Well, I took the risk and bought a Mac Mini on Saturday afternoon,
and was both pleased and relieved to discover later that it was
indeed one of the new spec machines. I bought the middle Mini in the
range, the one with the higher CPU speed with Combodrive. The specs
that I'm reading in System Profiler are:-
a) CPU is 1.5Ghz, bus speed 1.67 Mhz;
b) supplied memory is 512 Mbyte. Interestingly the memory is reported
in System Profiler, and confirmed by examination, to be PC3200-400
DDR, not PC2700 as Apple's specs say. Probably this change is a
result of the faster bus speed. I will be increasing the ram, of
course - see below for more on this.
c) graphics chip is an ATI Radeon 9200, but with 64 Mbyte of VRAM. So
not really suitable for on-line 3D gaming, but plenty good enough for
what I want;
d) hard drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.2 model ST9808211A, which is
an 80 Gbyte, 5400 RPM drive. Again, better than the previous specs.
So altogether I'm well pleased.
Memory upgrade: I started off asking the Applestore to do the
upgrade, but backed out when they told me it would be an extra £140.
This contrasts with the on-line Apple store's price of £70 extra if
specified as a build-to-order machine. The reason is that if it's
done in the store they don't recover the 512 Mbyte ram already
installed, they remove it and give it to you. Also I think there's a
charge for the fitting. So it's going to be a Crucial job.... about
£75 inc. VAT & postage. I've already had the Mini open - the hardest
part of that is just screwing your courage up to do the amount of
levering you need to do to 'spring' one of the edges out - and after
loosening a screw so the Bluetooth antenna can be move clear, the
single RAM slot is perfectly accessible.
I've also moved everything across from my old Powerbook, using the
Migration Assistant that appears during first boot of the new
machine. After connecting the two machines with a Firewire cable and
booting the Powerbook into Firewire mode, everything came across. It
really was that easy. The only thing that took a little work was
iTunes: my playlists weren't appearing. Then I noticed that the new
machine had iTunes 4.x installed, and I had already upgraded to
iTunes 6 on the Powerbook. After upgrading to the same version on the
Mini and restarting iTunes, everything was fine. All my other
applications, including Photoshop CS and Office, have worked perfectly.
As far as performance is concerned, everything feels much, much
snappier. I haven't done any serious image processing work yet, I'm
going to wait until I get the 1 Gb ram. But so far I'm seeing
significance performance enhancements in everyday things. As I
should, of course: the 12" Powerbook not only had a slower CPU bit
also a 4200 RPM HD and just 32 Mbyte of VRAM. So even in these areas
the Mini is a step up. I'm very pleased with it indeed.
Tom Burke
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