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Want to give a MAC a try, and the Mac mini is pretty hot.

C

coolred

Diamond Member
I hear some good things about MACs, especially in the general productivity area. And I would love to give one a try. Especially one of the mini's, those things look great and are so small. But I know they have very little memory 256MB-512MB standard. They also have a very low end graphics card, not that I plan to game on i, but man its got crap for graphics.

Plus with the impendeing switch to intel over the next few years. Is it wise to buy a mac now, or is waiting the better bet.

Yes I know many will come in here saying that if i always wait for the next best thing, then I will always be waiting. And thats true. But I don't plan to always wait for the next best thing. This is just a pretty big change going on, and I am wondeirng if its not worth waiting for. But on the other side of the coin, it is a big switch, and it could have issues in the early versions. So it may be a long wait for somethign without any bugs in it.

What do you think.
 
If you're running a resolution higher than 1280x1024 don't waste your money. I have a mini and even typing in dreamweaver is choppy because there isn't enough vram. (Running 1600x1200).

Otherwise it's not too bad. I'm definitely going to get a high end mac in the future, but not until they switch to intel.🙂
 
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
It's Mac, as in Macintosh. Not MAC as in Media Access Control. A MAC is part of a network card.

512MB isn't too bad for Mac OS X.

It's not a gaming machine, don't worry about the video, it really doesn't matter. Stop thinking x86 gamer.

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Click to expand...

Uh yeah sorry about that, I don't know why I capitalized it all, I knew better then that. Just had a brain fart I guess.

I know its not a gaming machine, but like remagavon said, in his case at the resolution he runs, its still choppy. I will be runing 1280x1024, so maybe it will be okay for me. And I haven't looked into it too much, but I have seen complaints from people saying it is barely capable of playing video such as DVD's and what not. Again I didn't get all the details, so it may have not been the videos fault.


Can a mini with the 1.25Ghz chip, and 512-1024MB of memory handle low end video editing. Mainly just moving home movies from miniDV to DVD, with maybe a little editing. Nothing too much, anything tough I can dual on my main rig. But it would be nice to be able to do soem of the stuff on the mini as well.

I think I am gonna add a poll. And thanks for the link, I will check it out.

One other thing, how does the mini work as an HTPC, not for DVR purposes, but all the other stuff?
 
If you're looking to use apple's software then you really don't have a choice about it, but if you're looking for proficiency with software you already have, the mini won't provide that. It does things well enough, but you can't really do more than one thing at a time with it or it runs pretty slow.

It's basically great for a general low end pc, where you need to use iChat (awesome, btw) and a web browser. It's not really good for much more than that.

I'd look into maybe getting an older ~1ghz dual cpu powermac from ebay which should cost you about the same as an upgraded mini would, and then you could get past the video issue, and have a bit more cpu to spare.
 
Really all I expect to use it for is internet, email, itunes, maybe some word proccessing, my wife might use it for chatting. Does iChat or any othe rMac software allow you to IM people who use yahoo messenger? Like i said, any video editing or whatever can be done on my main dual Xeon rig, it just would be ncie to do soem of it on the mac, since the software they have is supposed to be good for it, right?

I am also considering just toying with linux/unix/BSD on one of my rigs. But I have tried them before, and while I don't really need my hand held, I have found some things that I just can't do/figure out about them. My biggest issues with them are actually small stupid stuff. My forward and back buttons on my intellimouse explorer never seem to work. And probablly my biggest issue is that, in windows using firefox, when you click in the address bar, it automatically highlights the text, so the next address you type gets put in in place of whats there. Where as in the linux distros I have tried, clicking in the address bar just moves the cursor there. To highlight it, you have to double click. I know these are kinda stupid, but its the little things that I am used to, that I can't seem to get by with linux. Some of the bigger things that would cause most people not to like it are things that I have found fixes to or just dealt with more easily then these small things.
 
it'll work fine. apple recently upped the amound of memory standard on a mini so it functions a lot better.
 
i would definetely wait until they switch to intel to buy any mac hardware. although, the Mini is already obsolete to start with, so maybe you'll be happy to replace it.
 
OSX is very refined so the weird 'features' that linux has unless tweaked really aren't there on OSX. Command+L takes you to the location box in safari (address bar in IE) and you can hit shift+up or shift+down to select a line of text, which is more intuative than shift+home or end. I believe iChat lets you use Yahoo, though I'm not positive. I really, really love iChat. You can format the incoming text so anyone with a weird font scheme is much easier to talk to, the sounds are unobtrusive and it's also pretty minimalist.

Web browsing is sometimes, oddly, slow. This might not be the case with firefox, but some pages when using safari are incredibly 'lagged'. Ebay's feedback page was literally running slow. I don't know howelse to describe it becuase I've never seen anything like it before. Typing out a feedback response was sluggish, as was scrolling on the page and general navagation. Most websites are fairly snappy, though still a bit slower than IE.
 
Everything runs pretty fast on my 1GHz G4. My Powermac is limited by the 100mhz front side bus, but my processor has 2mb L3 cache. It runs plenty fast.

I am sure the Mac mini will run faster, with its faster processor, faster FSB and faster RAM.
 
I love my Mini @ 1.25 w/ 1GB..

Does all my music, pics, and internet wonderfully..

Video Editing isn't pleseant with the slow 4200RPM HDD though..
 
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