Mac Mini (Mini Review)

[ARuth]

I just hooked my mini up last night and tried it out. I have a Mini with 512 ram and the super drive and the wireless blue tooth and love it. I also have a G5 dual processor 2gig and was afraid it would feel to slow. Well it feels nice and fast like one of the powerbook laptops. The strange thing was that is came with ilife 4 installed and I had to take the disk and upgrade it to ilife 5. The unit feels nice and solid. Looks good next to my ipod mini, same silver color. When using it with web surfing it feels good pages open fast and the apps open fast as well. I tried out garage band and did not songs with it and it did not slow down. If you like the speed of a G4 laptop then you will love it. I use my G5 all day and it does not feel really slow or anything like that. Now I am sure if I do some renders or other things that tax the G4 chip I am sure it will be a lot slower. For everyday use for anyone other than a power user in need of the power then you will not notice it being slow at all. I am glad that I bought one and may buy another for my desk at work. IF I get another one I will not load it it though. If you have 512mb ram then that should be fine for most people. I was able to take the ilife 5 cd and upgrade my G5 as well so that was nice. They must have been building these for a few weeks since it had ilife 4 on it. The quality on the PC is nice and just a good as all the other mac models. It fees great to speed 500 or 600 dollars and open the box and have a computer that feels like its not cheep and that it feels like a nice pice of quality apple computer hardware.

Andrew

 

[runninmac]

Thanks for the review i will diffenitly be gettin one of these

 

[ARuth]

I also hooked it up to my HD 34" tube tv set. The picture was better than I thought it would be. It was pretty clear but web pages and apps were big because it was set at around 640x400 or something like that. The DVDs looked great playing on the set though so it would make a nice home player for Itunes and DVD's.

Andrew

 

[pncc]

Let's try to clear up some confusion out there. Shall we?

What if any info came with the Mini describing Customer installable parts? Does it say anywhere what can and can't be installed? Does it say something like 'do it at your risk, if you break anything AppleCare won't cover it?'

I am a little concerned about the resolution you mentioned when connected to your TV. Where there any other resolutions available?

What is the deal with the power supply I am hearing about? can you post close up photos of the computer end of the power cord? Some are saying that there are many wires in the power supply and speculate that iPod dock additions will be forthcoming.

Thanks!

 

[ARuth]

I will post photos tonight when I get the chance. I am at work right now but I can tell you that somethings now. The power supply is a big white brick. There is one end of the brick with the cosr that comes out and plugs into the wall. The other end of the brick you plug the other cord that came it it into the brick looks like a 3 prong clover end and that goes into the brick. Then you plug the end of that cord into the mini, the plug that goes into the mini looks a little like its usb shaped but more rounded. there is only one cord the brik is in the middle and they give you a long cable. It detects the tv and the screen size could not be changed it said ntsc on the settings when I went in to look at it. It did have some check marks for over scan and a check mark to make the picture more clear. The over scan was not helpfel just made the paiture to big for the screen. The other button made the tv picture look clear. On a HD tuve set 34" it looked clean but the windows are going to be big becasue you cant change the settings. If you have a DLP OR LCD tv I think you will get a better picture and will be able to change the size since they are kind of projectors in a tv box. Even though the windows were big when I played DVD's they did look good and the colors were great looking.

Hope that helps. As for the power supply there is not a lot of wires running around just one to the mini and one for the display. There would be one more for the keyboard and then you could plug the mouse into the keyboard so that would leave one open usb slot. I have the bluetooth so I did not have to use any wires for keyboard or mouse. I did have to plug in my keyboard and mouse from my other mac when I first set it up so it would find the wireless mouse and kayboard then I did not need them after that.

Andrew

 

[barnett25]

Let's try to clear up some confusion out there. Shall we?

What if any info came with the Mini describing Customer installable parts? Does it say anywhere what can and can't be installed? Does it say something like 'do it at your risk, if you break anything AppleCare won't cover it?'

I am a little concerned about the resolution you mentioned when connected to your TV. Where there any other resolutions available?

What is the deal with the power supply I am hearing about? can you post close up photos of the computer end of the power cord? Some are saying that there are many wires in the power supply and speculate that iPod dock additions will be forthcoming.

Thanks!

A regular format (non HD) TV runs at 640x480 resolution.