Mac Mini

[Mr. SmartyPants]

http://www.apple.com/macmini

wow... i want one

[blkmage]

Not really, there are only two usb ports, and you have to use a usb keyboard and mouse. I guess you could get a usb hub.

RAM, you could upgrade, but only an 80 gig hard drive? No DVD writer and a not that great video card. At over $600 (CDN).

I guess it's okay for people who aren't that tech oriented.

[Debitt]

xD; Would be good for poor college students...and therefore good for me since I'm destined to become one. >_>;

It's not the best computer, but it certainly is better than nothing.

[ShiroiHikari]

I want one. O_o

you can always upgrade it...not like I need a good vidcard. I don't game.

[Mr. SmartyPants]

i like the size. And its fairly cheap, it would be a lot cooler if it were called MiniMac. I already have an ibook and a desktop. So it doens't need to be high end

and it is definately much better than those 500 dollar dells you can buy

[shooraijin]

blkmage, I think the point is that it *isn't* high end -- it's targetted to home users who need a small, inexpensive computer, which is a pricepoint which has long been missing out of Apple's catalogue. It comes with AppleWorks, which can read and write Microsoft Office documents, it comes with iLife, and it supports most standard peripherals. Out of the box, that covers most home users. If you want a DVD writer and a nicer card, Apple would rather sell you an iMac or a full-fledged Power Mac.

My interest in it, however, is as a cheap component for clustering. A 1.25GHz G4, while capable, is no speed demon but at $499 you can afford to buy a few of them and string them together (and they're small enough to make it reasonable, space-wise).

The thing I don't like about it is that apparently you void the warranty by cracking it open to upgrade it. Even if true, I imagine enough complaints will come into Apple that they'll change this policy at some point (not that I haven't voided the warranty on just about every computer I've bought).

[Mr. SmartyPants]

another thing, i was looking at some ibooks before i have gotten my ibook, they were being offered at 1 ghz processor. The next day they upgraded to 1.2 ghz for the same price

[Jasdero]

o.o That's so cute!! X333

*smash* ¬¬ evil Macintosh...

[Tycho]

Not really, there are only two usb ports, and you have to use a usb keyboard and mouse. I guess you could get a usb hub.

RAM, you could upgrade, but only an 80 gig hard drive? No DVD writer and a not that great video card. At over $600 (CDN).

I guess it's okay for people who aren't that tech oriented.

The keyboard has a USB port, so you don't lose anything. (Two actually, but one for the mouse). Unless they're shipping with those wireless ones that the G5 have.

You can get a superdrive (DVDR) but that starts pushing the price up.

As for techieness, its faster than my G4 that I do my work on. And I could play WoW on it.

And if I get into the JET program, I will own one. For now, I will have to settle for an iPod Shuffle.

[shooraijin]

The other thing people are conveniently forgetting is the software that comes with it -- in this case, iLife '05 and AppleWorks. A fairer fight might be to add the cost of Microsoft Works and a comparable DVD creator utility to the PC. (I don't count Microsoft Movie Maker in the same league as iMovie either, for that matter, but this is purely my opinion and I'll give the PC the benefit of the doubt.)

The minis aren't shipping with *any* keyboard, let alone the Apple USB, but Jobs is maintaining that most people will use the USB setup their old computer had anyway. However, even my (at the time it was purchased) "money is no object" dual G4 Power Mac MDD (12/02) has only two USB ports on the motherboard; the mouse plugs into the keyboard. Two USB ports is pretty much standard for most Macs, from minis to my folks' new dual G5 Power Mac, because of that keyboard hub. (I did have to add a PCI card for a couple extra ports, but I have a lot of USB peripherals and I don't like chaining hubs if I can avoid it.)

EDIT: Correction ... the G5 has three ports, one on the front, two in back.

[Shao Feng-Li]

Gimme a Frag Box. But still for five hundred bucks, that thing is pretty cool. RAther have that than my laptop I think. With only five gigs of hard rive, it would be a definate improvement. Heh.
http://www.falcon-nw.com/fragbox.asp

[Arnobius]

It seems kind of underpowered compared to the $500 PCs. My old Compaq Presario 6020 had better stats and that was built in 2002 (and is worth less than $500 now). It would be interesting to see how much Macs get out of their Ghz speed compared to the PC (anybody got a link or info?, because you can't even get a PC as slow as 1.4Ghz anymore, so I'm wondering if this is comparing apples and oranges).

I suspect Apple is doing this, because they are really losing out in the market for new computer buyers. I think I'd pass since I want more power and speed. If I went Apple, I'd probably want a PowerMac, so long as it could match my stats for what I paid (3700+ Athlon 64, 512mb RAM (expandable to 2GB), 16X DVD+/-RW DL burner, DVD ROM, Audigy sound card, 256mb Graphic card, 3 USB 2.0 ports, 3 FireWire, plus it has the old PS/2 ports for the keyboard and mouse so I don't have to waste my USB ports. 250GB hard drive (with room for a second to be added). I paid $1500 for that.

