My Mac Mini Impressions

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

Iporã — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 16:28:08 GMT

Hei, very nice that you described your feeling with your first Mac, I got the first one around the time yout yours, and it is steel the same one I have, is surely needs an upgrade, I'm steel in Panther wuth 256 MB memory, but I love it anyway!!!

Don't shame about the photos, it's exactally what I was searching on google images, just in the wat to pack my mini in the same way it came from the store... I was not getting how to put the cables in the box, now thing fit perfectly.

Thank you a lot!

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

David.Wang — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 06:39:44 GMT

Gene - Yup... Apple pays a lot of attention to aesthetics and functionality and makes some cool hardware. And Mac OSX is pretty svelte to look at, too.

As to which is "intuitive" or better, I think there is no right/wrong answer. Using a broad-brushed analogy - Windows is much more flexible and tuned toward the no-frills, reliable Engineer-types, while Mac is more fixed-function and tuned toward the artistic/no-complexity types.

Sure, it is possible to make a pretty Windows OS and a techie Mac OS, but that is not the default persona. So, to give an artsy type a PC or to give an Engineer-type a Mac would probably not work out. ;-)

For example, I think I am open-minded and flexible enough to appreciate and understand the Mac, but I am not a blind Mac fanatic that will defend it to the death nor will I dismiss the Mac as inconsequential like a Windows user. I merely observe what is advanced as well as limiting with the Mac, PC, and *nix platforms, I know what makes intuitive sense to me, so I concentrate on using the best of all worlds in the right situations...

//David

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

Gene Kriegsmann — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 20:52:58 GMT

I was amazed at how similar your first impressions were to mine. I have owned Windows Based PCs for nearly 20 years. My first plunge into Mac was to purchare a Core Duo 17" iMac six weeks ago. The packaging blew me away. The entire ambience was so different than any previous computer I had purchased.
I must admit that my Apple experience began with a 20GB iPod. It is what first got me thinking about buying a Mac. The aesthetics of the Pod were something unlike any other player I had seen. The fact that shutting it off required a gentle touch as opposed to a harder push on the wheel is just one example of the total feel of Apple products. (I have found the same with my remote on the iMac.) Apple is about Aesthetics as much as it is about computing, and that is a very different experience.
As to OSX, what can I say? It combines functionality, stability, and aesthetics as well. It is intuitive which Windows never was or will be. I have a powerful PC which gets booted less and less often. I am a Machead.

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

David.Wang — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 12:15:55 GMT

Matt - ok, I linked in the picture which most explicitly shows what was where, how it was tied together, and the packing wrap (if you still have it) should be obvious from the geometry.

//David

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

David.Wang — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 04:44:32 GMT

Matt - Sure, no problem. Now that I have some storage space for photos with the MSDN blog, I can link them together.

//David

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

Matt — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 03:50:41 GMT

Care to post those packing images. I would like to repack my mac mini and it is like a puzzle game that I really just want to have the solution to.

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

winmac! — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 04:49:55 GMT

Anders:
I mentioned in my earlier post how I manage to crash it by just unloading and loading the unmodified Apple kexts - For USB It's easy - Unplug Maxtor drive and plug ipod. Machine goes crazy to the point starting applications is not possible. (Even terminal.app).

It's another matter that my USB enclosure with laptop hdd works very fine with Linux and Windows but not with MAC OS X.

But I am fine with that I _am_ addicted to Apple h/w and MAC OS X. I was just highlighting the fact that technically speaking Windows and Linux are two damn good OSes which work well with nearly all the hardware you throw at them (well not Linux but it still has fairly good device support).

David Wang - Good post, I submitted bug reports for all the problems I faced with OS Z with the appropriate people :)

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

David Wang — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 01:38:55 GMT

Ok, here's my 0.02...

I think that at the core, Linux, OS X, and Windows XP are all pretty solid nowadays - way better than say five years ago or even two years ago for all respective OSes. This isn't so say that any of them are perfect - they all have flaws in a variety of areas - and depending on whether your daily usage pattern hits those flaws, your views on the OS will differ.

My gut feeling about the majority of declarations about how "my personal experience with OS Z is that it is bad/unstable because of blah, blah, blah" is that they are basically second-hand information. Why?

Well, very few people come forward with a core dump of the segmentation fault or debug dump of the access violation causing the unexpected behavior and debugging it. And until that is done, fault simply cannot be correctly assigned. Debugging provides first-hand information of what actually happened; personal interpretations of what happened is basically second-hand influenced by personal perceptions, amongst others.

At which point, we are just discussing personal opinions that can degrade... which I'd like to avoid.

Incidentally, this is where Windows tends to get beat up by consumers because it supports orders of magnitude more devices, drivers, software, etc than any other OS, which combined with users having a hard time (or not even caring to) distinguishing between a failure in the OS vs a failure in the 3rd party device, driver, or software, Microsoft gets the bad rap.

For example, 90%+ of "crashes/hangs in IIS" reported by customers, when investigated by Microsoft, are actually caused by 3rd party or even customer code. Raymond Chen also implied similar stats when it comes to device drivers and Windows BSOD.

Coincidence? I think not. People can write bad code no matter the platform. It is th perception that differs.

//David

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

Anders — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:37:46 GMT

When i leave work i pull out the DVI.wire, network wire, and 2 USB- wires while the machine is running. I close the lid , put it into my bag and runt to the train. In the train i open it up, get a 15 sec Finder beachball when it looks for the network drive I so violently took away from it, but goes on just fine. I connect over bluetooth/gprs for some 20 minutes, until i get to my station. Close the lid, hurry to my car and get home. Often I have to open my computer at hom, it connects automatically to my wireless network and everything just keeps runing smoothly. This I have been doing for 4 years, practically everyday, never crashing, and hardly ever turning off my Powerbook.
So how did you manage to get a USB related crash?

re: My Mac Mini Impressions

Weili Wang — Mon, 21 Nov 2005 21:26:46 GMT

winmac!:

I've seen new computer users (be them Mac or Windows) who "accidently" deleted certain system files and wonder why their computers won't reboot.

Fact is, it's is EXTREMELY easy to crash a computer, be it Mac or Windows, especially if you aren't familiar with the system.

Instead of blaming the system, many users should review what THEY are doing wrong first.