At about 12PM Today, I was greeted by a man dressed in a blue suit from Star Track Express out the front of our house. There was no question about what he was delivering – it could only be one thing. Of course, I also knew this because I’d been refreshing the tracking page on the Star Track Website (left for delivery at 7:53AM).
The package was signed for and I was given a small brown box just large enough to contain the Mac Mini as well as some extra padding foam. I quickly whipped it away to my room and opened the box to reveal what was inside.
|
|
I’ve always been a fan of how Apple presents the packaging of their products. It’s always simple and professional, looking very elegant. The packaging of the Mac Mini was no exception to this. Even after you open the exterior of the box, everything inside is well laid out and supported by packing foam.
|
|
|
|
You can see from above that the Mac Mini includes:
- The Mac Mini itself
- DC Power Adapter
- Instructional Manuals and AppleCare Information
- OSX Installation CDs
- DVI-VGA Adapter
- Front Row Remote
So I’d already decided where I was going to place the Mini. It was just a matter of once again cleaning up my desk. (Did you know Apple promotes clean work environments through the design of their machines? 
)
Initial Setup
After turning on the Mini for the first time, you’re greeted with the OS X “Welcome Wizard” which runs you through a few things such as configuring the keyboard layout and network information. After 5 minutes, and to use Steve Jobs’ favourite word, “boom” you’re on your desktop.
|
|
Paul Stamatiou coincidently wrote an article today on his new Intel Mac Mini in which he linked to a great little application called Monolingual which allows additional languages to be reoved from OS X to clear up some free space. I managed to clear 2.4 GB of space which was “wasted” on languages I wouldn’t ever use.
Things Get Interesting
This is where things do begin to get interesting. I’d only really experienced OS X before earlier last year when I’d done a “biege box” install of the Intel edition. Of course, I’d played around with it before on a few other machines – but never as my primary operating system.
When you’re switching from Windows, most existing Mac people would say it is “easy”. Sure, maybe if you are doing a parallel or phased method of switching and you’ve done a lot of your homework before you make the switch.
Keyboard configuration is done in the initial setup like I mentioned before and you’re asked to specify the key to the right of your left shift button and the key to the left of your right shift button. That will automatically determine your keyboard type. It maps the Ctrl, Windows key, and Alt buttons (assuming you’re using a standard PC keyboard) to the Control, Option and Command modifiers.
Coming from Windows I was used to things like Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V for copying and pasting. This won’t work in OS X unless you use the “Command” key or change the key modifiers. This made it particularly hard at first and a little bit annoying. Changed that preference quick smart.
Now – despite common belief, OS X will automatically detect if you’re using a two button mouse or a single button mouse and enable the right click functionality that Windows users love. So directly out of the box I had right click support built right in.
I’m fairly familiar with the OS X interface so using the operating system and finding things was fairly easy. Things like ejecting a CD, mounting a DMG file I’d had experience with before. No problems there.
The first problem hits, I launch Front Row for the first time and attempt to play a DVD. Everything stops responding. I can’t do anything. It turns out it was because I hadn’t changed the region for playback to 4 (Oceania). Almost instinctively I was pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del to bring up a task manager or at least reset the machine. Clearly that wasn’t going to work. I pushed the power button on the mini (stupidly) – it appeared to turn off but on closer inspection of the status LED, it was actually in Sleep mode. I held down the button on the back of the machine, which I should have done in the first place and turned it off.
Second problem. After configuring Windows File Sharing to be turned on I noticed the machine was in the workgroup “Workgroup”. Now, you’d think that the options to change this would be in the System Preferences under Sharing which is where you configure Windows File Sharing. Wrong, the location of the Application to change your workgroup is buried under Applications, Utilities, Directory Access and then you need to select SMB/CIFS and hit Configure. Why? Who knows.
I managed to build up quite a comprehensive list of open applications (windows) in a short amount of time and I needed to switch between them. I’d constantly keep trying to Alt + Tab and then realised that would get me no where. The OS X equivalent would be Command + Tab (Can I change that?). You can also use Exposé (F10) which provides a cooler way to switch between active windows.
The same thing applied for when I quickly wanted to get back to the desktop. For the life of me, I couldn’t work out how to do this. I looked a little bit into it and it seems that F11 will shove all of your windows to the side so you can quickly see your desktop.
Performance
“Boom” says Jobs at the Apple Keynote where he announced the availability of the Intel iMac machines. This little Mac Mini (Core Duo + 1gb RAM) sure does some serious ass kicking in terms of performance.
The OS loads quickly and you’re free to begin your work in under a minute.
The launch of applications such as iTunes, Quicktime, Safari and products from the iLife suite are almost instant. We’re talking about applications here which are compiled as “Universal Binaries”, that they were compiled to work on both the Intel Macs and PowerPC Macs using the same binary. Applications which aren’t Uni bins however are slower because they need to be emulated by Apple’s Rosetta which translates CPU instructions for the differences in the architecture.
Application Cross Over
One of the other important factors when “making the switch” is whether or not the applications you need to use are either available in OS X or there are applications which provide similar functionality.
I’m only going to quickly touch on this as I’ll be covering my list of essentials in the future.
