Apple Mac Mini Review

I recently purchased a Mac Mini after my Windows PC started having hardware problems. I had a PowerMac G4 (Sawtooth ed.) before, but by chance, I was Windows only for the past 4 years. It was a good experience with Windows, but since I felt OS X to provide a superior experience, I decided to go back to a Mac when I was ready for a new computer. I have the latest 2 GHz Core 2 Duo version and because I don't ever plan on playing any video games on it, it's perfect. My main purpose for buying this computer is a better user experience (i.e., safe and reliable platform for personal computing and a more intuitive interface).

The improvements to OS X (Leopard version) since I was on it (Tiger version) are great. The Dock has been greatly improved with things like the Stacks capability while the Windows Taskbar has been fairly stagnant. The only thing Microsoft has done to it is to make it bigger and easier to edit. Mail and iCal are also apps I miss greatly. Outlook just doesn't compare in terms of user friendliness. I'm very spatial in terms of organization and most features on the Mac just aligns perfectly with how I think.

The hardware on the Mac Mini is also very impressive. It's tiny, super quiet (much more so than my old Shuttle PC that had 4 cooling zones and variable speed fans), has 5 USB ports and gigabit ethernet (I have a FiOS connection, so I care about speed). Also, once Snow Leopard comes out, the Mac Mini's video card will be able to take on some of the load off the CPU, which is going to add more speed to the system. And because there are no Mac viruses in the wild, I don't have to run any anti-virus software constantly, so I get that significant extra speed-boost. 

With regards to speed and user experience, I do notice some times when the computer does hang a little. However, I soon came to realize that it's more noticeable on the Mac because of the spinning beach ball. I get similar experiences on Windows, but because there are no visual responses from Windows when the system is "thinking," the hang time is less noticeable, but still requires me to wait. In the Mac's defense, I rather know when the system is "thinking" than to just sit here and wonder why my Windows machine isn't doing anything.

I'm happy to be back on a Mac.