- Average user rating: 3.5 stars out of 20 reviews Back to product review
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11 out of 11 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"5 Kids - 1 Mac Mini - It changed our computing life."
Pros: So simple and easy to use
Cons: Few games. No hardware based CD Eject button.
Summary: I am not your typical Mac Fan-Boy. My family has recently switched from Windows based computers to the Apple Mac Minis.
We have five kids and we home school. We decided to buy a computer dedicated solely to our school efforts for the kids. Our first computer for this purpose was not made by Apple. I literally hated the machine. Every week my kids came to me complaining that the computer wasn't working again.
I donated it to our church and bought a Mac Mini, on the advice of a dear friend. Since then we have not had the first failure, had to format the hard drive, run spyware removers and such.
I have set up an account for each child. None of these accounts have administrator rights. This means that they can't add things they shouldn't, or remove things that are essential. Everytime they install something it pops up a window asking me for my password, so I get to review what they are doing.
Each account has built in parental controls that allows me to control e-mail, web browsing, chatting and such.
You really can't appreciate how small it is until you have it on your desk. It is T-I-N-Y!
Now we have 3 Mac Minis in our house. One for me, one for my wife, and one for the kids. We use a wired router because I don't know enough about the wireless ones to feel secure with one. That being said, all I had to do was plug the cable in. I didn't have to change a single setting, or tell the Macs anything. All three computers magically get on the internet.
Sorry for the ramble, but I am forty years old, and in my 25 years of computing I have never been this excited about a computer before.
- 2 replies to this review
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Thats good news...I was stuck to windows until now. I dont know how many mac machines I have sold to customers, as I used to work in a electronic retail shop part time in London. [and I did not own a mac at that time..lol)
I am switching to Mac next month, probably with a mac mini core duo. I got an lcd t.v 23" recently [res 1024x768,contrast ratio: 1600:1] .Cant wait to hook up the mac mini to it..... -
All I can say is Ditto. I had been a PC user for the last 14 years because of my engineering background. I finally took the advice of a good old friend, bought a mac mini for our 6 homeschooled children when we moved, my son bought a mac laptop for college, and we haven't looked back. The mac min has been running virtually non-stop (not even powerdown for 12 months without a single virus, lockup, file corruption that delayed us more than a few minutes-Something unheard of on ANY pc I've ever had. Hopefully the Intel chips will change non of this. With Google Earth and SketchUP to Geographic and drafting programs available in MAC versions-I would totally abandone PC's in the near future with the Core-duo able to run windows XP (unfortunately still need this to deal with my GIS software and AutoCAD products.
Go Apple
Apple Mac Mini Core Duo (1.67GHz):
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