Apple's Mac Mini

[halfadder]

Originally posted by: halfadder
Nanode has composite and SVideo out, as well as 6 channel audio. The Mac Mini does not have these features.

I have a correction to make:
Apparently the Mac Mini can do composite and SVideo out with a $19 adapter that plugs into the DVI port. This is similar to how G5 users do analog video-out on their OEM graphics cards. See the Mac Mini specs page for more info.

 

[Wuzup101]

That's a good point, I can't remember the last time I looked at the LCD on my sony MD walkman (which I used before my iPod). They simply don't hold enough to really need one (especially for people that just bring them to the gym and such).

 

[MatthewF01]

As an 18-year old college student who is an absolute computer fanatic, I havent really ever thought to give Mac a chance. The price points have also been well out of my league, given the value of building your own PC desktop...

But the Mac mini certainly is an interesting device...I would love to get one to mess around with Mac OSX.

If it only accepts USB mouse and keyboard, are there any [mini would be nice] KVM switches that do USB in/output?
I would want to recycle EVERYTHING my current desktop is using (17" lcd, 5.1 speakers, USB mx700 mouse & usb kybd), and would my logitech quickcam for notebooks pro camera work, or are there only drives for their iSight cam?

Finally, Mac is making me think multimedia.

How would the Mac mini fare as a multimedia center? Im gonna be stuck in a dorm for a while, but the thing is quieter by a mile than my desktop, which gets annoying for watching dvds and stuff... how far could you take the Mac into a multimedia hub?

 

[halfadder]

I've seen several KVM switches that have USB, some of which use VGA for video, others use DVI. There are lots of options there if you do some web searching. Hopefully you can do pure DVI.

There are indeed Mac drivers for the QuickCam for Notebooks Pro. You don't need Mac drivers for the mouse and keyboard, but they are also available from the Logitech website and have some extra settings, adjustments, etc. Logitech is a very Mac-friendly company.

Macs are great for multimedia. Even though I'm surrounded by PCs here in my home, I use my PowerBook (my only Mac) for almost all of my photos (with iPhoto and with Photoshop CS) and home movies (iMovie and iDVD, and sometimes Final Cut Express). My main use is presentations via Apple's "Keynote" app. I have not yet done much with Garage Band or iCal. I do have MS Office 2004, but I don't use it much with OpenOffice and Nisus Writer Express. The included AppleWorks also has most of the features I need. But really, I use my PC for most of those Office style tasks. The same for web browsing. Apple's Safari is great, and so are the Mac versions of Mozilla/FireFox and Camino, but again I usually do most of my web browsing on my PCs.

For TV tuning / capture, there are several options:
http://www.elgato.com/index.ph...e=products_eyetvwonder
http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyetv200
http://www.plextor.com/english/products/TV402UMac.htm
http://www.formac.com/p_bin/?c..._converters_studiodvtv

For FM radio:
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/radioshark/

If you want to pipe the media from the Mac to your TV there is this:
http://www.elgato.com/index.php?file=products_eyehome
But you could also just buy the $19 composite & svideo adapter from Apple.

The only problem I can think of is the current lack of 5.1 audio out on the Mac Mini. From the looks of the spec sheet, it only has a stereo minijack. I would expect someone like Griffin http://www.griffintechnology.com to make a 5.1 adapter, but time will tell. There are some options though, such as the Transit or Sonica from M-Audio http://www.m-audio.com/index.p...mp;ID=consumerproducts but they're probably overkill.

Of course, you don't have to start out big. If you're interested in exploring Mac OS X, buy a Mac Mini for $479 (you're a student, right?) and play around. You can probably figure out how to add ram without breaking it (and thus breaking the warranty) in the future and you can always add Firewire and USB gizmos down the road. Firewire and USB hubs are cheap if you need more ports, but again, start small and buy what you need when you need it. I don't have any accessories for my PowerBook other than software and a MX900 mouse I also use with a PC, yet it serves my needs perfectly.

 

[halfadder]

copy-paste...

