Posted by Scott Hughes
Tue, 28 Feb 2006 18:30:00 GMT
Damnit! I waited too long to flip my Mac Mini PPC on eBay… Now that Steve’s announced the Intel Mac Minis, it’s going to be a hard sell. If you were holding out on switching, the new Mac Mini’s look a lot more attractive than they were before. From the Engadget live-blog of the event:
10:09am PT - Introduced the iMac, doing really well out there, MacBook Pro reviews are off the charts, two of the things helping this transition are universal applications. Rosetta turned out to be much stronger than we thought it would be, running most PowerPC apps. Today we’re introducing our third machine, the mac mini based on Intel’s Core Solo processor.
10:11am PT - It’s two and a half to three times faster in the same box. Also, putting a core duo processor in the Mini, it’s 4.8x to 5.5x faster. We have a product that’s over five times faster in the same form factor. We’ve added gigabit ethernet and doubled the number of USB 2 ports to four. Analog and SPDIF input and output. And its really quiet, it’s a pretty great product.
Ooohh.. Audio-input – something that was missing on the previous generations of Mac Minis. But this is nowhere near the point of giving me Buyer’s Remorse (not like those poor folks who bought the iMac G5 a couple of months before they announced the iMac Core Duo).
Posted in OSX | Tags MacMini | no comments
Posted by Scott Hughes
Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:17:00 GMT
I’ve been drooling at the dual- or quad-core G5’s for a while now, trying to decide whether or not I want to spend that kind of money on a new computer. I’m really very happy with the Mac Mini; you certainly can’t complain about its price. But I do still have some speed concerns. Specifically, application startup time can be horrendous. Applications which hog a lot of memory (like Firefox) can be unbearable to restart. The current solution has been to never shut anything down. Sometimes switching between applications becomes cumbersome, but never as slow as a fresh startup. Before I traded up to the big Macs, which have way more power than I’ll really need, I want to see if it’s possible to give the Mini just a little more juice.
Read more...
Posted in Technology | Tags benchmark, Firewire, MacMini, MacOSX | no comments
Posted by shughes
Tue, 28 Jun 2005 03:00:00 GMT
A couple of weeks ago, I made a comment in Chris’ blog post about how he tried to ruin his laptop with a bottle of water. For your convenience, here’s my relevant addition to his story where I tried to ruin my delicate Apple hardware…
Last weekend, Nicole was using my brand new Mac Mini. Of course, that also means she was using my almost brand new Dell 2005fpw 20” lcd… Not to mention my mostly new wireless keyboard. And, she was drinking coffee while doing this. So, I’m playing fetch with the dog downstairs. The way our apt is laid out, we have a second floor with a sort of balcony over the living room which is where my mac mini lives. I decide to give the dog a good challenge by tossing his toy over the balcony edge to where Nicole is sitting. Nothing but net… The toy went straight into the coffeee, splashing coffee everywhere. Keyboard was the worst hit, but I did actually get a big splash on the Mac Mini. It looks like it’s going to survive, but I have a nice brown stain on the felt in the slot loader to remind me of what an idiot I am. I think I got the keyboard back to a good state, though if the N sticks on me again, I’ll have to buy a new one. Can’t tolerate sticky keys, you know…
Today, thanks to a remnant of that mess, I learned a couple of things about my Mac Mini…
- Dried coffee is like hardened cement when placed between my computer desk and the rubber bottom of the Mac Mini and will, in most circumstances, require an actual chisel to separate the two.
- That little power cord in the back slips out of the Mac Mini like a frightened, greased pig at the county fair.
- Mac OSX does not berate you for improper shutdown of your system, unlike Windows XP.
That third point is an interesting one to me. I’m very familiar with recovery on Windows, given that prior to WinXP crashes were quite frequent… I’m sure Mac OSX must have some sort of method for recovering orphaned files and, perhaps, booting into a safe mode if I installed something which hosed the boot process…
I need to add that to my “to research” list…
Technorati Tags: MacMini, MacOSX
Posted in Humor, Personal, OSX | Tags MacMini, MacOSX | no comments
Articles Only
