Mac mini (1 Viewer)

[NickBrazzi]

I'm also doing some scaling. My PJ is native 854x480. I did get the Mini to output 856x480, but it looks wierd. Hard to explain. Something's up with those two missing lines. It's completely usable, but, for example, there is a strange shimmering effect when playing DVD. It's very minor, but with us HT people, very minor is unacceptable.

Anyway, I feed it 1280x720 from the mini now and it works fine. Had some trouble that I eventually worked out (had to adjust the position setting in the PJ. Anyway, feeding it 1280x720, which it scales to 480p looks fantastic. The DVD player works very well and looks really good. Like I said, you need to tweak the image with Avia, but that's a given anyway.

The DVD player is very easy to use, especially with a programmable remote. The M-Audio Transit works great for passing the digital audio (DD or DTS) from DVD player.

One cool thing about the Apple DVD player, if you've never used it. When you close the program, it remembers where you were on the DVD. So, next time you insert that DVD, it asks you if you want to start from the beginning or start from the last time you played the disc. You can disable this if you want, but it is pretty handy.

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Mine Shipped !

You know I've been checking it every fre hours, was 2/14 till yesterday and now it shows Shipped !!!!!

I'm a Mac User !

 

[Craig S]

Man, I've been swamped, but I thought I'd check back in here with my latest impressions.

Still liking the Mini. I remain impressed with the graphics performance. Even on my fastest XP machines (3 Ghz+) I turn off all the fancy visual effects because they noticeable slow things down. Yet the fancy stuff works just fine on this little Mini. Apple's SW engineers have really squeezed every bit of performance possible out of the graphics engine.

My favorite Mac feature not on XP is Expose. I didn't really get what the big deal was when I read about it, but seing it in action - WOW! Rather than explain Expose for you new Mac users, I'll just say when you get your machine up & running, open several different programs, which should give you a bunch of overlapping windows. Then hit the F9 key. I expect your reaction will be like mine:

Downloading & installing programs is a revelation on the Mac. For many, you just download the disk image and drag it to the Applications folder. That's it, ready to rock. Other apps run an installer if you need to choose some options. Decide you don't want to keep the program in question? Drag it to the Trash. No fuss, no muss.

There are a number of little things I am not enamored of. I've always hated that menu bar that stays at the top of the screen. And it seems really difficult to get certain apps to maximize to full screen size (Safari, for one).

I bought the Mini to be a music server. This morning I finished copying my library of 500+ ripped CDs from my iPod into iTunes on the Mac (you need a third-party utility to do this). Fired up the TiVo desktop (I have networked TiVos on both my main and bedroom systems) and with two clicks told it to share my iTunes library. Voila! Now I can scroll through my library on the TiVo and play anything I have stored through my stereo systems. And it's all served by the Mini, which sits tucked away in a corner quietly doing its job.

So far, I'm a happy camper. Money well spent. Next step - start importing photos into iPhoto, so it can be a photo server as well.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Defnitely true. The rendering of web graphics is superb. My iMac also displays my photos perfectly accurate in terms of color. Did you see all the built in color adjusments and utilities on Panther.

This is some supremely genius software craftmanship.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Try this. Go into system preferences under the Apple menu and select eth Dock to hide...then resize your Safari window to full screen. The OS only "protects" the top menu bar-the rest of the screen is all Safari. You can also widen the window but most web sites are not widescreen so it does little good. On my 17" screen I leave about 2" on each side of the Safari window.

What is also cool about Safari beside lightning speed is the bookmark buttons and one touch bookmarking. Why does XP suck at this?...Look ma! no pull down menus.

 

[DaveF]

I've been a PC user since grad school, but when I heard about the Mac Mini for $500, I was excited. I could use a new computer and this seemed great.

Then I priced one.

With sensible features, it was closer to $1000, with no monitor, keyboard, mouse, or software. And is a G4, not the current G5? I can go pretty far with a PC with $1000.

I've read this thread, but I still don't get it. I'm not up on Mac performance, but it seems over-priced and under-powered. And I don't care about small or cute. $1000 for a 1.x GHz G4?

Can someone explain the Mac mystique? What's so attractive about the Mini?

 

[SteveLa]

People that I know that have bought the Mac Mini (myself included) already had the monitor, keyboard and mouse. I'd hardly call the Mini devoid of software. It comes with Quicken 2005 (which I use extensively), the AppleWorks productivity suite and iLife 2005. The latter software is a home run in the way it tightly integrates digital images, music and video editing in one package. It is unbelievably easy to use. So what free software comes with PC's? Most I've seen charge at least something for any of the MS Office applications. Heck, I'm also saving money by not having to invest in anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities.

 

[Ken Chan]

The advantage there is that it makes the menu items "infinitely tall" -- you just jam the mouse to the top of the screen to click on something, you don't have to be as precise as when the menus are inside each window.

Or is it more the fact that it's just always there?

 

[Chris_HA]

Try this:

Go to http://www.apple.com/applescript/safari/ and download the Safari Scripts to you hard disk.

