Apple Mac mini
Back on February 28th, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Intel powered Mac mini at a small event. At the time, the announcement garnered both positive and negative reviews of the machine. Regardless of the reviews, this was the perfect machine I had been waiting for Apple to come out with.
Everywhere the old mini fell short (power, longevity, etc.) this new mini excelled. The one drawback was the integrated video chip which meant that it would never be a great gaming machine… but that wasn’t what I wanted it for.
I bought the thing that very day, and just a couple days later it arrived with a wireless keyboard and mouse. Once I got it home, it took all of a couple seconds to plug the thing into my Samsung LCD TV using a DVI to HDMI cable (not included, BTW) and there it was: OS X on my TV without having to juggle laptops.
Previously, I had been plugging my 15″ Aluminum Powerbook into the TV to watch movies and downloaded content. This was a terrible setup for a number of reasons. One, I had to plug it in each time and unplug when done. Also, I had to store all my media on the laptop which was quickly running out of space. On top of that, the Powerbook didn’t have an optical audio out port, which meant that the sound had to go through the headphone jack which picked up an awful lot of the Powerbook’s internal noise (harddrive spinning, etc). This made the audio quality pretty bad.
The Mac mini solved all those problems with the addition of a 500 Gig external harddrive while adding Apple’s decent Front Row application and remote. Placing DVD’s on the external harddrive even allowed instant access to my entire library from the remote just like iTunes had already done for my CD collection.
Yeah, some things didn’t perform flawlessly. Front Row, for instance, feels very young. There’s lots that it just doesn’t do well, although a fairly recent update shows that it’d being improved by Apple and could grow into a very nice piece of software.
In the end, though, I highly recommend this configuration and should you have cable TV (which I don’t) you can easily extend it using the great EyeTV products.
Posted in Apple, Hardware, Software, Television
