Four weeks ago at MWSF, Apple released a computer that in my view makes all others pale into insignificance. It’s not the fastest computer out there by a long shot. It’s hasn’t got the capacity to hold 1,000,000 GB of ram (or even 8GB should you wish). It’s hasn’t got a very fast or even a very spacious hard disk drive. But what it is, is what is really important to me. The Mac mini is a tiny little box that takes up almost no space on your desk and doesn’t make any noise, yet it’s a decent computer. In short, it’s unobtrusive and it works. I’m not going to go off on some rant about how that’s the way computers should be, because some people want a computer that has the latest greatest chip in it and does a bajillion operations in a second. What I’m going to do is look at the target markets for this computer and take a look at how it performs.

First Impressions

Upon getting the mini out of its box the first thing I notices was just how small the thing is, I expected something small, but this thing surpassed all expectations. The best way to describe just how small the thing is is to take 5 jewel cases for CDs and stack them up, that’s how big the mini is.

The fact that it’s so tiny does not imply that this thing is flimsy. The aluminium shell looks and feels like a good thick chunk of metal and the plastic top looks like it could take a knock or two. The beast is also fairly weighty, adding to the impression of good build quality. The only real way to tell though is to own one for a while and find out just how long this machine keeps going. Judging by previous efforts by Apple you’ll still be using it in five years, and it’ll still be working in a school ten years after that once you’ve sold it.

Setup

So, I sat the machine down on the desk, plugged it in and got started. One thing to note is that Apple does not ship a keyboard, mouse or screen with this little box, so you need to supply your own. The logic is that Joe Blogs who owns a PC already has a monitor from their last Spyware infested mess, along with a keyboard and mouse. The problem being that 90% of PC keyboards, for some very strange reason, still use PS2 connectors, and yes, you guessed it, the Mac mini doesn’t have one. OK, so a PS2-to-USB convertor or a new USB keyboard is only going to set you back 3 GBP or so, but honestly, if apple is trying to tempt PC users, this should be in the box waiting for you.

So, keyboard issues aside, the machine is all plugged in and ready to go. I press the on button and hear the familiar mac ‘bong’ noise as it starts up. And I’m surprised to see a screen asking me to enter my details to get the admin account set up. Every time I’ve bought a mac before I’ve had to install the operating system straight out of the box (a painless operation with a mac, but an hour long hassle all the same). The mac mini didn’t require this, which is a very pleasant surprise.

I reach a screen asking me if I’ve owned a mac before and want to use the settings from that; I click “yes” and embark upon a process I’ve never tried before. The system asks me to plug in my laptop and boot it into firewire target disk mode (by pressing ‘T’ as the machine starts). So I leave it going and come back 30 minutes later to find the mac sitting there proudly booted and logged in. Everything is set up the way I like it, very impressive. So from out of the box I’ve got a system set up and ready to go in 5 minutes, and a system matching a box that I’ve previously set up in 30 minutes.

After a while I noticed that there was a very low noise coming from the machine ᠩs fan had started up as the machine began to get too hot. The noise is very very low, although loud enough that I noticed without listening carefully for it. When the fan shuts down the machine is totally silent. Having looked at the power supply I discovered that the machine uses a maximum of 85W (roughly equivalent to running a light bulb), much less than most PCs use (between 400W and 600W).

Memory installation

Having watched the Apple technical support video that shows how to open the Mac mini and get at the guts, I had a go at installing my own gigabyte DIMM. Let’s face it, the 256 MB that’s in there is not enough. Not owning a putty knife, I had to improvise. A couple of dismantled bulldog clips later and I was ready to perform the surgery. The difficult thing about getting into this box is that you need a tool that will not bend but is also sufficiently thin to fit into a very tight gap. The solution I found worked best was to insert a very thin item either side of the case, and then use that to lever it out very slightly in order to insert a slightly thicker and stronger implement. Once you have got a suitable slice of metal into the gap, the case opens relatively easily and installation is a doddle, but getting it in in the first place is very difficult.

iLife ‘05

iLife ‘04 comes pre-installed on the mac mini, which surprised me, until I dug about in the collection of CDs that came with the machine and eventually found the iLife ‘05 DVD. I found it quite surprising that Apple didn’t pre-install ‘05, I can see a lot of users thinking that the applications that came installed on the machine were in fact the ‘05 versions and not realizing that there was huge advantage in installing iLife from DVD. Once I had installed the newer apps, I started to have a play around. Interestingly, installing iMovie HD didn’t remove the old iMovie, adding to the confusion about which version was which.

First out the box of course was iTunes; now we’ve all played with iTunes many many times, and we all know it’s a great app. Just for kicks I encoded a CD to see how fast the mini was - An impressive 15x rip to AAC greeted me, which is as fast as many high end PCs manage and certainly faster than any consumer level PC is going to do.

Next out, I plugged my digital camera in and saw what iPhoto ‘05 could do. I’d taken a few test shots just to see how iPhoto dealt with it, a few pictures at different resolutions and a couple of little movies. My first impression is that the new interface is a lot cleaner than iLife 04’s. The program also responds a lot better than previously. The photos all imported perfectly and iPhoto cleaned up my camera just as it normally would. When editing photos you can now see a filmstrip across the top of the window which gives you much faster access to photos than before. The editing features are also much improved; the old easy to use tools are still all there, but now there’s some more advanced features. The most obvious advance is that iPhoto now has an “Adjust” palette that allows you to play with various settings for the photo. The new interface style it uses - a transparent window that floats above everything - is very pleasing on the eye and also very intuitive; the transparency seems to make it obvious that it floats over the top of everything. Once you get over the neat visual effect you get down to playing with sliders. Options to let you change brightness/contrast; colour saturation, temperature and tint; sharpness and straightness; and exposure and colour curves all appear in a well designed palette. iPhoto’s other big new feature is its ability to import movies. The feature works flawlessly and allows you to play the movie in Quicktime. I was a little disappointed by two things in this feature. First, it doesn’t embed the player in iPhoto, so it feels a little like a tack on - when you double click the movie it loads up quicktime player and a separate window. Secondly, there’s no option to quickly and easily push the movie into iMovie and play around with it. Instead, I had to load up iMovie, dig into the iPhoto library to find the movie and import it. While this worked, it’s hardly the most intuitive user interface for the job.

Speaking of iMovie, this was the next application I gave a try. I was pleased to discover that it can now import anything that quicktime understands, instead of just raw DV streams. It can also deal with a lot more target video formats, including MPEG4, HDV and Widescreen DV. Once into iMovie not a lot has changed. The interface is slightly updated and looks cleaner and fresher, but otherwise, editing movies is done as it always was. Unfortunately I didn’t have a DV camera on hand, so I couldn’t fiddle with the other major change Ա4e Magic Movie feature. Again, lacking a DVD burner, I wasn’t able to test iDVD either.

Garageband 2 is another story. After playing around for a little I got together a good track with a good beat going - I’ll be at number one in no time. The application sports a huge array of new loops which can be quickly cobbled together into a good track in no time at all. The new instrument tuner comes in extraordinarily useful, and with the aid of my iPod’s microphone I was quickly adding the dulcet tones of my highland bagpipes into the mix. The application in general works much faster than the previous version, editing and recording works like a dream.

Overview

The mac mini is an excellent computer for both geeks wanting a cheap small silent computer (like myself), or for Joe Blogs who’s been getting pissed off with Windows and wants something that doesn’t have spyware infestations every second week. The system is much faster than you would expect from its specifications, easily beating off current consumer level PCs and even competing with some reasonably high spec machines. iLife is really maturing with its 2005 release, but it still has a few annoyances that could do with smoothing over.