A DMG (Disk Archive) file will open and install a folder call Safari Scripts to your download directory. Drag this folder into the following path.

/Macintosh HD/Library/Scripts

Next goto

/Macintosh HD/Applications/AppleScript/ and run a program called Install Script Menu.

It will install a script menu towards the right of the Menu Bar. When you are in Safari, select the menu and select the Safari Scripts section. Inside you will see a script named Windows to Full Screen.


If you guys want to see all the little tips and tricks this kitty (pun intended) can do, see this website:

http://www.macosxhints.com/

 

[Lee Scoggins]

It's easy Dave. You need to play with an iMac or Mini at the local Apple store. They are really fast, and double the ghz ratings on the G5 for comparable IBM PC performance. The difference is two-fold: 1) 64 bit recording and 2) far more secure and stable operating systems.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

30 day trials of low quality and uninstallable security, utility, and messaging software.

 

[Thomas Newton]

There's nothing forcing you to buy a Mini instead of an eMac, or iMac G5, or PowerMac G5 tower.

 

[DaveF]

Absolutely. WHen I price PCs, I come up with $1500 - $2500 solutions. I mistakenly thought, from all the buzz, that Apple had blown the doors off by unleashing an equivalent to a high-end PC for a paltry $500.

Rather, the mini mac is their response to the $500 PC tier. A good system, but not crazy-good like I expected.

And in my Apple ignorance, I didn't know they provided a suite of software with the compter. I'll have to check it out next time I'm at CompUSA (no Apple Stores out here).

Thanks for the clarifying info.

 

[Chris_HA]

Smartly, Apple doesn't want to cannibalize their higher end systems with the Mac Mini. It's purely a 'get you foot in the door' system, and from everything I have heard about it, a good one too. I have been using Mac since the beginning. I am also an IT back office guy during the day. I have a fast 2.8 gHz P4 HTPC that I built by hand. My 1.25gHz Powerbook laptop feels just as fast.

For security and administration reasons alone, it's worth getting into OSX. As a developer, it just gets better with OSX 10.4 (Tiger).

Apple's iLife suite is just icing on the cake: http://www.apple.com/ilife/
I use iTunes every day as a server for my music collections to share them with what ever computer I am using in the house.

I use iPhoto every other day. The fact that it can now read camera RAW files and manage them makes it and even better solution. Since version 3, you have been able to select a playlist and make it your music for slide show, all without having to open iTunes. It's great when family or company comes by.

iMovie make it SO easy to casually edit up my DV video. I can have a 20 minute movie fully edited and ready to burn to DVD in about 2 hours or less.

iDVD makes burning a DVD movies with all of the fancy menus so easy, it's should be illegal. iDVD also has the ability to make one touch DV to DVDs for easy archival of of your DV camera footage.

Both iMovie and iDVD allows you to browse your pictures from iPhoto and music from iTunes, allowing you to easily use media from either of those two applications in your video or DVD setup.

If iMovie is not strong enough for you, consider getting Final Cut HD. It is the (slightly) slimmed down version of Final Cut Pro, a high end (AVID level) video editor.


Other things to share about OS X for the uninitiated:

Your can use and share your files from the MAC to any PC or Linux box on the network (and vice versa) by using the built in SMB/CIFS client.
You can also share your PC printer with the Mac, or Mac printer with the PC (using SMB and CUPS).

Built in Apache web server with PHP is already installed. So in an FTP server and SSH server.

Apple has built in faxing capabilities, as well as a system level PDF writer.

Expose rocks (as was mentioned above).

Most applications are two button mouse aware. No need to deal with Apple's single button mouse.

 

[Lee Scoggins]

I just plugged in my Microsoft wireless optical mouse and everything synched up perfectly including the scrolling wheel.

 

[Gregory Scott Bass]

Hi...just thought I would chime in and say that the mini has convinced me to abandon windows too,,,I ordered my mini with every option so it was not cheap but I plan on carrying this thing around with me alot

 

[Lee Scoggins]

Greg, welcome to the party!

Enjoy the stress free computing!

 

[Dave Scarpa]

Well My Mini is finally here. I can't believe how easy it was to set this all up, 15 min and I'm on the new typing now, on my PC Network sharing files, it really is a joy to work with.

 

[todbnla]

You guys are really making me spend my tax return on one, I am fed up with all of the windows based garbage that comes down the pipeline. And on the PC side, bigger is better, seems its not true for apple products in more ways than one. I cant wait till my uncle sam sends me some apple cash.

On a related note, I plan on buying the barebones edition and maybe only after a while adding more ram, I am tired of trying to have the biggest pc made! Email, word apps and a few pics and mp3s don't need a welding machine to run.
CLOSE the Window

Is ram hard to add in these? I have done several on pc based machines...PLMK

 

[Kris McLaughlin]

Todd,
when you do order your mac, do yourself a favour and get at least 512mb of ram. The easiest way to have a poor experience with OS X is to use it with less than 512mb.

It's not a pricy upgrade, I think Apple even dropped the price in the last couple of weeks.