Mac mini Review At Macworld

lemonylimey writes "Macworld has the first hands-on review of the new Mac mini along with nicely illustrated step-by-step dissection. It looks like the mini comes apart easily and (unsuprisingly) uses standard notebook components: a Panasonic DVD-R drive on 'SuperDrive' equipped models, Seagate Momentus 2.5" notebook ATA-100 hard drive and a single, nicely accessible 184 pin DDR DIMM socket. Upgrade options aside, it might not have the clock-for-clock power of the equivalent $499 PC, but you have to ask yourself - If you put them both on a shelf and ask your Mom* to pick one, which one is it going to be? (Yes, I'm sure your Mom is a Doctor of Mathematics and wouldn't buy anything she couldn't run Debian on. You know what I meant.)"

Benchmarks

[Gob Blesh It]

And here's a bunch of performance benchmarks pitting the Mac mini against a range of other current Macs [macintouch.com]--not just abstract numbers but real-world tasks (think "17 Meg file" [kottke.org]). I wonder how PCs stack up, particularly with Cinebench and the iTunes rip test...

talked with the project lead

[voisine]

Had a nice conversation with the project lead for the mac mini this morning at the apple store in the Westfield mall. He said first day sales blew away any computer apple's ever made, by a sizable margin, although the shuffle blew the mini away for first day sales of any apple product ever. He said he was asked, can you make it this small? (10" square)... yes. Can you make it this small? (8" square)... yes. Can you make it this small? (7" square)... maybe. Can you make it this small? (6 1/2" square)... no. Okay, that's the size then.... oh crap! :)

Re:Imagine...

[the pickle]

Actually, Apple says not to do that [macintouch.com].

I suspect it's mostly a wireless issue, and if you're building a mini-cluster, you'd probably rather use Ethernet to connect them anyway, and you probably won't be using Bluetooth. Either way, at least the top machine would have antenna access, so if you absolutely needed BT/802.11 you could have one of them do wireless and relay to the rest over Ethernet.

p

Re:Imagine...

[tfiedler]

In eight rack units I could fit what, 16 of these critters. So I get 16 1.4GHz G4 processors for about US$9,600 My cluster of eight xserve g5s (16 cpu) cost me about $35,000 and takes up 8 rack units. Now my question is this... what is the real world performance difference between 16 1.4 GHz G4 processors versus 16 2GHz G5 processors and does the $25,000 difference make up that gap? Then, if you figure the cost of double the power cords, ethernet cabling and administration does it still?

Re:Underpowered?

[FLAGGR]

I agree. Currently, my main system is a P2 / 266mhz. I spend all my time programming games and stuff, works fine for me. Sure, I could go on one of the family PCs, which are P4's, but this one is in my room and runs fast enough. (Then again, half the stuff I do I have to move to another PC to test it, because either my CPU is too slow or GPU doesnt support some feature) I ordered a mac mini, can't wait (3 weeks till it ships, so says apple) xcode will be awsome.

Some random benchmarks

[kompiluj]

I have lately started thinking about buying MacMini, iBook or a PowerBook. Because I most often use Gentoo GNU/Linux or FreeBSD (but I also use Fedora, SuSE, M$ Windows and Solaris) therefore I have done some benchmarks to compare compile times on some different architectures. My software of choice is PostgreSQL database since it's size is just right (a few minutes of compile time anyway). Ok, here come the benchmarks (the most important is the 'user time' which is how long really the compile took, it discard other factors like filesystem, HDD and system load factors):

# cd /usr/portage/dev-db/postgresql/
# ebuild postgresql-7.3.6-r1.ebuild fetch unpack
# time ebuild postgresql-7.3.6-r1.ebuild compile

PowerPC G4 750FX 800MHz, 512kB cache
real 5m53.398s
user 4m26.985s
sys 0m51.748s

Intel Northwood ("old" pIV) 2.8:
real 2m56.295s
user 2m29.630s
sys 0m26.190s

AMD Athlon 1.5 256kB cache(Sempron 2200+):
real 5m55.046s
user 5m9.700s
sys 0m34.270s

AMD Athlon 1.8 256 kB cache (Sempron 2600+):
real 4m14.234s
user 3m19.729s
sys 0m44.704s

Well, not bad for 0.8 GHz, heh

Re:PC competition for the Mini-MAC?

[daviddennis]

I hope you got a laugh out of the other reply to your post, which was an ancient troll. He didn't even update the model numbers and mhz ratings he used, how sloppy was that?

But understand that there are two types of customer. One type, and I fear the most common, looks at the details of a product and tries to compare it to others using a laundry list of features. For instance, a computer with an 80gb hard drive is better than one with 40. One with 512mb is better than one with 256mb. This completely ignores whether the products are well designed and assembled, whether they run MacOS X or Windows, and so on. This type of buyer drives the market because he/she/it is most common. It's much easier to describe something in numbers than in depth.

People who appreciate Apple products tend to look more at the whole product than the specifications, and they realize that while Apple isn't the cheapest company in the world, it makes fabulous things because it sets out from the start to do just that.

The two types of customer really don't understand each other very well, and I think that's why there is so much passion between pro and anti-Apple factions. One point of view simply cannot understand the other.

One thing that does intrigue me is that obvious valid anti-Apple arguments are rarely seen. For instance, you have to re-purchase much of your software if you want to use an Apple computer to its full potential. If you have Office, you need Apple Office. If you have Adobe products, you need to upgrade them. And so on.

The best anti-Apple argument is that many people fear change and going to something different. I've known people like that and they are perhaps the hardest type of person to deal with. This is largely disregarded on Slashdot simply because most Slashdot people are happy to learn about new operating systems and user interfaces, but it is a genuine problem.

So yes, there are lots of trolls and they change but little over the years. Perhaps they are simply envious of the cohesiveness of the Apple community and its obvious love of the products. That's something very unusual in this day and age, and we should celebrate it. Don't kowtow to the God Steve, but don't ignore his virtues either.

D

Ram $$$ savings

[rollthelosindice]

It is so good to see that the end-user can do their own ram installations on the Mac Mini. After all, with one of the main purposes of the machine being cost savings, it would be difficult to achieve with Apple charging $425 for what the other says can be bought for $160 (1GB ram chip).

I have come to the conclusion that I will buying one of these and replacing my lilksys wireless router with it. It's about time I got a legitimate home network setup, and this is a great motivation.

Re:Underpowered?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a Java developer, and I am planning on getting a Mac Mini to use as my primary development environment (using either XCode, Netbeans or Eclipse as an IDE).

It will be quiet (unlike my current noisy PC), and will hopefully provide a cleaner, more stable UI than Windows. I've spent more time fighting Windows than doing work lately.

Compilation can be done on my Linux server, and the appserver can run there too. I doubt I'll need more than a 1.42GHz processor for coding, given that I used a Celeron 466 up until 2 years ago with similar IDEs. They run fine once you disable automatic compilation, and may even run fine with it on the Mac Mini (although I can really live without it).

Re:iDVD question

[Anonymous Coward]

correct me if im wrong, but during the keynote didn't steve say that llife 05 has removed that restriction and you can use idvd with anything now?

Re:Imagine...

[prockcore]

Server Admin: Remote Server Admin tools let you configure and monitor all key services of Mac OS X Server from near or far.

Not so. It only monitors the services provided by Apple. If you want to roll your own Apache and PHP (because Apple-provided PHP is currently vulnerable), the server admin won't show it, and as far as I can see, there isn't any way to add it manually.

It doesn't even work on all Apple provided services. Apple Remote Desktop doesn't show up.

The xserve is a nice piece of hardware, but the OS is poorly suited for servers.