Could I have gotten better from Mac?

[Arnobius]

Gimme a Frag Box. But still for five hundred bucks, that thing is pretty cool. RAther have that than my laptop I think. With only five gigs of hard rive, it would be a definate improvement. Heh.
http://www.falcon-nw.com/fragbox.asp

That ain't cheap. Ran what my system had and it would have cost $2300 in this system

[shooraijin]

I'm wondering if this is comparing apples and oranges

No pun intended?

Yes, you are. In the case of the PowerPCs, they tend to be underclocked compared to x86s of the same generation because the PPC is doing more per clock cycle. Looking at the G4e for a minute (since we are talking about a Mac mini):

- The G4e has a large number of shallow instruction pipelines to take an instruction and break it down into its component operations.
- These pipelines are running in parallel.
- These pipelines, because of their short size, are taking only a few clock ticks to get from instruction into operation. They are, however, much more complex and so must run at a slower clock speed. There are just seven steps between instruction and operation.
- The G4e's complexity limits the number of instructions in flight per clock tick (the pipelines are shorter, so fewer instructions can be accomodated), but also is very resistant to bubbles in the pipeline (mispredicts, cache misses, etc.).

Now the P4:

- The P4 has a small number of very deep pipelines. These pipelines also run in parallel.
- To allow clock speed to skyrocket, each pipeline step has much less to do (comparatively smaller steps), so it can be clocked faster. There are 20 steps in the P4 pipeline between instruction and operation.
- The P4's deeply pipelined structure pays dearly for pipeline bubbles, in excess of 30 clock cycles if a branch is mispredicted and the right branch is not in the L1 cache. A lot of the P4's silicon is given over to making sure this doesn't happen (silicon which the comparably sized G4 can spend on actual execution logic instead). On the other hand, it can have many more instructions in flight if it guesses right.

Ars Technica did an excellent comparison, noteworthy as they are usually a PC-friendly site:

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/p4andg4e.ars/1

Their metaphor is that the G4 is the walk-in and the P4 the drive-thru: the walk-in has lots of short lines but more complex steps (so each step takes a little longer but there is more done per step), while the drive-thru has one big line but faster steps. This is an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

All this to say that clock speed isn't directly comparable between processor types. In fact, look at AMD's chips and check how fast those are clocked relative to what they claim their equivalent Intel speeds are. This kind of apparent mismatch already exists in the PC world.

The G5 has a deeper pipeline than the G4, so some of this no longer applies to the most current Mac models.

[Shao Feng-Li]

Oh my brain hurts...

[Arnobius]

Indeed, my head too. Well the discussion on Pentium waste reminds me why I prefer the Athlon to the Pentium. I do wish that there was some unified standard that pointed out which one actually got you to where you wanted to go quicker. Probably would be meaningless, but it would be nice to see how well a program could be run on a PC vs a Mac.

I do understand the point made about different steps per cycle, since I have an Athlon that runs with about half the steps and from what I've seen, does run faster than a Pentium with similar Ghz (theoretically, mine "creeps" along at 2.41Ghz, but is very fast in installing programs and rendering video).

...and no that wasn't a pun about apples and oranges, just the best cliche I could think of

[shooraijin]

One thing that did annoy me is that eventually even IBM bought into the clock speed myth (i.e. more clock speed = better CPU), and the G5 was in some ways a direct reaction to this in order to bring up the numbers. This isn't to say that the G5 doesn't have many powerful advances over the G4 (it does), but I dislike deeply pipelined architectures and using one in the G5 was a conscious attempt to make the clock speeds more comparable so that Apple, IBM's biggest outside customer, could have a marketing tool.

The G5's biggest bang, of course, is that fat front-side bus -- on my mom's dual 2.5GHz G5, this is a whopping 1.25GHz. One thing I didn't like about the G4 was how the FSB was limited to a (comparably) pathetic 167MHz. In G4 monsters like my dual 1.25GHz G4 MDD, it gets around this with oodles of cache (L1, L2 and L3 for each CPU), but this is clearly suboptimal -- demonstrated when you realize that Apple threw out the L3 cache going to the G5 because the FSB was fast enough not to need it.

Of course, now that Intel themselves are exhausting what clocking can offer due to their process and material limits, even they are trying to wave down the importance of clock speed and instead focus on raw performance benchmarks. This is good not only for Apple and IBM, but also for alternative x86 vendors, especially AMD.

[Arnobius]

Of course, now that Intel themselves are exhausting what clocking can offer due to their process and material limits, even they are trying to wave down the importance of clock speed and instead focus on raw performance benchmarks. This is good not only for Apple and IBM, but also for alternative x86 vendors, especially AMD.

