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The Mac mini preview

Jade wanders the halls of the Moscone Convention Center at Macworld San …

Charles Jade – | 0
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Introduction

What follows is a curious Thing-In-Itself. If you are easily offended, stiff, or resistant to Space Balls, you might want to skip this article. And in case you don't recall, Space Balls had sexual innuendo. -Ed.

If, as Apple states when they consign rumor sites to the ninth plane of legal hell, innovation is the DNA of the company, then it must be fossilized. Low-margin, low-tech, white box, red state PCs have been around since before Michael Dell first declared Apple doomed, so what is the big deal about Apple finally doing what most PC manufacturers have been busy losing money at for years?


A reputed "iPod Halo Effect Switcher" photographed in the wild.

The Halo Effect, like the Switcher Effect, or the Think Different Effect, theorizes that an advertising campaign of some sort, be it based upon collectible posters or television commercials of apparently narcotized teenagers, combined with the clueless meanderings of financial analysts, will inevitably generate another Effect. There could even be an increase in computer sales, too. That is the supposed reason for the Mac Mini. In the latest gushing scenario, millions of iPod owners so enamored of an Apple click-wheel mp3 player and sick of Windows malware will dump their PC for the right price, even if the Mac mini is woefully underpowered by PC standards, and it is, but specs aren't everything. First, it looks great.

In keeping with the idea of an iPod in every pocket, and a Mac in every home, the Mac Mini is pictured next to the, er, bait. The Mac Mini at first reminds of the Micro ATX Whatever PC, except that with Apple, small, like everything else must be beautiful. At 3 pounds it weighs less than the lightest laptop Apple makes, and its profile is nearly as slim, a mere two inches tall, a flattened Cube ? but flattened with style. The surfaces are smooth, mix of lacquer white and brushed metal, perhaps the love child design of an iMac and a PowerMac. The specifications are also, to be polite, minimal.

CPU

A 1.25 or 1.42 GHz G4 (pathetic 167 MHz FSB included), and, sure it would have been nice to have a G5 inside, but it would be nice to have a PowerBook G5 and a flying car too.

RAM

256 MB PC2700 (333 MHz DDR SRAM), standard, and if you want more, and you better because OS X loves RAM, it pretty much has to be installed by techs. Unlike the iMac, the Mac Mini is not user serviceable, unless you are running a Japanese deconstructionist website ? pass the metal saw.

Hard Drive

Either a 40 GB or 80 GB Ultra ATA, though mostly a 40 GB because it?s just not worth an extra hundred bucks for that extra storage and a miniscule CPU increase.

GPU

The ATI Radeon 9200 with 32MB does not support the forthcoming buzzword feature from Tiger, Core Image, which means wavy Dashboard effects get done by the CPU or not at all. But does the Radeon 9200 really not support Core Image? Until the day of the Keynote the Core Image preview page for Tiger listed video cards that supported Core Image, and the least powerful card capable was the GeForce with 64MB RAM, but now the list is gone.

To that end, I asked every single person having anything to do with either the Mac Mini or Tiger, even ones who folded brochures, and the answer was definitive: no one knows. Could the spec for Core Image be changing? While Quartz Extreme preferred 32MB VRAM when it came out, it ran on 16MB, so maybe, just maybe, the Mac Mini might actually do Core Image. Wave effects for everyone!

Optical drive

Is anyone really going to pay an extra $100 for the optional SuperDrive, on top of another $100 for the model with the larger hard drive? I mean, is some unknown Michael Moore, Jr. planning on firing up Final Cut Express HD on their powerhouse Mac Mini with 256MB RAM and create the next F911? Okay.

Other crap

USB 2 and FireWire 400 included, Bluetooth and Airport Express ready (meaning you can pay for the upgrade), a single DVI (VGA adapter included) connector, Ethernet and modem, and, of course, RDF generator. If you swing that way. Because that?s what the detractors will say. But is the Mac mini really a weakling?

Mac mini performance

What are the biggest uses for a personal computer today?

  • pr0n web browsing
  • E-mail
  • Word processing
  • Games

Well, three out of four isn't bad. Any five- or ten-year-old computer can easily accomplish all but the last, and since the xMac is running at 1.25 GHz, a speed first introduced by Apple in 2002, it is well ahead of the curve in putting obsolete chips to good use.

As for games, any self-respecting Mac snob will sniff and tell you to buy a console. So what can be expected of xMac performance? That depends on whether you are asking real people or propeller heads at Slashdot. To that end I surreptitiously ran everybody's random favorite for Mac benchmarking, Xbench, on an xMac.

Methodology

All Mac results were gathered from machines running OS X/Panther and having 256MB RAM, with the exception of the dual processor G5. However, screening posted Xbench results, as well as conferring with a Magic 8-Ball, indicates that dual processors and memory in excess of 256 MB RAM have negligible impact (though pulling RAM from my wife's PowerBook for the purposes of testing raised the tension score in the Jade household by 10 percent). Representative data from the Xbench results website was used for additional comparison, as well as relevant other sources.

  1. Even an overclocked iBook G3 (1GHz/256MB RAM/32MB VRAM) might suffer from the missing Altivec instruction set used in the G4 to make up for the pathetic 133MHz Front Side Bus Apple was stuck at for, like, a million years, until the G5 showed up
  2. The xMac (I made the name and I like it better than Mac Mini) (1.25GHz/256MB RAM/32MB VRAM) scoring in proximity to a PowerBook of similar specifications may be the result of getting a few more cycles out of the latest revision of that beaten dead horse of a CPU, the G4, or possibly that the GPU is kind of old. Maybe Apple should have just included a piece of brown cardboard cut out in the shape of a video card instead.
  3. The inclusion of a 5400RPM fixed disk and the ATI RADEON 9600 Mobility in the PowerBook (1.25GHz/256MB RAM/64MB VRAM) could very well account for the difference in scores to the similarly specified xMac, though I would not count on it.
  4. An average male (six inches/circumcised) will ejaculate approximately three minutes after penetration (much to the disappointment of the average female). The commonly held belief (among average males) of 15 minutes or more is a result of benchmark cheating (self-delusion).
  5. More interesting than the much higher test scores of the PowerMac G5 (2x2.0 GHz/1536MB RAM/64MB VRAM) posted in the Xbench database, is the fact that Steve Jobs doesn't know how to use the possessive in relation to his own name; it's Steve Jobs' PowerMac G5. As written, 'Jobs' appears to be a verb of some kind, which makes for a rather unsettling statement and graphic image.
  6. Timothy McVeigh (Male/33 years old/psychopath) was executed by lethal injection, the combination of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride killing him in four minutes, though it must be noted this benchmark does not include a reading of Invictus.

Conclusion

It's clear that the xMac performs considerably faster than both my iBook, which cost me $200 more than an xMac, and nearly as fast as my wife's PowerBook, which cost four times as much and is less than a year-old (and that makes me want to cry). Beyond that, it appears that Timothy McVeigh would have enough time for an orgasm before dying, if someone who likes doing ?jobs? could help him out, and, as always, benchmarks really only matter to people who argue about computers.

Real conclusion

It?s not about the computer. It?s about the effect, or rather the affect. The ?y? of xMac, or Mac mini, is another question: why not Windows? For people in the real world, the Mac mini, with the included software, does everything people need, while not doing things they don't need, like becoming infected with malware.

And the Mac mini does it at a price, US$499, competitive with the charcoal turds produced by more successful PC vendors. It's taken twenty years, but Apple may have come full circle at last.

Mac mini: the white brushed metal box for the rest of us.

Charles Jade
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