My First Mac
It seems odd that I have wanted a Mac for so long and only now have bought one. As mentioned previously, I have purchased a MacMini (MM) for the purposes of testing and music playing. Having got it last week, I have had a bit of time to set it up and play with it. Here are my experiences and thoughts…
Setting Up
The MM arrives in a very small box. In fact, the box is smaller than my small QBic/Soltek PC. This leads to me being very excited before I've even broken the seal! Looking at the back of the box, I see that they have printed a four step guide to setting you MM. Seeing as they've gone to the trouble of printing it, it would be churlish of me to not follow it. OK, Step 1: Unpack your MacMini. Sounds easy enough. I open the box. Inside is the MM, the PSU (almost the same size as the MM itself) and a DVI to VGA adaptor. There is also a manual and a couple of discs which I hastily discard.
Right, Step 2: Connect your USB mouse and keyboard. Then hook up your DVI or VGA display. I've bought an Apple keyboard with the MM which has added 19 squids to the price but it's fairly sexy so I don't mind. I've also got one of them Stark mice from Microsoft (cheers Mr Coote). I was gonna use an Apple mouse but the lack of a right button and wheel would have done my head in so I went for the Starck (plus it has a very cool blue glowing strip down the middle). I ordered the cheapest TFT I could find too from Novatech - 115 squids delivered. It's good enough for what I want and a bargain at the price. With everything connected, I move on…
Step 3: Plug in, turn on and say hello to Mac OSX - OK, <plug in>, <turn on>, "Hello".
Hello?
Ah, it seems to take an awfully long time to start up. Well, it is a bottom of the range MM. First run through has the usual registration and localisation gumf. Then I see the words "Mac OSX Panther - Getting started". Hold on, I thought this came with OSX Tiger. I go and check the order and sure enough it ships with Tiger. At this point my heart sinks and I assume that I'll have to send it back. It is at that point that I see the DVD with the OSX upgrade on it. I am perplexed that there was no indication on the box that the upgrade needs to be done manually - a less eagle-eyed user may not have noticed and never made the upgrade.
The upgrade takes about an hour. Yep, a whole hour! Eventually (about 2 hours from the initial unpacking) I'm ready to go…
In Use
Well, it's not that different to Windows in concept really. The Dock is the equivalent of the Start menu. Finder is the equivalent Explorer. Safari is Internet Explorer. After about 10 minutes of poking around I had worked out the basics and it all seems to run smoothly (although 512MB of RAM would probably have been a good idea). I really like OSX. It is very pretty (does that make me shallow?) and has lots of nice touches like the way programs slip into the dock when you minimise them.
Things that will take a bit of getting used to are using the Apple key instead of Ctrl for copy, cut and paste shortcuts. Also, the Minimise, Maximise and Close buttons are in the top left rather than top right which means I end up tracking twice as far with the mouse EVERY time! Also, when you close a program, it doesn't actually close, it goes into a kind of halfway state so that it starts quicker the next time you need it. Nice but confusing to begin with.
I then set about networking. The MM crashed my BT 2100 router straight away but a quick firmware upgrade seems to have solved that one! The Mac found my PC share easily enough and I set about copying my MP3 collection across. 11GB in 37mins seems fairly reasonable to me. Networking back the other way was a little trickier but a quick Google found a tutorial on getting it sorted. I was now file sharing to my hearts content. However, I couldn't seem to access my PC as a web server to test my sites prior to going live. The chaps on Mac Forums didn't really know either but they asked if I could access the sites from another PC on the network. "Of course you can" I thought. However, a quick test later and it would appear that this isn't the case. Some more Googling and it appears that Windows Firewall is stopping all incoming requests! A quick fettle and all is right with the world.
In Summary
It's going well so far. It is a very sexy little bit of kit and if I was using it more then I would have gone for a higher spec. The little teething problems have all been ironed out and I have learned to loath IE5Mac for the piece of crud it is. This morning I made a speaker lead and now have a couple of Wharfedale Diamond 7 speakers pumping out the tunes the MM is playing. It's all going well so far. Would I recommend it? Well, I wouldn't recommend the MM I have for more than music, internet and e-mail and writing the odd document. The more powerful ones though would definitely be a good home computer, especially for those who don't like computers as it is easy to use and looks nice!
Oh, I forgot to mention - it comes with a couple of stickers which look pretty good on your snowboard. Well, on MY snowboard actually. If you want some on YOUR snowboard, you need to buy a Mac Mini.