Tech Goes Boom

Review: Mac mini

You've already seen a ton of Mac mini reviews out there, but I thought I would throw my week of experience in there for the heck of it.

The Packaging: Apple really nailed this. The box is very small. It was a smart idea for Apple not to include the keyboard and mouse both from a price perspective and for the box size. The psychological impact of buying a box this small is much different than buying a G5 or even an iMac. It's easy to grab that little box and head to the register. It doesn't feel like you've made a huge purchase that you may regret.

The Machine: Apple is bridging the gap between consumer and pro machines with the Mac mini, and they show it in the case. Wrapped around the front and sides is the brushed metal finish we've come to expect on Apple's pro products, and on the top in the glossy white iMac finish with a grey Apple logo. As many others have said, it's hard to get a sense of how big this thing is from pictures. It's small. Truthfully it's not much bigger than a regular hard drive.

Popping the case reveals the intricacies of Apple's engineering. It's an impressive, tightly rigged set up in there. One thing to watch out for when adding extra ram (which you will probably want to do) is the back ram clip cannot fully disengage because of the stiff RF shield on the back of the machine. So you will have to do a little manual pulling to get the chip out of the slot. Not a big deal, but something to watch out for.

The machine is dead quiet. While there is a fan in the machine, it is inclosed in a vent which dumps the hot air out of the back of the machine. You'll probably never hear it. Putting a cd in the laptop sized drive seems to make an unbearable racket in comparison. Because it's so quiet you may notice drive activity from the notebook hard drive that would wouldn't notice in normal conditions. Mine tends to make a rhythmic clack every 20-30 seconds. I checked my 12“ powerbook and it makes the same access sounds, which I had never noticed before. It's really soft, but discernible when the machine itself is so quiet.

Tough Choices: Like I said earlier, you're going to want more ram. I popped 512 in my machine, which is acting as a web server. If I was using it as a desktop, I would probably throw in 1GB. The less we can swap virtual memory out to that slow laptop drive the better. And speaking of that laptop drive, for some, it may be worth it to swap that 4200RPM drive out for a 60GB 7200RPM drive from hitachi. Newegg has a good deal on it. Of course you can also use an external firewire drive to boot from for that extra speed.

Of course, dropping $250 on more ram and a fast desktop speed drive seems to go against the cheapskate ethos inspired by the mini. I have started measuring purchases in my life by ”percentage of mini“. In this case, more ram and a faster HD could buy me half of another mini. Would I rather have another machine, or speed this one up? Tough choice. Thanks Apple, for giving me more tough choices in my life.

Mac mini as a server: In many cases, people use over-powered machines to run most of their server needs. For small offices or homes, there's no heavy lifting involved in serving up files or acting as a print server or serving up web pages. Even some business related server activities like e-mail, DHCP or directory services aren't particularly processor or drive space intensive. For these people a mini will do a great job. I'm currently using mine to serve up 5 web domains with e-mail for each, running movable type. Averaging 2000 hits a day across those domains the mini isn't even breathing hard.

It's important to note the mini in some ways out-specs the first generation xserve with a faster processor and bus speed. Given a 7200 RPM drive, and a gig of ram, it could even replace one for most server needs. If you're currently running a mac server, and haven't felt any particular need to speed it up, get a faster network card or bigger faster hard drives, chances are a mini would work out fine for you.

While OS X Server seems expensive, it can be had for as little as $250 education priced for 10 users. If you've got a student in the house, it's worth picking up.

The TechGoesBoom synopsis: The Mac mini is an extremely capable machine in a very quiet, very small enclosure. It fills a lot of needs for a lot of users, and it's going to make Apple a lot of money.