But before you start let me tell you why. I am doing some research for something and needed a Mac to play with to test some stuff out. My good old Windows laptop is sitting directly in front of me as I type this, but I do have some initial observations and I will talk about what drove me to stand in line at 5am with some dedicated Apple users Saturday morning.
I was talking with me wife last Thursday about some issues I was having getting objective comments out of some developers on software that they were working on. I needed that information soon. Being I am doing a considerable amount of consulting I decided it may be a good idea to get up to speed on what Apple has been doing and the price entry level of the Mac Mini fit into my budget for the project. Plus we could write it off as a business expense. :)
So I called the Apple store here in Hawaii and asked if I could reserve a Mini. They said “no way” first come, first serve, and they had a limited quantity. They mentioned the store would be opening at 8:30 am and to get there early. I asked how early is early. Apparently some people had announced plans to camp out over night.
So as the alarm clock rang at 4:30 am on a Saturday I got out of bed pissed off about how stupid could a company be for only having limited quantities on an official release day and went to the store. Sure enough 5 other people were already their and the earliest arriving person had shown up at 2. Of course they all had power books out and were chatting away about stuff I have never heard of. So when the discussion moved to me I talked about podcasting and some other subjects avoiding the fact that I was a hard core Windows user that was getting ready to drink the Kool Aid and have the wrath of my readership pound me to pieces.
People started to show up in mass around 7am at 8:30 the doors opened and I got Mac Mini #6 from the Honolulu store of only 20. There were at least a 100 people behind me and many not very happy when they announced no more Mini’s having been only open 15 minutes.
I picked up some more ram for the thing at CompUSA who turns out had a lot more Mini’s than the Apple store. I thought that was pretty funny and I could have stayed in bed if I knew that.
I got it home set it up with my current mouse, keyboard and monitor tied it into the KVM and have been playing around with it some. Obviously having spent years on a windows machine everything is second nature so I am not used to having to go look for information on how to do basic stuff. One thing that does is amaze me though is this thing is truly mini. When I opened it up to change the ram I could see they packed a lot in small space.
Performance is ok considering they have basically released a Poor Mans computer. You still get more bang for the buck out of some of the low end Windows machines but I will give them credit for trying.
Have I caught the Mac fever? No not by a long shot, because my initial opinion is that Windows still has a significant upper hand on them on applications and I think the argument for ease of use between the two has been debated to death. [Mac Mini]