Apple Mac Mini


Click here for more pictures.

General Technical Information

HOSTNAME MINI
SYSTEM CPU IBM PowerPC G4 @1.42 GHz
CACHE (2nd, 1st D/I)
 512 KB, 32 KB / 32 KB
RAM  1 GB (Max. 1 GB)
DATA BUS WIDTH
 		32 bit
IDE BUS 1 x ATA-100 for 2.5" laptop disk(s)
EXPANSION PORTS 2 x USB 2.0 (non-bootable) and 1 x FW400
GRAPHICS Onboard Radeon 9200 32 MB video RAM
HARD DISK DRIVES 80 GB 2.5" IDE internal laptop disk drive, 200 GB 3.5" firewire external disk drive (boot disk)
DVD-ROM DRIVE DVD reader / CD-RW Combo
NETWORK 100 Mbps ethernet, 54 Mbps WLAN and Bluetooth
AUDIO
 Onboard soundcard (output only), built in speaker
OS Mac OS X 10.4.6 (Tiger)
YEAR 2005
SPEED about 2000 (not measured) VAX MIPS
COMMENTS Light, small, quiet, cost-down Mac computer. My second Mac.
PRICE '05 (base system + memory upgrade)
 $600

History and other comments

I decided to buy one of these when Apple finally lowered the price on any new Apple Mac under the "pain limit" $500 (for a basic setup with no extras, the new price was $499, in July 2005). I'm sure this kind of pricing policy will inspire many peecee owners to pursue the Mac world, especially the ones that have been interested in Macs but always turned back to the peecee world after glancing on the price tags of PowerBooks or iMacs. For me the *NIX part of Mac OS X is interesting too. It would be pretty safe to say that OS X has the prettiest GUI ever built on any *NIX OS so far (at least at the moment of writing, Aug. 2005). So the reasons for getting this box was both the price and the fact that I would also get an interesting (for me) new *NIX flavour to play with.

I've upgraded RAM myself just as described on many web sites (if you wish to do-this-yourself, just do some googling). This box runs Mac OS X without complaints. Just be sure that you understand that this is based on laptop technology (to make it small, energy saving and quiet) so it could never perform like any of the "bigger" Macs with faster disks, maybe faster chipsets and not to forget the G5 processor, possibly accompanied by a larger cache.

To make Mini a bit faster to use I purchased a 3.5" FireWire disk and installed the system on it. This turned out to be a good investment: it boots noticably faster and applications load faster too. I had my doubts about the FW400 port, being slower than USB 2.0 at least specification-wise, but now when I've used the external disk for a while I can recommend this upgrade to any Mac Mini user. To get the most performance out of an external disk you need to purchase a fast 3.5" disk, not a pocket size 2.5" disk, which would be about the same speed as the internal disk in the Mini.

Since I bought my Mini without the 'SuperDrive' ( = AppleTalk for DVD burner) I wanted to use my external USB 2.0 DVD burner to burn DVDs with. This turned out to be somewhat problematic because Apple obviously (... and conveniently) "forgot" to write support for cheap generic USB burners for peecees. Normally the device will be recognised as a generic DVD reader, but when you try to burn a DVD there will be some funny error messages. On Mac OS X 10.4 this can be fixed by installing a driver called PatchBurn.  

Back to My Hardware Collection.

 
Last updated:  31-5-2006