Mac mini

Ken — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:30:13 +0000

I've had my Mac mini for a few weeks now, and thus far, I love it. Especially nice is the fact that's it's practically silent. By comparison, my old G4 sounds like a vacuum cleaner with its continuous whooshing.

The process of cracking the mini open to upgrade the memory and hard drive was a bit heart-breaking, because I put a few scratches into the bottom casing as I was doing it. I guess it's not noticeable (since it's on the bottom), but still... I hate to blemish a pristine system.

According to XBench, the mini is roughly 2.5 times faster than my G4. Actually, I'm surprised at how well the G4 still holds up by comparison. It's possible that if I were to upgrade the CPU and graphics card on the G4, I could make it run almost as fast as the mini. But then again, it would cost more to buy those upgrades than it would to buy a new mini.

Gaming-wise, the Nvidia 9400M isn't too shabby. If I boot into Windows, City of Heroes runs smoothly at high resolutions with most effects turned on. Unfortunately, the Mac CoH client bogs down at times; the Cider translation engine isn't quite good enough for the 9400M. But still, the Mac CoH is at least playable, and I can always boot into Windows if I want the better performance.

Migrating data from my G4 hasn't quite gone as smoothly as I'd hoped, but I think that's mostly because my G4 is still running 10.4 Tiger and older versions of Mail and iLife. I've managed to port over all my email, my RSS subscriptions, and my photos. I haven't done iTunes yet.

All in all, a worthwhile purchase. And as I said before, the nice thing about the mini is that it can easily be repurposed into a server or media box if I choose to upgrade again in a few years.