Mac Mini Six Months On

I was exactly six months ago that I bought the Mac Mini, my first Mac ever. When I first bought it I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. It was so frickin' tiny, even the box was tiny, and it was so quiet, which was actually the reason I bought it. And of course, there's OS X.

After a few days I started to get disappointed in how slow it was. It was much slower than my old low end PC. I mostly care about "the snappy" for Firefox and I eventually got it when I switched to a G4 specific build of Firefox (I benchmarked it to be almost twice as fast).

But I was still disappointed in how slow it was compared to similarly priced PCs. People who think that Macs are just as fast as PCs are full of shit. The megahertz myth may have some validity, but a 1.2 GHz G4 isn't even in the same world as a 2.4 GHz P4.

So after Laurel bought her iMac G5 I was seriously thinking of upgrading to an iMac G5 right away. The iMac G5 still wasn't as fast as a low end PC but it ran iPhoto resonably well and it definitely had "the snappy" with Firefox. But I waited, I had only bought the Mac Mini a few weeks earlier.

The the Mac Mini grew on me. That little box sat there quietly on my desk and served up everything I wanted (except for iPhoto). Over the last few months I've been slowly doing more and more on it. I always have X running in the background. I run Firefox with scores of tabs open. I always have emacs running. I always have iTunes running. And I've just recently started using Photoshop Elements, which is slow, but it works. This computer works well for me. And I now get annoyed listening to the iMac when it awakes from sleep.

So I'm now happy that I didn't buy an iMac for myself. As long as you don't spend hours using Photoshop and you are willing to give up PC games, the Mac Mini will probably work well for you too.