I’ve just bought a Mac Mini and retired my five-year-old desktop PC, an Athlon XP based system running the Ubuntu Linux distribution. With steady upgrades (especially a 2GB RAM boost), it was still quite usable, but the CPU was showing its age and the graphics were miserable. I’d tried fitting a new AGP card in, but the system rebooted randomly and I’m just not patient enough to suss out the source of the difficulty any more.
Most of my computer science friends made the leap to Mac four or five years ago, while I stuck it out with Linux for quite some time.
I ultimately made the jump for three main reasons:
- Unix without the hassle of Linux. The terminal and macports/fink give me the full power of the Unix command line and most of the Linux toolset–but I get a polished GUI on top. To be fair, Ubuntu Linux had a pretty clean, simple GUI on top… but I really got sick of things breaking from release to release, and spending hours trying to figure out what was wrong. (Examples: PulseAudio in the 8.1/9.0 releases, Amarok2 in the 9.0 release, nVidia drivers in 8.1, etc., etc.) To be fair, Mac has its share of problems too–it looks like a lot of software has broken with the Snow Leopard release, especially in the macports/fink world. But the basics will almost always work, I think.
- Low power consumption and quiet. I’m really impressed by Apple’s commitment here: 15W / 30W power consumption on the Mac Mini (idle / active), versus 64W / 100W for a typical minitower PC. I did a bit of research on this, and PCs have certainly improved over the last 5 years—the new Energy Star-rated “80 plus” power supplies are certainly decent. But the killer these days appears to be graphics: a dedicated PCI graphics card really sucks juice, while the Mac Mini uses a graphics chip optimized for notebook systems. The Mac Mini’s chip isn’t the hottest on the market, but is still capable of playing many current graphics-hungry games like Quake 4. And because the chip is designed for notebooks, it’s very power efficient.
- Futureproof…? I’d like to be able to continue using this system for at least five years. This is always a challenging game to play—parts come and go, new operating system versions come out, new media are invented. That said, USB and Firewire allow a lot of the customization to happen outside the box now, and the main things that are inflexible are processor, RAM, graphics and software. I’m most concerned about the software—I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple orphans the Mac Mini down the road, given the hands-off treatment of the first Mac Mini model. That said, as long as I can load Linux on it once Apple drops support, it’ll continue to be useable. We’ll see what happens.
At first blush, it looked like the Mac Mini was within $100-$200 in price of a comparable spec PC. I spent a while trying to ensure that I was making an objective decision without being seduced by Apple’s slick, glossy emotional appeal. In the end, the PC makers dropped prices dramatically for the back-to-school season, and there was no price contest; I paid a full $250 more for the Mac Mini with slightly poorer specs. I’ve justified this to myself on the basis of wanting a truly good operating system, and getting a truly energy-efficient computer.