Yeah, I'm waiting for MS to get to the final version of X64 out, so I can take full advantage of my processor (so long as they can make sure the 32 bit apps work as well).

As for Intel, even the top of the line P4EE (or whatever) seems to have hit the wall at the high 3Ghz range, I read the max they could do was about 3.8 overclocked if they wanted to keep stability.

I think I'll never be a Intel person. Athon 64 gives me more bang for the buck (and I only have a 754 pin version)

[Fsiphskilm]

I don't like

[Tycho]

I don't like Apple anymore, sorry after 1st hand experience I can't stand my Mac Cube and am trying to sell it on ebay.

Let me put it this way

If God gave me a coupon for a free Apple computer, it would STILL be a waste of money I just see them as ... not as usefull compared to PCs, With windows I can run 8 things at once and keep track of them, FTPing, Browsing, Music Transfers to my NetMD, Instant messaging, programing, MS OneNote for notes. And All the windows are all shown organized in the Taskbar, but with Apple OSX, there IS NO taskbar.

You are forced to figgit with the clumsy windows or use the Expose feature. Me and a buddy made jokes about how hard-core mac fans only run one program at a time, lol, Windows has it's own issues we all know, but when It comes to getting something done, XP for me.

I'd rather have my COMP crash every 3 months than be forced to use a Mac.

Funny, cause I'm almost always running that many programs on my mac and never have any problems. I fail to see your complaint. Windows are just as easy to access on the mac than on windows. All hidden windows are shown in the Dock (gasp, a taskbar). Expose works great on anything else. I for one would rather not have a 3 icon deep taskbar taking up a fifth of my screen.

And I'm a programmer. That means FTP, Terminal, Programming GUI, and Text editor. Thats a lotta windows.

And say hi to the next spyware program you get.

BTW, I do feel sorry for you cube. That wasn't the best release apple put out.

[shooraijin]

Volt, I think you have this confused with the cooperative multitasking of OS 9. OS X is fully pre-emptive.

I'll be the first to state that OS 9 had a lousy memory and process management model -- most of that was pretty much unchanged since System 6 MultiFinder. OS X is totally different -- comparing Windows 3.1 to XP, as it were.

Also, as Tycho pointed out, the Dock is where you would find your process list (and there are Dock replacements/enhancements if you don't like it). Myself, at any given time, I have Finder, AIM, Terminal, Camino (Mozilla variant), Rockstar Slob (a heuristic playlist music jukebox I wrote myself), Preview and usually a couple emulator windows open. Not only that, but Terminal usually has its own processes running, and sometimes I have X11 processes up as well.

All of them multitask, and all of them can be shut down forcibly with no penalty if you have to.

I did like the Cube -- although Apple didn't think through some of its problems, and it had several important gaffes. Fortunately, it does seem like they've learned from the Cube with the mini. Time will tell.

[Mr. SmartyPants]

Volt, it's all in the power of the Apple+Tab

[Arnobius]

Wait a minute Apple+ Tab? You mean like the ancient alt+Tab switching of Windows 3.11 days? The reason MS made the taskbar was to improve on that, so you don't have to keep switching until you find the right app. Just point click and go direct to the app you want. That's a definite strike against Apple

And say hi to the next spyware program you get.

What's to worry about? Be smart in what you download, keep your firewall and Antivirus updated and it's no problem.

[Fsiphskilm]

The START menu

[shooraijin]

Why is it a strike against Apple to offer the same keystroke that Windows users use? I use Alt-Tab a lot more on my office PC than I use the taskbar, since I can keep my hands on the keyboard.

Also, to Volt, have you considered one possible reason for the speed difference is that the Cube is over four years old?

Now, for my little theory bit. Even though I (obviously) think that Macs are superior to PCs, I hope that our market share never increases above 10%. Here's why:

- We run under the radar as far as malware -- at least malware that's designed by professionals (creeps and crooks alike). They want to hurt as many people as possible, and it's not worth it on OS X. Hackers who want to build a name for themselves will still try, of course, because Apple has tremendous mindshare compared to their market share. Fortunately, there aren't many folks in this category.
- The PC world acts as a sieve for our software. Only games that make enough money to merit ports to other systems will make it here, and likewise for applications. Yes, we also miss out on a lot of gems from smaller companies that don't have the resources or time, but odds are that some Mac developer will see the niche and clone it. This has happened numerous times.
- Similarly, the PC world also filters our hardware. Only bigger name companies like ATI and nVidia create video cards, not all their knockoff-licensees. Only Mac specific companies bother producing upgrades. This limits choice, but greatly improves compatibility and the ability to *test* compatibility. Yet, at the same time, we still have USB, FireWire, IDE and standard SDRAM controllers, so for certain things we are not without choice.
- It keeps the elitist factor, which Apple marketing would practically die without.
- By being smaller fish in a bigger sea, we unify well with other smaller systems out of necessity. Desktop Linux, for example, is a similarly sized fish, but there is a lot of crosspollination, and as a result a lot of Linux software builds identically on OS X.
- The broken windows effect: a smaller userbase means bad software and hardware is identified faster, and complaints propagate quicker, and companies are ostracized more aggressively. In other words, a building with a lot of broken windows will never notice another broken window. A building with a few intact windows will be much more obvious with one broken, and it's likely to be repaired quickly. There was a very insightful blog on this, and I can't find it now.