Mac Mini Motherboard photos:
http://www.macnews.de/gallery/...ac%20mini/P1020518.jpg
http://www.macnews.de/gallery/...ac%20mini/P1020517.jpg
http://www.macnews.de/gallery/...ac%20mini/P1020510.jpg

Note that the modem module is removed in these photos. Also funny how the Apple "Intrepid" memory-i/o controller ASIC is the largest chip on the board!

Based on the specs (G4, 167 MHz SDR FSB, 167 MHz DDR333 RAM, Radeon 9200, etc) I'm guessing Apple is using the eMac circuitry:
http://developer.apple.com/doc...rt/040168001721_01.gif

 

[Staples]

Originally posted by: frazzled
Yup, it's a 2.5" HDD.

I wasn't thrilled at first until I reminded myself that my daughter's G4 iBook has a 4200 RPM 2.5" HDD and I must say that it is a pleasure to use.

I guess I won't avoid the idea as much as I would have without your vote of confidence. I have used 5200RPM drives from all periods of the last three + years and it doesn't seem they have made any progress. All of them seem about the same speed to me. Maybe there are some 7200RPM drives they used. There used to be 7200RPM drives but I don't know if they make them anymore. I don't think Dell offers them anymore in their laptops.

 

[Whaspe]

They didn't give us a new powerbook
That's what I'm waiting for.

 

[halfadder]

Apple upgrade the Xserve without any fanfare. They'll probably do the same for the PowerBook in the next month or so. Hopefully the PowerMac G5 too.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Originally posted by: halfadder
Apple upgrade the Xserve without any fanfare. They'll probably do the same for the PowerBook in the next month or so. Hopefully the PowerMac G5 too.

And the eMac too!

 

[hopejr]

Originally posted by: Thin Lizzy

Originally posted by: halfadder
Apple upgrade the Xserve without any fanfare. They'll probably do the same for the PowerBook in the next month or so. Hopefully the PowerMac G5 too.

And the eMac too!

That's what I'm waiting for!!!

 

[Wuzup101]

Apple probably will make a small speedbump to the powerbooks in the next month or so (maybe 1.5 and 1.67ghz G4s with 128mb vid mem and 5400rpm drives standard). I don't see much more than that. It's rumored that companies have already been contracted to build iBook and powerbook G5s in the second quarter of this year... which rocks if it's true.

As for multi media, macs are perfect. I live in the dorms right now and I have a 15" powerbook with a new M-audio sonica theater that I just got for christmas. I run a set of z5500s through those (and my xbox also goes through the z5500s). I have my powerbook connected to an external 19" monitor, and when I want to watch movies on my 32" Tv I can either play them direct from the xbox or by using the s-video out on my powerbook. IMHO the mac mini is a very good value for a multi media PC. The three guys I'm living with next year are already talking about splitting the cost of one for a media center next year.

 

[frazzled]

Hmmm, dorm life sure has changed in the past 25 years :Q

Of course, my programming classes also used punch cards :thumbsdown:

JT (Cal '84)

 

[imported_Lucifer]

I just got info on the Mac mini HD size. Its a 2.5'' 4200 RPM drive

However, the Mac mini?s hard drive is the same kind you?d find in a laptop: it?s a 2.5-inch, 4200 rpm drive.

Link

 

[Staples]

Originally posted by: Thin Lizzy
I just got info on the Mac mini HD size. Its a 2.5'' 4200 RPM drive

However, the Mac mini?s hard drive is the same kind you?d find in a laptop: it?s a 2.5-inch, 4200 rpm drive.

Link

Ouch. That is what I feared. All the 4200 drives I have come in contact with are slow as hell. I will definitely have to see one before even consideration of buying one.

 

[novon]

I'm in for one....just to play with OSX

 

[shadowfaX]

Originally posted by: frazzled
Hmmm, dorm life sure has changed in the past 25 years :Q

Of course, my programming classes also used punch cards :thumbsdown:

JT (Cal '84)

yikes! i think my uncle was talking about using punch cards in his programming classes at cal. i don't know what year he graduated though (but it was sure quite awhile ago).

