Mac Mini

I bought one of these (the middle spec) last week. It hasn't been the wonderful experience that Steve Jobs intends (demands?) that Apple purchases should be.

In the shop they also had the old model, for £399, a £250 saving. I nearly bought one and upgraded it... but decided not to, because the old model had a 20% slower, non-upgradable processor. It would cost £150 to upgrade, so for the extra £100 I got the faster processor and less hassle (and risk).

Once I got it home I used the standard Apple migration tool to copy my setup from the backups of my old Mac. The progress bar for this process started at 1hr 49 minutes, went down to 43 minutes over the course of about 2 minutes, went back up to 1hr 7 minutes over the course of the next 5 minutes, then ran for about an hour and crashed with less than one minute remaining. Remind me again why I paid so much more for a Mac?

It turned out though that the migration had actually worked - apparently, anyway. After a reboot and a reinstall of a few bits of old software which needed upgrading because of the architecture change between the two Macs, I was away, with a system that looks exactly like my old one, but everything works much faster. So that's nice.

I sent the machine to sleep. When it wakes up it doesn't properly query the screen for the graphics capabilities, and the resolution goes wrong. So we've been having to shut the machine down instead of sleeping it. The old PowerBook did it right. Sigh.

A few days later I checked the spare space on my external hard drives, and found I didn't have as much left as I thought. In the past I've upgraded the drive mechanism in the external hard drives, but now I can't, because the enclosures I have use EIDE drives, and all the decent sized drives available today are SATA. So I ended up buying a new external 1Tb hard drive, for an additional £129. This totally changes the equation with respect to not buying the £399 old model computer in the first place. I could have upgraded the SATA disk in the cheaper mini for much much less. Oh well. At least I have the faster processor, and an external ESATA drive (which is a bit of future proofing, I guess).

Okay, lets try out the new features I got with this Mac. iPhoto has a neat feature called 'faces'. It goes through your photos, picking out faces, and if you assign a name to a face in a few photos, it will find other photos of the same person. A pretty neat feature. See this (very long) thread in Apple's user forums detailing all the other people for whom this feature just doesn't work. Grrr.

How about iMovie? I really like the new iMovie interface, where you can have all your clips content available when building a new project. So, I'll import all my old movie projects into iMovie. I started this process yesterday at about 2pm, it finished this morning at about 7am, and most of it is wrong - videos just not there, or in a 16:9 aspect ration when the original was 4:3, or otherwise corrupted. I think I may have sussed out this problem though.

And finally, I got a new game too. Lego Indiana Jones - The Original Adventures. This is an extremely daft combination of action movie and playing Lego, but is a lot of fun and pretty kid friendly, when anything dies it just springs into its component Lego pieces, not a drop of blood in sight. Got it home and read in the small print on the back of the box that it doesn't work on the Mac mini. WTF??? I saw Lego Star Wars, which is very similar, running on a 5 year old Mac with about a tenth of the processing power a few weeks ago!

It turns out that the warning on the box is a lie, the game doesn't work on the older Mac mini with Intel integrated graphics - except that it actually does now, because there is a patch for it. But my Mac mini has better graphics than that anyway.

So anyway. Not exactly a brilliant transition experience - and still ongoing. I'm awaiting software updates for the OS and iPhoto to hopefully fix the sleep problem and the faces problem. Of course, not all of this is Apple's fault. But I've got the blame someone.