A few Questions and opinions

Question

Ok, I'm looking at getting a mac mini, as a replacement fora jaded old Tiny PC. Im basically wondering whether the mac mini is substantial for my needsa nd whether anyone ahs any problems or opinons on them. Basically i need a small home computer which will be used simply for the internet, microsoft office, and perhaps something like football manager 2007. Will the mac mini be able cope with this?
thanks

Answer 1

This question comes up quite regularly, and in response I think the most important thing to say is that one has to be careful not to mistake the size of the Mac mini as any indication of it's performance. Inside that small package is a fully-fledged desktop computer which in most respects comes close to equalling the performance and power of the top of the range Mac from just 2 or 3 years ago.
It suffers two limitations in my view. The first is not so much the system itself as it is the current state of software, because like every other Intel-based Mac, the fact is that at present, a number of the most common applications are still not written to run natively on Intel processors. As a result they run, but require the use of an on-the-fly translator to convert them from PPC to Intel code. Rosetta, the translator, is provided as part of the OS but requires a lot of memory and as would be expected, doesn't generally run particularly quickly. To use software such as the current version of MS Office, Adobe Photoshop etc, it would be wise to add as much RAM to the system as possible (the max is 2Gb) to allow 'room' for Rosetta to work. Intel versions of these packages, including MS Office, are due next year.
The second is a relatively slow hard drive. The drive is, in fact, the same as those used in the laptop models, and runs at 5400rpm. It doesn't really impact greatly on system performance except at times when there is significant drive activity. The system can be improved once again by increasing RAM since this helps reduce the background 'paging' activity (reading and writing to virtual memory) but when dealing with large data files, system performance will always be limited to some degree by the performance of the drive.
Fortunately the first issue can be resolved by sticking entirely to Intel-native applications, which means that if you need an MS Office compatible package, you can actually avoid the current (non native) Office by downloading Neo Office, which is Open Source and Intel Native. It's not as elegant as the Intel native Microsoft product promises to be when it is released, but it works and at the very least should tide you over until MS release their software.
Otherwise, a Mac mini is capable of a lot more than basic tasks. I have a number of them in use in networks I manage and their users are very happy with them, including one user who uses his for complex video editing and production.
These are remarkable little systems that seem to rarely disappoint.