to iLife (and if you use it, you will).
If you’re still using a Power Mac G3, don’t wait any longer—move up to a Mac mini. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how much faster your computing work and play will go. And don’t hesitate to recommend the Mac mini to your PeeCee-using friends. It offers a stylish, inexpensive introduction to a truly elegant computing experience.
Macsimum rating: 8 out of 10
Have a product you’d like us to review? Write us at dsellers@macsimumnews.com
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
