First Impression of the Mac Mini

After a little over a week, we finally received the Mini. I'd have to say that I'm most impressed with the packaging. You can tell that Apple puts HUGE amounts of care into appearances, and their packaging of the unit is one of those details. The mini came in a tiny white box with a handle on top. Inside it had everything carefully wrapped in clear plastic (like a new CD). The unit itself was tiny, about the size of a CD case. Interestingly, the power brick, which was also sleekly styled, was almost half the size of the computer. Putting the thing together and initial setup was a snap. Just plug it all in. Here are my random thoughts from what I could do yesterday:

-It is hard to get used to using the copy and paste functions, which requires using the windows key, rather than the CTRL key, which I'm used to.

-The mini came with OSX 10.4 Tiger installed, but also with a Leopard install disk. I DID in fact install Leopard, and found it to be somewhat faster overall than Tiger, but the doc is kind of weird looking. I think I preferred the old doc, but its a minor quibble.

-Installing and uninstalling applications is too simple. I wish windows could be like that.

-It takes some getting used to having a fixed menu at the top of the screen per application, rather than a menu connected to the actual window of the application. I keep forgetting to look there.

-I hate that clicking the x button does not quit the application, but only hides it. I'm a performance miser, and that is something that I could easily overlook and end up with 40 apps opened at one time.

-I had to download a driver from HP's website for my printer. I also should note that HP never released an official driver for my printer, so I actually had to do some google searching to find one of the same "family" that works on the Mac. I've not officially printed anything yet, but I'll assume that the driver works.

-iPhoto was not as impressive as I had thought it would be. I'm glad that I ordered Lightroom. Photo organization and quick editing were a breeze with Picasa. Its a bit more involved with iPhoto, but I like the added control you get over image exposure. I think what I hate is the weird photo management and arrangement. I felt like Picasa did that way better.

-I'm still trying to get iMovie to work. It just hangs on me each time I launch it. I've never once had it working. Stupid FedEx.

-There is way less flexibility in tweaking the system settings than in something like Windows or even Linux. Either way, most things are eye candy anyways, so no big deal. Just something I noticed.

-Once I actually figure out the iTunes interface, I think I might like it. I'll be honest in that I've never been a fan of the iTunes GUI over the years and have avoided it on my PC, but its integration with OSX and FrontRow is probably a good reason to start learning it.

-Installing OSX Leopard was so simple that Microsoft should be somewhat ashamed at the way its done in Windows. The total installation (clean install) took 45 minutes. The process can be that short in Windows, but the screens for OSX make it much less intimidating.

-Garage Band looks so awesome I'll just reserve to say that it deserves its own separate post, once I can actually start producing some music on it (yes I do play and write music sometimes).

I think I'll stop here with the thoughts. There's still a lot for me to learn and explore, so these initial thoughts might be totally bunk in another month. Either way, I'd have to say that I'm still feeling neutral on the whole thing. I don't LOVE the mac yet. Its too different from the things I've used over the years to just take it at face value. Stay tuned for more thoughts.