mac
I mentioned earlier that I was thinking of buying a Mac Mini. Well, last week, I bit the bullet and ordered one from the Apple store. I went for the 1.5GHz model with 1Gb of RAM. It arrived on Monday, delivered to my workplace as I wouldn’t be in at home to sign for it. Everyone in the office gathered round to look at my new toy with envious eyes. They couldn’t believe how small it is. I find it difficult to believe myself. The Mac Mini is just 16.5cm square and 5cm high. Into this tiny and beautiful package they managed to cram an 80Gb hard disk, the aforementioned processor and memory, a DVD/CD-RW drive, soundcard, internal speaker and video card. Amazing.
It is astonishingly quiet as well. I’m used to the racket made by my old box, with a fan in the power supply unit and another sitting over the processor. But, even sitting here with it on the desk in front of me, I can barely hear any noise from the Mac Mini. It doesn’t get noticeably hot to the touch either. God knows how they keep it cool. All in all, it is a very nice piece of hardware.
I’m also suitably impressed with the beautiful and well designed Mac OS X that runs on the box. It’s obvious that the designers have put a lot of thought into designing a usuable user-interface. It all hangs together very well. There’s lots of subtle visual touches to delight the eye: dialogs that slide in from the top of the screen; windows that fade away when you close them; icons that bounce up and down to attract your attention, and so on. The “Finder” tool, which pulls together views into crucial folders on your filesystem (Documents, Music, Pictures, etc) along with an “Applications” area where all your apps sit, makes for a nice way of interacting with your system. Immeasurably better than, say, the Start Menu and Desktop Icons that Windows relies upon.
I also like the fact that I can fire up a console window and find myself back at the familiar unix prompt. The best of both worlds.
It’s nice to have a new toy to play with.
(Here ends the advertisement on behalf of Apple - can I get some money back now Steve?)
Blue Witch says:
But can you stop all those ‘visual effects’? They’d just drive me mad(der!!).
Blue Witch spoke at 23:28 UTC on December 7th, 2005 link
Richard says:
They are very discreet. It’s worth seeing for yourself, if you know anyone with a mac.
Richard spoke at 23:30 UTC on December 7th, 2005 link
Neil T. says:
Glad to see you like it. The one time I’ve heard my mac mini’s fan was when running SETI for a few minutes - obviously with it running at 100% CPU it’s bound to generate a fair bit of heat. But otherwise the unit has been almost totally silent and as you say it is ridiculously small - you really have to see it to believe it.
Neil T. spoke at 01:07 UTC on December 8th, 2005 link
Daisy says:
We’ve a year old Dell and I can’t tell you many times I’ve had to double check to see if it’s actually switched on.
Nah, I’m just jealous
Daisy spoke at 20:42 UTC on December 14th, 2005 link