Apple Mac Mini Core Duo user reviews (1.83GHz)

Pros Small, compact, OS X and XP, WIFI+BT, Sleek

Cons DVI out instead of VGA, few ports, no eject button

Summary Those of you looking for a small, good computer that does minimal things, look no further. Mac Mini has you covered. For me, I use it for videos, music, surfing, and some light gaming, which makes this perfect for me. Only problem is that I have too many USB peripherals to connect and it makes it tough to get them all in. I had to buy 2 external hubs to keep up. So far, I have connected an external card reader, which I would like to see included, a 750GB external hard driver, an external dvd burner (which I've switched to using Firewire), an external sound card, a keyboard, 2 USB hubs, and several PDA device cradles. That being said, it works perfectly. I put it below my TV, which I'll be upgrading to a 30" LCD TV. Once that happens, I can ditch the smaller LCD monitor and I can watch TV and control my computer on the same monitor. Putting there saves space and I use wireless mouse and will be getting a wireless keyboard soon too. One problem I see is that if you don't get an external sound card, the sound quality is pretty bad. Also, the DVI means that many monitors won't work. I have to get an LCD screen to get it to connect. It won't work with my old tube TV. Also, the USB ports are next to the USB ports and with all of them jammed, it's cumbersome to have to take one out to unscrew the monitor cable off.
For performance, It's pretty good. I upgraded to a 2.16 GHz Core Duo and have 2GB of RAM. Later I may upgrade to a Core 2 Duo, price-permissble.

Overall, this is a great system. Few complaints and definitely an upgrade from a 1.2 GHz AMD from 5 years ago.

Pros Price, Speed of processor, Build Quality,

Cons This is as perfect an entry Mac as it gets. Has it all.

Summary Its amazing to me, how Apple has perfected itself in the last 2 years. Starting with the inntroduction of the iPod 5 years ago this month, Apple and their desktop line of Macs start with this machine. And it delivers it all, and at a cheap and fair price.

Looking for an introduction to the wonderful world that is Mac OS X? This does it cheaply, and with everything youll need to get started.

Pros Quiet...almost too quiet, its eerie. Fast. Comes with quite a few full version software (not 15-30 day free trials or limited feature versions). Small.

Cons Safari browser does not always render websites correctly (that is a gripe about Safari not the Mini). A tad expensive once you add the 1gig of ram. No DVI cable knowledge by Apple folks/me.

Summary Purchased this computer for my brother after his laptop finally bit the dust. He really only uses his computer to yahoo chat, limewire music, youtubes, eBay, and myspace. He was going to get another laptop from Dell due to their very attractive priced $549 Inspiron 1501. The only reason he wanted a laptop was due to him not having room to place a desktop PC in his living space.

So he called me and asked me to look into it for him. I reviewed the Dell but was a little disappointed with the power for the price (mind you for what he uses his PC for it would actually have worked for him). I finally stumbled across this Mac Mini by accident. I am a diehard IBM-clone, Intel, Windows-based, whatever you want to call them user/supporter. For myself I would never had considered a Mac, however considering my brothers lite usage of the PC I figured a Mac would do him right. Also he has a gift for finding and downloading EVERY virus on the planet. So once again I figured that Mac would be better due to their lack of viruses.

Ok so we go purchase this machine. He has an LCD TV (non-HD...this becomes important later) and has enough room on his entertainment center to place the Mac Mini. While at the Apple Store it becomes apparent to me that he will have to run the USB keyboard / mouse cable (that I was going to provide him) from his entertainment center to his chair....yeah that is not going to work. Ok so I purchase the wireless keyboard and mouse for him as a early Christmas gift. Being a power junkie myself, I force him into the 1.83 (from the 1.66) and I force him to get the 1 gig of ram, as opposed to the 512 meg. I realize that this is going to put him way over the $549 he wanted to pay for the Dell so when we go to ring the whole thing up I pay the difference (which comes out to $400 including the mouse and keyboard). I do this for two reasons, 1) I have always been interested in the "dark side" (mac) of the computer world, and 2) I want his net money spent to be the same so that he does not regret the purchase. In addition I paid the extra amount because I have been looking for a living room PC for myself and if this pans out for him I would purchase one for myself (was worth the $400 to me...if you can believe that).

