Mac mini – the first few days

It’s been two and a half days since I brought the mini home from the Apple store and I thought I’d share some of my early experiences with it.

It’s tiny – I mean it is unbelievably small. When my wife came in for the first time to see it, she said “Where’s the computer?” because she was expecting this big behemoth that we’ve become used to in the age of Tower and even Mini-Tower PCs.

It’s cool – not just that it is wonderfully designed, it runs cool. I think the aluminum sides make a difference. Whenever I touch them they feel cool. Plus I’m guessing the fan/ventilation is well engineered. Hope that Dvorak notices this, since this is was one of his concerns before he started to officially recommend it.

It’s quiet – The only exception to this is when the optical drive spins up. Otherwise, you can’t hear the fan or the hard drive. This is a stark difference when compared to my old PC or even my Xbox.

Display resolution problem – when it first came up, the mini started displaying at 800×600 on my Gateway 2000-branded Sony Trinitron 17″ CRT, which I normally run at 1024×768. I had to dive into the preferences to change the display resolution. This may be a problem for those who are switching, since the mini doesn’t come with the Display menu item enabled. Instead, you have to go to the Apple menu, then go to System Preferences, then choose Displays. Anyone else out there experience this problem or is it because my monitor is almost 10 years old?

The mini has an internal speaker! This isn’t a PC internal speaker that just goes beep or click. This is a speaker that outputs sound like a PowerBook would. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there is a hole for the sound to come out of, so it is quite muffled. Or perhaps it is not amplified. So you could get away with not plugging in external speakers, but only if you’re in a quiet room and you have good hearing.

Now, when you connect external speakers while the mini is on, the sound automatically re-routes from the internal speaker to the external. Very smooth. I think that the iPod has this sort of headphone jack sensing technology too, except that when you unplug your headphones, the iPod stops playing. It won’t re-start playing unless you manually re-start. BTW, I think the mini calls this jack a headphone jack.

The reassuring Apple LED – there’s a small, round pinpoint of an LED on the front that glows when the mini is on. When it is asleep, it has the reassuring slow pulse that tells you that it is sleeping soundly, just like on a PowerBook. The Apple logo on top doesn’t light up or glow, but maybe it should. It would be quite cool and also match the PowerBook’s glowing Apple logo.

I’m the only one who hasn’t cracked open their mini with a putty knife – or so it seems. Already, Russell, James, smash and even Dan Frakes from MacWorld have not just opened theirs with putty knives, but even posted instructions, pictures, and video!

Why would someone risk damage to their brand new and elegant Mac mini? Well, because people don’t want to pay $450 for 1GB of RAM (which is the official maximum amount of memory you can put in a mini.) Instead, many folks are buying them for roughly $200, give or take $20, opening up their minis with a $5 beveled puttty knife and then replacing memory like you do with any other Mac or PC. I don’t think I’ll be doing this anytime soon since it seems like 256MB is going to be OK for my kids usage.