 

[hopejr]

2.5" 4200rpm drives aren't too bad. I got used to the one in my iBook. however, it would've been nice if there was a faster one in the Mac mini.

 

[halfadder]

Originally posted by: Staples
Ouch. That is what I feared. All the 4200 drives I have come in contact with are slow as hell. I will definitely have to see one before even consideration of buying one.

I'm interested in hearing which model drive it uses. According to Utilities->SystemProfiler, my PowerBook has a Fujitsu MHT2080AT. That's 4200 RPM and 2 MB cache. It sounds bad but I've never noticed it being a limiting factor. I can play with several clips at once in Final Cut Express 2 without any problems. Levels load fairly quickly in UT2004 too. I suppose it could be a problem for someone that works with 40+ MB images or uncompressed video. The largest files I work with in Photoshop or iPhoto are just 5 Mpixel which is still only 15 MB per image when saved as an uncompressed TIFF file, they save to disk in less than a second. The video I work with is from my MiniDV camcorder, and that's only 3.125 MB/sec since it's DV. About the only disk-related performance issue I've seen is the boot times on this PowerBook... it takes at least 25 seconds of hard drive grinding to boot to the login window after POST. (And POSTing alone takes about 25 seconds... so 50 second boot time alltogether. Thankfully waking from sleep/suspend takes less than 1 second).

 

[hopejr]

My POST is only 10 seconds and I get to the login window after about 30 seconds.

 

[Mingon]

Think i'll order one, tempted to get rid of my main machine which is just used for email and using a mac mini and my ezgo micro pc (even smaller than the mac)

 

[Galathron]

I'm interested in hearing which model drive it uses.

The 1.42GHz model uses the Toshiba MK8025GAS 80GB 4200RPM which has 8MB of cache. I would assume the 1.25GHz uses the 40GB version of this drive, the MK4025GAS.

In contrast my iBook G4 uses a Toshiba MK3021GAS which only has 2MB of cache which performs well for myself in most situations, especially after going from 256 to 640MB of RAM.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Originally posted by: Galathron

I'm interested in hearing which model drive it uses.

The 1.42GHz model uses the Toshiba MK8025GAS 80GB 4200RPM which has 8MB of cache. I would assume the 1.25GHz uses the 40GB version of this drive, the MK4025GAS.

In contrast my iBook G4 uses a Toshiba MK3021GAS which only has 2MB of cache which performs well for myself in most situations, especially after going from 256 to 640MB of RAM.

I loved moving from 256mb of RAM to 640 in my emac. Everything got a lot faster!

 

[Jassi]

Is it possible to replace the HD with the Hitachi 7200 rpm drive in the mini?

 

[hopejr]

I got a Fujitsu MHT2030AT in my iBook G4.

 

[cheesehead]

Originally posted by: cy7878
Wirelss is OPTIONAL!! Costs $129. If you add up all the stuff, you may as well buy an iBook because it's the same price.

I fail to see your logic.
In case you have not heard, USB 802.11g adapters can be had for as low as 5$. (I bought a Belkin CardBus 802.11b card for that price not two weeks ago).
The people who this is targeted twoards (namely, people fed up with the sheer crappiness of windows) are likely to have a monitor from a past computer. Those that do not will likely be the types who would get the 70$ 17" flat CRT's you see from time to time in the paper, not 20" LCD's.
And lastly, this computer actually comes with decent software. AppleWorks is in many ways the equal of Office, and is vastly superior to WordPerfect, which is supplied with Dell computers. Mac also has the effective equivalent of the world's greatest antivirus/adware protection software, as almost no viruses or adware are written for it. Macintoshes also excel in the area of Mp3 encoding, which is often the most CPU-intensive task that the pedestrian user requires. (That said, a 1.25 ghz G4 is more than capable of low-end DV editing in iMovie or Final Cut Pro.)