Ok we get the Mac Mini home and quickly realize that it does not have a connector to the TV/Monitor. So I tell my brother to finish hooking it up and I head back to the Apple Store (30 minutes away). I get there and they don’t have the cable. The Mac Mini has a DVI output and my brothers non-HD LCD TV has a DVI input, however the Apple Store did not carry a DVI to DVI cable. They had EVERYTHING else, DVI to HDMI, DVI to S-Video, DVI to VGA, DVI to RCA, DVI to AGP (or whatever the old apple display was), but no DVI to DVI. The Apple guy tells me to go to Radio Shack to pick one up. The Radio Shack is in the Mall a couple of stores down so I don’t mind the advise, though I am a little put off by it. I get the Radio Shack and lord they don’t have it either, they can order me one but they need to know which type, DVI-A, DVI-I, or DVI-D. Beats me? So I head back to the Apple Store and ask which kind of output this is...the guys answer "DVI". Yeah I get that part, its the -A -D -I piece I need. He had no clue, but to his credit he spent 30 minutes with me trying to figure it out. Finally, after a wikipedia search, he determines that I need a DVI-D. He then looks online and finds that Best Buy has them in store (as opposed to Radio Shack having to order one). So I get to Best Buy roughly 20 minutes later and they toss me a new curve ball. Do I need Single Link or Dual Link? Once again I don’t know. If I would have had the Mac Mini in my possession at that time I would have taken it back to the Apple Store right then, gotten a refund and went to the Dell display in the Mall. However I remained cool and purchased the Single Link cable hoping this is what we needed. Finally 2+ hours after I left my brothers house I return with the “magic cable”, or so I hoped. We plug it in and ….. no video. My brother is all upset by this and even starts to mumble something about the Dell laptop. I am trying at this point to remain hopeful but am getting upset myself (actually already was but am trying to hide it). So I remembered that the Apple Store had a DVI to S-Video adapter. I check his non-HD LCD TV to ensure it has a S-Video connector and I rush off again to get the adapter. Roughly 75 minutes later I return with the adaptor and an s-video cable. Bingo the Mac has video. This totally changes the mood in the room and we both are like “we need a beer”.

The very first thing we saw when we finally go the Mac running was a grey screen telling us to either plug in a mouse or turn on our wireless one. We turned on the Mighty Mouse (I expected this mouse to come with a cape, but sadly it did not) and turned on the keyboard. After spending a few minutes typing in information (like address, name, user id, etc…) we were up and running. What amazed me was that it did not need to know anything about the internet. We just plugged the ethernet cable in and it configured it automatically for us. It proceeded to check if it had patches and then proceeded to download and install them for us. After everything was finished (not including the cable problem) we had only spent maybe 30 minutes tops.

There was no annoying pop up (purchase me) software installed. There were no annoying limited function or limited use software installed (that we have found yet). Everything on the Mac was fully functional and worked great. The system is very easy to navigate, even for a old Dos/Windows person like myself. We installed Yahoo Chat and it worked like a champ for the Mac. The only problem we ran into while using it is that Safari does not render ebaums world correctly. When you use the search feature it will chop off about ½ of the results and place them into the bottom bar on the website, which makes that ½ useless…which also limits the use on the website as the Next/Previous links are in that mess somewhere. I do not know if Opera or FireFox would work with Mac, I have no looked into it yet.

As for other things related to the actual Mac Mini itself (hardware). The machine is eerily quite. I had to keep looking over to see if the blue light was on to know that was running. You can not hear this Mac from more than two feet away. The machine itself does get a little warm but nothing that I would worry about (from a “can I sit it on my nice finished wood surface” perspective). It boots up VERY fast and shuts down even faster. If you leave the Mac in sleep mode (which by the way Apple recommends unless you are going to be away from it for 3+ days) you can awaken it with either a click of the mouse, touch of a key on the keyboard, or from the little remote control they give you. In S-Video mode the picture looks alright, but it is a little fuzzy. I suspect that with the correct DVI cable (or running it in VGA mode) you would get a crystal clear picture.

***WARNING*** - The DVI dilemma. Ok if you are not a DVI guru (like I was not) you may not know the difference between Single Link, Dual Link, DVI-A, DVI-D, DVI-I, and all of the other mess DVI gives us (no wonder HDMI is the new standard). You do not need a Dual Link cable for the Mac unless you want to run two monitors. So you can save yourself some $$ and purchase a Single Link cable. If your LCD TV is HD, then you will want the DVI-D. If your LCD TV is non-HD, then you will want the DVI-I. You do not want the DVI-A.

