Life with an Intel MacMini, Year One
By Ted Bade
I decided to buy an Intel based MacMini right after they came out. There were two main reasons for doing this. First of all, it was going to replace a slowly fading “Soccer Ball” iMac that my wife used, and secondly, because I wanted to see how this Intel chip Macintosh worked first hand. Luckily, my wife was very reluctant to let the old iMac go (that was by far her favorite Macintosh form factor), which meant that I had several months of being able to play with it before it moved into her study.
We purchased the first generation Dual core Mac Mini. The only thing I added to it was additional RAM. My friend, the Apple store owner, pointed out that adding RAM to this machine after market, could lead to marks on the case. Having the RAM added at the factory meant the machine would arrive with no physical scars. So I decided to pay for to factory installation of the extra RAM.
The Mac Mini arrived in a little box, not the type of box one would expect to find a powerful computer in! If you have never experienced the size of a Mac Mini, you might be surprised by just how small they are. I sure was. Having it on the table before me I can easily realize why people see them and decide to use these machine inside of other things. They are tiny!
While it is definitely not a muscle machine, it is powerful enough. If you are upgrading from an older Mac,(not last year’s model, but a few generations back), it will be significantly more powerful then what you had. It is a terrific basic machine. The Mac Mini comes decked out with just about everything a Mac user could ask for. Built in wireless, Bluetooth, four USB 2 ports, FireWire, a super drive for recording CDs and DVDs, and even optical audio out! It lacks mouse, keyboard, and display. I had the necessary keyboard and mouse available, not a problem in this house. We decided to buy a nicer LCD monitor for it, which is another tale in itself.
Side note: [One of the reasons the old iMac wasn’t leaving is that we could not find an LCD monitor that was even in the same universe as that attached to the soccer ball iMac. It’s clarity and wide usable angle are important factors, but the range of motion of this display is unmatched. You might not have any idea how impossible it is to find an LCD monitor at any cost that has the ease of use of the old soccer ball iMac’s monitor. They just don’t exist. Most LCD monitors don’t even go up and down! They simply angle in and out, this includes the newer iMacs. None I could find were designed to slide left and right without moving the entire base. We settled on an HP monitor that at least went up and down, although it wobbles.]
Once the machine was home, it was easy to fire it up, get on the Internet, and give it a whorl. The package includes all the standard Macintosh software, including the newest version of iLife and iWork. As for the rest of the software we were going to use on it, I needed to find Intel version if they existed. Even at the early date that I bought this machine, much of software we were using had been rewritten for Intel. But there were a handful not redone to support Universal Binary, including Microsoft Office. This fact gave us ample opportunity to see how the Apple’s Rosetta features work.
One of the main draws of the Intel based Macs is the ability to run other x86 type OS’s. Since I already wrote a complete article on this, I won’t say a lot on this topic. You are welcome to read my article on running Windows on this machine for an idea of how it worked. Briefly let me say I was quite impressed with how well all the solutions I tried worked. Apple’s Boot Camp is probably the best solution for power hungry applications. However, on this machine, you won’t play many Windows based games, as the graphics hardware on this machine just isn’t up to snuff. Which means in my eyes the Parallels software solution is the all around best one for the Mac Mini. It allows you to run Windows (or any x86 based OS) side by side with Mac OS X. It was a great solution when I wrote my review, and they have made several major improvements on it since then. If you have need to run an occasional Windows based application, I highly recommend it. If you need to move output from the Windows environment to the Mac side, again, the Parallels system is the best. It allows you to cut from one side and paste into the other. Very, very nice.
I was disappointed with the Windows Apps I ran on this Mac Mini. Not for how they ran or that I had problem installing them. It is just the standard poor quality of the applications I ran! The ease of use inherent in all Macintosh applications just isn’t there in Windows applications. It’s pretty much a free for all and every one does the interface their own way. This lack of a standard makes a user always feel like they just don’t understand what is going on. But that’s a Windows world problem....
