Mac Mini Review
I have a Mac Mini for about half a day now and I would like to share the first impressions of a long term Linux and Windows user.
The Mac Mini is not my first Mac, I had a UMAX 3000 clone back in the days of the infamous Mac OS 7. I was really disappointed back then and considered it a waste of money. In the mean time I have worked with a large variety of different systems. Ranging from DEC Ultrix and NeXT via Solaris with olvwm and ctwm over MS-DOS and DR-DOS and Windows of almost every flavor to Linux with icewm, KDE, Windowmaker, Ion, Fluxbox and others. I also flashed my WRT54gs with OpenWRT and my NSLU2 with the unslung firmware. I tend to think that I've come around a little bit in the computer world and I consider myself CLI-o-phil and halfway agnostic to the OS war.
Now I am a happy owner of a Mac Mini 1.25 with 512Mb, a DVD burner and the BT and WLAN option.
Opening the nice package revealed the small machine. I am not going to repeat all that 'Oh it is really small!' babble, just look at the shot I took with my phone cam. Below the Mac is my Shuttle barebone. I guess the Mac is going to be what the Shuttle was always intended to be but failed. I want a computer to run 24/7 for surfing, listening to internet radio, watching movies, sending mails, organizing photos, maybe accessing my files from the outside over the net. I am obviously among the iLife target audience. The main reason why I did not use the Shuttle that much was noise. I had to sleep in the same room and the fan was too loud.
Apple hardware has a quality touch. While I was really impressed when I built my Shuttle barebone back then, the Mac Mini knocks it up a notch. But maybe this is only because it is not a barebone and I don't have to use a screwdriver to start using it. Still I like the design and I also like it that the packaging and the look of everything is really stylish. It is the same thing as with food: not only it is important that it tastes good, it is also nice if it looks good.
Unpacking, plugging in a couple of wires and turning it on did not take long. To sum up the impression of starting and fiddling around with my new gadget I have to say:
It just works
I am not sure whether that is a marketing phrase, but if it is not, then it should be. After turning it on I answered a couple of questions in some dialogues and viola everything is just there. It connected to my WLAN, registered my account, (which I actually don't like,) checked for updates and installed them. Opening mail for the first time, it asked for the account settings and after seconds I could access my IMAP mailbox. A lot of software comes pre installed and using it is really a charm. First thing I did was to fire up safari and play the Secret Agent channel from SomaFM.
Installing Applications
I used Safari only for a couple of minutes. Quite fast I missed the AdBlock extension from Firefox, thus I installed the fox. Installing Firefox showed how different and simple Mac OS X can be. After downloading the Firefox package it was opened as a disk image in the Finder. In the Package were two icons, Firefox and a readme. All I had to do for installation was to drag the Firefox icon onto the Program icon in the Finder. Heck, I don't even know where exactly it is installed now and you know what? I don't know and I don't care! That is the truly apathetic agnostic approach. I plan to follow this way up until I run into problems. I am really curious how long will take.
Look and feel of the Desktop
One word: Exposé! I've used different virtual desktops in
the various Unixen, I like keyboard switching of the Linux console
and I frequently used Screen to manage my applications. All the
Alt-Tab fans out there: Forget Alt-Tab. Exposé rocks! I
instantly loved this feature. I mapped it to the middle mouse
button under the scroll wheel and now can switch between my apps
very fast. What I really like about it is that the windows are only
minimized so much that they are side by side. If you don't have too
many windows open you can still see what is going on in them. Good
for checking progress of an installation or something alike.
I experience a little slowdown of the animation when having
roundabout ten program windows open and hitting F9, but that is
absolutely not disruptive or annoying.
Having the menu bar at the very top is something I will have to get used to. I'm not saying it is bad, it is just different. The good thing is that you can always move the mouse pointer to the very top and you're there. You don't have to target vertically. But I am not sure whether that really gives you a performance boost when working. I doubt it.
One thing is really different and here I like the windows paradigm a bit more: When you close the last window of an application, then the program is not terminated in Mac OS X. It simply continues to run without a window.
Other stuff that just works
I am an unhappy owner of a Siemens SX1 phone. Quite frankly: it sucks. One of the reasons why it sucks it the unbearable synchronization with a PC. Send a message if you want to know the other reasons. Under Windows you have to install a couple of programs and have them run as services all the time. Then it is only possible to sync with Outlook which I absolutely hate and by the way which I don't have because it does not come free with Windows. Connecting and transferring files from the memory card via USB is so tedious that I decided to always take the card out and feed it into the PC with an adapter.
With the Bluetooth option of the Mac Mini I could connect and synchronize the phone with the address book and iCal without hassle. Very nice. At first I could not find iSync in my program folder. I typed 'iSync' into the search field in the finder and after five seconds it was found. Guess what: It WAS in the program folder, I was only too blind to see it.
I run two WLAN networks at home, one standard infrastructure and one p2p based olsr meshed network. With Mac OS X you can configure two profiles and quickly switch between them from the Apple menu. On my Laptop the network card supplier software also allows that, but ever so often it would fuck up and simply not show the dialogue any more, forcing a restart. While this is not Microsofts fault and knowing that this is also easier in WinXP I still have to say that with both Linux and Windows I often had the feeling that I am wrestling my computer into doing what I want. I won a lot of times. Almost never I could not get something to work the way I wanted but I have to admit that I am tired of having to know how exactly my computer works. I want to use it and not maintain it.
I am sure that I will find one or the other annoyances after a while, but the first impression is astonishingly good.