Ok to sum up:
HD LCD TV – Single Link DVI-D
Non-HD LCD TV – Single Link DVI-I

That little jewel of information there can save you hours and tons of money on gas

Pros Incredibly small profile, decent performance

Cons limited upgrade options, so-so graphics, small hard drive, no FW800

Summary I start by saying that CNET's review wasn't very good. Their screed about 90 days phone support for example is deceptive in that most manufactors HP included include only 90 days of software support on the vast majority of their machines! Apple's support historically has been far better than most of their competitors, which is hardly suprising since most of the software is made by Apple. Except for a trial of MS Office almost everything is made by Apple. Most Windows machines are a mish mash of software manufactors and the manufactor of the computer made next to none of it! Apple is also one of the only companies that has largely retained their tech support within the US. Therefore, you don't talk to some foreigner with a strange accent that you don't understand. CNET even ran a story about Apple closing their experimental center in India, but apparently the writer of the review doesn't bother reading CNET. Sad...

The biggest criticisms that I have is that graphics card is pretty weak. While I can get smooth 1080p playback of movie trailers the Intel integrated graphics is not suitable for a lot of high end gaming or high end video/photo editing. With a 500GB external drive this is a good basic machine for playing back video on your TV. I only find it unfortunate that the machine doesn't offer a Blu-ray option yet. If they had a Blu-ray option and they could keep the price below a $1000 I think this would be real good HTPC, but alas it would plays standard DVDs.

It is unfortunate that there isn't a means of upgrading the graphics either through a low profile PCIe card or a MXM card either, so you are pretty much stuck with the graphics. The HP slimlines offer a PCIe low profile slot, but unless you are going to throw down at least $200 you couldn't get much better graphics on the HP either. If the most demanding use of 3d graphics is going to be some 1080p video playback the graphics card will cut it, but if you are editing video or playing any hard core games I would go for another machine preferably a larger form factor with a dedicated graphics card (Geforce 7900 or better)and either a higher end Core 2 or maybe even a Quad.

The Hard Drive is a bit small albeit for the vast majority of users the size isn't a big deal as much as the speed of the HDD. A lot of people would fill a 160GB HDD. They really should put 7200rpm drives in the mini to improve the performance. This isn't a laptop so battery life isn't a big deal. Even beefing it up to a 7200rpm wouldn't increase the wattage so much as to require a noisier fan. If you are really into large amounts of storage for video you should just buy an external Hard Drive. It is unfortunate that the mini has neither FW800 or eSATA because both are much faster. Since the Mac Pro and the iMacs all have FW800 I would have figured Apple would have added it by now. eSATA may have been asking much because eSATA drives haven't been on the market as long, but not getting FW800 is a real bummer. The HP they compared it to has neither as well so I don't really find the HP larger price tag that appealing.

Upgrading the memory is more difficult than it ought to be(get a putty knife and google Mac Mini memory upgrade), but you can get 2GB of DDR2-667 for about $100 at any decent local computer store. If you do that than you can sell the 2 512mb modules, whereas buying 2GB through Apple you let Apple keep the memory. I rather think that they ought to include the extra gig of RAM on this model since it would only add about $40-$50 to the cost(average joes can buy it for that price so Apple shouldn't have any problem buying it for that price). It would also make the performance running Vista on theis machine better as well. A lot of people buy a Mini as a way to get their feet wet in the Mac world without spending fortune.

The lack of a card reader is much ado about nothing. Internal card readers add clutter to the case and wouldn't support any new future card formats. Won't it look stupid to have a card reader 2 years from now for cards that nobody uses anymore meanwhile having no slot for new proposed standards? How much longer will you need a slot for XD or MS? Heck who needs Smart Media anymore? Furthermore, replacing an external card reader is far easier if a pin gets bent on the CF slot or somthing.

All said I think that the Mac Mini 1.83Ghz model is a nice machine albeit I think that it definately isn't for everyone. It makes a fine basic home theather PC or basic home user. Anyone looking for a high end HTPC should just build it themselves. Anyone who edits video or does hard core gaming should be looking at a standard tower instead of low profile machines. Despite some flaws(no FW800, no eSATA, no Blu-ray, no dedicated graphics) I can see quite a few people who be bothered by my criticisms and will find this unit appealing.