One noticeable lack with this machine is the lack of a graphics card. Using a “feature” of low end PCs, this machine has an Intel graphics chip on the motherboard shares the computer’s RAM for its video work. Which means it can get sluggish when you are trying to run a large application that work with graphics and that high end games don’t run very well on it. However, this graphics system doesn’t get in the way of basic applications, even web browsing or watching a DVD.
The other problem with any Intel based Mac is that not all software has been recoded for the Intel chip, so there are a few problems in that regard. If you remember the move from the 68000 Motorola chips to the PowerPC chips, you might recall some of the hassles involved running the old applications on the PowerPC chip. With the Intel chip there is a LOT LESS hassle in this regard. Older applications run, although they don’t run as fast as they would if the program had been recompiled for the Intel chip. This is because Apple created an interesting piece of technology.
As you might recall, Apple created an instruction interpreter they call Rosetta. What this application does is, in real time it converts PowerPC instructions to Intel instructions, very similarly to what a spoken language interpreter would do. It is a credit to the power of the Intel chips that PowerPC applications run almost as fast as they would on a moderately powerful PowerPC Mac! From the perspective of a home user, most applications run fine, although at some points they might appear sluggish or unresponsive. For the most part, in my experience with this machine non-Intel applications run fine (including Microsoft Office). There are a number of good articles that quantify the speed of an interpreted application. My perspective here is from that of a person who used a PowerMac G4/700MHz iMac as the reference machine and concerns regular home applications. Games and graphics applications are another matter.
There have been a few problems with the Mac Mini. Although the Mac OS X code has been converted to Intel, there are a few items we found that just don’t work well. One little problem is with the “Character Palette” feature. In case you don’t know about this little gem, let me explain. When you turn it on, a little flag icon appears in the menu bar (representing the country whose language you use). If you pull this menu down, you can open the character palette. What this does for you is to give you the ability to easily search for symbols contained in your font files. What makes this useful is that it organizes the symbols into groups like mathematical, currency, technical, arrows and more. If you are looking to include any symbol in your text, this application is the easiest means of finding it. It also lets you create a list of favorite symbols, which you can access even more quickly. Really cool if you use certain symbols regularly.
When we turned on this feature on the Mini, it worked okay for the first few minutes. Then it blew up. The box showing the palette went blank and whenever we looked at a document the dead blank palette would interrupt things. It was very annoying. Luckily, turning off this feature and rebooting corrected the problem, but the palette is not usable on the Mini. It might have been a one time thing, but I haven’t had the courage to try turning it back on. The Mini is my wife’s machine and if something doesn’t work right, I definitely hear about it.
The biggest pauses we observed are due to not having an Intel version of an application, it is especially noticeable when you shift from one application to another. The computer usually stumbles and pauses while it shifts. There is often a considerably longer pause then one would expect. It is annoying from the aspect that we have grown use to the Mac OS X smoothly shifting from one application to another. True to the fashion of the impatient computer user, we usually find ourselves clicking a number of times trying to get the machine to respond, only to find it doing a number of things we didn’t expect as it slowly accepts the clicks! Since this isn’t the normal situation, when it happens, it is even more unexpected.
Another aspect of the Mac Mini we discovered is that it makes a great “portable” computer, provided, of course, that the place you are going to has the necessary mouse, keyboard, and display. It is actually easier to carry around then a PowerBook! For demos at out computer club, where we have an overhead projector, it is easier to carry in then the laptop!
All in all, the Mac Mini is a good choice for the basic home user. It performs well enough, has plenty of power and, as time goes on and one upgrades their software from PPC to Intel, the applications will get faster! It makes an excellent choice for a second machine or a machine for someone with basic computer needs. Most Mac home users will probably have the necessary keyboard, mouse, and even a monitor stored somewhere in the house! It is also a great deal from a cost standpoint. At $800 it is easy to justify.
