Travis Vocino Experiments in Art, Science & Technology.

Now that I’ve spent some intimate “alone-time” with the new addition to the family, the Mac Mini, I feel I can comment on how it’s working out.

The Mini journey started when I needed to get more done at home. I had been using a PowerBook to do my extracurricular work at home, usually while sitting on the couch or outside. While this was great for watching TiVo, it wasn’t so great for being productive. I needed a better home office environment where I could properly separate play time and work time.

I have a Dual 2.0 G5 PowerMac for my “office-Office” and I thought the investment for another one in the home-office was a little much. I hadn’t really considered the Mac Mini — I forgot about it quite honestly — but when I happened on it while browsing last Friday I said to myself “Oh right! There’s that Mini thing.” So when I got home I immediately told Wendy the great news — I was expecting.

In preparation for the arrival of our bundle of joy, we decided to rearrange our home office in a configuration more conducive to workflow and staying focused. We now have just the one (Mini) computer and a ton of desk surface — we’re minimalists. This replaced two full PC setups, including, “Megatron”, my Ultimate Gaming Machine, and Wendy’s dual-boot XP/Fedora Core machine. It looks great.

We went to the local Apple Store and picked up a 1.25GHz Mac Mini for about $530 out (with tax and stuff). The 1.42 just didn’t seem worth it for the extra $100+tax.

The first thing I’ll say is, it’s small. Cute but not fuzzy (unlike Sophie who is both cute and fuzzy). No, the Mini is elegant and sophisticated in appearance. It rests peacefully next to my monitor in the home office of Vocinoland (to the left, specifically). It’s extremely quiet too, which is a significant and pleasant change from having two PCs blasting away system 2-3 fans each in this room.

As for performance, coming from my PowerMac, it is noticeably more laggy — but I expected this. I don’t do nearly as much multi-tasking as I do at the office — about 10 applications open across two monitors. I’m looking forward to putting a full Gig of RAM into the little guy (it’s maximum capacity) which should help things considerably.

The main drawback is the hard drive, which is a 4200RPM notebook drive. Honestly, though, even with the limited RAM it has now and the slower drive, it still feels very nice. My workflow isn’t compromised at all. I attribute this to MacOS X being a superior environment. Once it has a Gig to work with I think it will be perfect. I could upgrade the drive but I really don’t think it hurts me much. The drive speed increases are expertly outlined in this Bare Feats article.

For $499, you can have yourself a stylish desktop that runs the best operating system available (represent!), is surprisingly upgradable after the initial purchase (RAM, hard drive, airport, external firewire/usb devices) and makes your life easier. I think it’s a great buy, personally.