In some ways, I want a return to the heterogeneous computing environment of the mid 1980s, where there were multiple home and office computer platforms. At home, you had Apple, Commodore and Atari (and depending on your country, Amstrad and Sinclair as well), and less frequently IBM or a clone. In the office, you had IBM, a rash of IBM clones, and sometimes Apple. In the server room -- if you even had one -- you had Sun, HP, DEC and IBM. In this sort of environment, a program that could not move to different architectures suffered. Heck, half my games for my C64 were advertised for different platforms, and many of my disks booted on another platform on the reverse side (often Atari).

Nowadays vendors do not pay attention to portability. Even in OSS, a lot of projects are Linux centric and won't build elsewhere, or not without a lot of work on the vendor's part to get Linux code to compile there. Whether it's not expedient for them to do so doesn't really play into whether they, idealistically speaking, should.

In any case, if Apple were to ever become the dominant platform, I suspect I would have the same complaints about them that I have about Microsoft and PC-based systems today. Running lean is good for Apple; it forces them to evade complacency.

[Arnobius]

Why is it a strike against Apple to offer the same keystroke that Windows users use? I use Alt-Tab a lot more on my office PC than I use the taskbar, since I can keep my hands on the keyboard.

Well if it works for you, fine. I was just suprised that someone mentioned it as an advance, when in the PC world, the taskbar was seen as an advance over the old alt+tab switching. I haven't used it since the taskbar came out, because it's easier to just pick out which app I want instead of switching.

As for the rest of the original post (which I snipped-- people can scroll up to it if they want ), I guess that shows that PC and Mac users really are different. Not a condemnation, just an observation.

I've heard some good things about Mac (notably video editing), but I like XP personally.

[Tycho]

Well if it works for you, fine. I was just suprised that someone mentioned it as an advance, when in the PC world, the taskbar was seen as an advance over the old alt+tab switching. I haven't used it since the taskbar came out, because it's easier to just pick out which app I want instead of switching.

Perhaps it should be pointed out that apple + tab brings up all active program, allowing you to tab switch or select with the mouse. Its a bit better than just program cycling.

Notice I said, "I don't like Apple", not "Apple Sucks", I think apple is awsome, but it's not for me, at least not the current OSX, In the future I might consider test driving one and if i win the lottery I'll buy...

Then in the future, avoid statements like "I'd rather crash than use a mac" or "If God gave me a coupon for a free Apple computer, it would STILL be a waste of money." To me, those are just thinly veiled "Apple sucks" quotes.

On the state of OS X's useablilty, are we using the same OS? I could see performance complaints about OS 9, but X is probably the best OS the mac has ever had.

And let's dispell this stupid "Macs are only good for AV" myth. The reason that this exists is because prior MS OSes had terrible graphics. And even though PCs can do this know, most publishing houses are still primary mac based.

Frankly, I only see Apple's future as bright. We have the corner on music players (iPods), make wicked servers (Xserve) and hopefully the cheap Mini will get use a bigger foot in the home market.

[shooraijin]

Well, in fairness, Macs are built out of the box for AV, and Jobs has made AV a strong priority. In this year's keynote, he even talked about this being the year of HD (hi-def) video, and he's updated the entire video product line (iMovie, FC Express, FC Pro) to match. My folks are running FC Pro HD on their G5 and it's very nice. So, even though I chafe under the stereotype as well, it's understandable, and it *is* an Apple corporate brag. If it gets more people into Apple stores, that's something.

Another interesting thing I hear from people, particularly in creative arts professions, is that they want a Mac for work and a PC for play. The Mac runs all their apps they need for what they do, and often faster or in a more integrated fashion, but they still want to come home and play the latest blast'em'up which has probably not been ported yet. Like I say, whatever gets 'em to the checkout counter ...

I'm serious about keeping Apple low percentage though. I'd like our marketshare to be a little bit bigger, but not -that- big.

[Tycho]

Well, in fairness, Macs are built out of the box for AV, and Jobs has made AV a strong priority.

I have no problem with macs being focused toward AV. It is were our primary market base is. However, I don't like the "macs are only good for AV" attitude some PC people have.

[Fsiphskilm]

I updated my P