“She was cute, no doubt about it. But the world is full of cute. I have been faithful so long that I wasn’t about to be swayed by good looks,” Bill Husted writes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “So I left her sitting there for a long time and kept using my PCs. But a guy can only ignore good looks for so long. So, using a kitchen knife, I opened the package from Apple and took a look at the new Mac mini.”
“A $500 Mac mini is a great marketing ploy for a lot of reasons. Mostly, it gives PC owners an excuse to try one as a second or even third home computer. The payoff for Apple is that some PC homes may gradually move over to becoming Macintosh homes,” Husted writes. “The mini comes with the OSX operating system, which I’ve found to be quite stable at work. Just as is true with Windows XP, a crashed program (and that still happens with both Macs and PCs) won’t bring the whole system down. The Mac mini
has just 256 megabytes of RAM, but OSX makes good use of that amount of memory, so the mini still seemed reasonably fast,” Husted writes.
MacDailyNews Note: Mac mini buyers will want to get a minimum of 512 MB RAM upfront. Don;t settle for the base 256 MB – it’s the bare minimum and you’ll want more.
“Although less powerful than my PCs, it seemed just as fast online. So far I haven’t had a chance to run more demanding programs on it. I suspect the speed difference will show up then. But from what I’ve seen, this machine is fast enough to be the main computer for many folks,” Husted writes. “It comes with an excellent DVD drive… When I popped a DVD movie into the mini, the picture on the monitor was superb. The mini would also connect to many modern TVs using a DVI connection (common with digital and HDTV sets). At just $500, the ability of the set to play DVD movies may be a selling point.”
Husted writes., “I had worried — based on the price — that too many compromises were made to create a Mac for $500. But so far the Mac mini is more than just another pretty face.”
Full article here.
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