For most Windows applications there is an equivalent OS X application. The thing about the OS X applications is that usually they’re designed better in terms of layout and usability. The application is a pleasure to look at where sometimes on those “dull grey boxes” the application can be a bit of an eyesore. (I stress sometimes here, because a lot of Windows applications are designed especially well)
Wrapping it up
The Apple Mac Mini is an excellent way to switch from Microsoft Windows (be it part time switching like myself, or a full time switch). The machine also makes the perfect HTPC (As has been said many other times) or just an addition to your existing computer network. It takes up little space and looks good too.
Despite the problems I’ve had with getting adjusted, as well as a sticky back button on my Front Row remote which I’m going to get replaced, making the switch was a fairly easy move. So far today I haven’t switched back to Windows (Uhh, I did remote desktop to change some file permissions so I could access them).
To all of those who do say OS X “sucks” and “blows”, then you should honestly consider taking a leap of faith and playing around with it sometime. To all of those who say the same about Windows, well I’m going to call you all idiots. Overall, both operating systems are very well designed and provide extensive functionality.
You’ll hear more from me in the coming days about how I’m dealing with the switch, my review of the included OS X applications (such as Front Row) as well as my list of what I deem as essential applications.
For now, it’s back to playing about and getting everything configured the way I like it.
Comments
Paul Stamatiou (March 21st, 2006, 6:11 am)
Glad you like your computer as well! I’m having a great time playing around with Front Row, it’s awesome.
tikitiki (March 21st, 2006, 3:07 pm)
I don’t know if you’ve managed to install PHP yet, but if you havn’t or dont know how to, I can help ya if you want. I’ve got a manual on how to
I think it include Apache and mysql too…
Anyway, I wish my damned computer was that fast… Unfortunately I prefer windows because its supports all the popular games that I like
coolmacguy (March 21st, 2006, 3:46 pm)
Command-Option-Escape is the os x equivalent of cntrl-alt-delete. It brings up a list of running tasks and you can kill nonresponsive ones.
Belloman (March 22nd, 2006, 2:22 pm)
It’s so… mini!
Congrats on getting it! I never really liked Macs, but they are still very nice, and they look awesome.
Chris Boulton (March 23rd, 2006, 12:38 am)
Exactly the same here – though I still like Windows Media Center Edition (especially the version within Vista).
What i’m particularly loving is the ability to use the Front Row remote outside of Front Row itself. So I can say have iTunes open in the background and still use the remote to switch between tracks.
PHP, MySQL and Apache are on my development server – don’t really want to be clogging up this machine with that sort of stuff. Hehe.
Cheers. I actualy forgot to mention this shortcut key in the “review”.
Hehe.
Jonathan (March 23rd, 2006, 11:21 pm)
Hi Chris,
First of all, happy birthday! I am a friend of Peter Akkies (you work with him on MyBB, right?). I have an iMac G4 myself, and PHP (4.x on OS X 10.3) is already installed on “command line level” (in 10.3, but I think on 10.4 as well). HyperEdit is an example of an application which automatically runs the typed in PHP code (http://www.tumultco.com/HyperEdit/). You probably need a more professional program but it might come in handy.
The Apache server is easy to configure as well, it is pre-installed (although on the 10.3 release it is a bit broken, but I think it is better on 10.4). On http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/mac/2001/12/07/apache.html you can read how to set up Apache. Furthermore, Camino (http://www.caminobrowser.org/) is quite a good browser based on Gecko/Firefox, written in Objective-C (Cocoa, which means it runs fast on your Mac) and it is an universal binary. No browser can beat Safari, but I heard some good stories about Camino. If you need some (Mac) help, you can mail me anytime.
Jeff (March 25th, 2006, 2:43 am)
Thanks for your review of the Mac mini fro a Windows user perspective. It made me think about all those keyboard shortcuts we take for granted. It will be interesting to see how painless the “switch” is, something I am also contemplating. I look forward to your future posts.
PS I found you via your post over on Paul Stamatiou’s site.
Chris Boulton (March 25th, 2006, 8:15 am)
Jonathan,
My text editor of choice is Textmate. It’s one of the primary reasons I ended up switching to a Mac. Like I said before too, I don’t really want to “bloat” up my copy of OS X with things like Apache and PHP – I have an Ubuntu server here for that
Oh and about Camino – I’ve started using that since your post. At first I was thinking “oh, just another browser”, but it is pretty nice.
Jeff,
Thanks for stopping by as well. You get used to the keyboard shortcuts pretty quickly and the switch (well at least for me) did end up pretty painlessly.
Cheers,
Chris
tikitiki (March 27th, 2006, 5:15 am)
Development server ehy… Wish I had one of those
aww well, maybe one day
Glad you like your eMac; We’ve got some new ones at school and they’re actually pretty good. Non-buggy is the way to put it
Jonathan (April 9th, 2006, 1:31 am)
Dear Chris,
In your message you mentioned: I do not want to bloat up my copy of OS X. I just wanted to tell you that a lot of things come pre-installed on OS X, such as the Apache webserver (although I don’t know if it really works good).
John Anderton (April 11th, 2006, 1:39 am)
Looks hawt !!!!
tbh apple’ products do look hot