Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer

Mac Mini: The Emperor's New Computer I just had to blog this review of the Mac Mini by a so called MCSE. Now i'm not a Mac officionardo by any small stretch of the imagination - hell - i've only touched one for more than 2 minutes a few times! But this bloke has got it all wrong-wrong-wrongo! I'm glad i never made MCSE - it obvioulsy means nothing these days! Quotes: While the hardware is about roughly equivalent to a Windows PC circa 1995, what got me interested were Apple’s claims about its size, weight and footprint. Hmmm.. 1995... thats when i first started fixing PCs. The birth of Windows 95. The PCs were 486s with 16 or 32mb of ram! Now lets compare that to the MacMini's 1.25 or 1.42Ghz G4 processor with 256Mb DDR-RAM. If you believe Apple’s marketing department, the new Mini is “smaller than most packs of gum” and weighs “less than four quarters”. Well, we received our test unit from Apple yesterday, and let me say right off the bat that those claims are a wee bit of an exaggeration. Well.. if you had been reading the spec of the new iPod Shuffle then you may have read that information..... but not the iMac Mini. While there is a Mac-style “donnnnggggg” when the Mini is first turned on, during normal operation the unit makes no sound whatsoever. This could make it very difficult for a novice user to know whether or not the computer is on. In fact, it took our techs about fifteen minutes before we realized the unit itself was operating normally and it was the monitor that was not plugged in properly Ahhh... the old classic! I drove from Milton Keynes to Norwich once to fix that fault! Actually - that was back in 1995 too! The Mini boots up into a stripped-down operating system which Apple calls OS X, similar to the stripped-down WindowsCE OS found on many handhelds. Yeahhhss... sure it does... Just cos its got no Start button its stripped down. There is no Outlook Express for email, but Apple includes a program called Mail, which is like a stripped-down email client. Duh! Secondly and possibly even more glaringly, there is no antivirus program shipped with the Mac! In today’s climate of non-stop worms, trojans and viruses, releasing a computer with no virus removal software is irresponsible on the part of Apple Duh duh! Possibly why someone would buy it in the first place? My Office 2003 CD would not install, despite claims I had heard from Mac fanboys that OS X is compatible with Office. Duh duh duh!! You even tried it! Extra points for effort!