Robert Evans

For over a year now, I have dreamed, hoped, fantasized about, and yes, even drooled over Apple’s computers. My purchase of a Mac Mini makes me one of the many PC turned Apple converts out there. And might I say that the grass is greener, much greener, on this side of the fence!

Prelude

I have been using a Dell Inspiron 1100 for about 4-5 years now as my primary computing machine. It has treated me well, until recently. First, it was Windoze, slowing up till the load time was literally 7-8 minutes, when it used to be 1-2 minutes. I don’t normally resort to name calling, but Windoze seems appropriate in this case. Everything I was doing, emailing, programming, surfing the net, was all incredibly slow. So, I did what any Windows user would do, wipe the hard drive, and reinstall Windows. My old laptop had a new found life, but unknown to me at the time, a very short life.

It seemed everything was running great again, then my ‘r’ button started to not work everytime I hit it. It got progressively worse, rapidly – within 4 days it wasn’t working except for every once and a while. During those 4 days, the ‘e’ button started the same progression, then the ‘t’ button. I cleaned my keyboard, to no avail, the keys worsen. Nothing else I could do, if I wanted to be productive with my work, but to get a new computer. I could have replaced the keyboard, but what is the point, it’s expensive.

The Stage is Set

This set the stage for my switch, my conversion if you will, to an Operating System that works for you, not against you – OS X. I have been drooling over Apple’s computers for quite a while and I thought I knew what I wanted, a 20” iMac. While they are very nice, I am a bit cheap and didn’t like the idea of spending $1700 for another type of laptop. The reason I state this is because if the monitor goes bad for whatever reason, I can’t just go an replace the monitor. The monitor is the computer. That didn’t appeal to me, especially after my laptop keyboard dying.

I am sure many people have had great experiences with their 20” iMac’s, but it just wasn’t the route I wanted to go. I looked at the 17” iMacs, but just didn’t like those either for basically the same reasons. I didn’t want to do the laptop thing again as my only machine. I wanted a desktop; a big screen to do my work on. Sure, I could buy a $3000 laptop and then buy a monitor, but that is a lot of money to drop, especially when I can get just about the same specs on something much, much cheaper.

Along came the Mini

Being that I am cheap, the Mini seemed like the perfect solution for me. I can get my external monitor, whatever size I want, and have a small machine with relatively the same amount of power as the 17” iMac and MacPro laptops. Granted, the latters are a bit more powerful, but I am not looking for the most awesome thing on the market. I just wanted something to do what I do, well.

Spending $3000 for kicks isn’t really my thing, I’d rather save the money for our down payment on a home to own. Every dollar counts you know, and I don’t seeing being frivalous as a good quality. Some people may need that power and portability, but currently, I do not. I don’t need to work inside Starbucks, my office and home do just fine.

One Mini to Rule them all

Ok, not the most inventive sub-title, but I like it. So far, the Mac Mini is awesome! I purchased the Dual Core and am currently running it with 512mb of RAM. There is some beachball-bouncing here and there and I’ll be upgrading it to 2gigs here shortly. I wanted to test it out and see where it hiccups, then upgrade it to see how much of a difference it makes. Hey, I am a curious person.

I am able to run Fireworks, Textmate, Firefox, Mail, Adium, MySQL, and a Terminal window without any performance problems. The only time I feel the slow down is when I am downloading a few large files and doing the above.

My Favorite Features

One of the first things that I notice and thought was really cool was the ability to go to the Media Center using the Remote and watch current movie trailers. On my Windows machine, anytime I would watch movie trailers, I would have to wait for it to buffer, not on the Apple. There is no wait, it just begins to play at full screen. For not having a great graphics card, the movie trailers are gorgeous on my new 19” LCD screen.

Expose is pretty cool. I have only played with the four corners and didn’t like that so much, but having the ability to map them to keys is awesome.

iPhoto is awesome. I love the layout and the controls it provides to edit pictures. GarageBand is totally awesome! I love music, I love writing music on my guitar, so I see myself using this program a lot in the near future. iCal is a great little Calendar program – something you wouldn’t really think is a big deal, but definately needed if you are scheduling appts. all the time and need to keep track of them on your computer.

I am undecided if I like the Mail program or not. I have been using Thunderbird for my PC and really like it a lot. I am going to give Mail a chance though and see how it works out.

The Transition

I figured this might be of interested to a few of you who want to switch, but haven’t made the move yet. I was concerened about the transition of my files and programs. I am on my computer all the time. I work from home 3-4 days a week now, so it is vital that I could make the Transition very quickly.

I spent a day getting all my programs I need onto the Mac Mini. Let me say this, it was much easier than I expected. Macromedia’s Suite was easy to get installed. Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.4 was very easy to get up and running. MySQL and CocoaMySQL was also a snap. Apple has really made installations very easy, uninstall is also very easy.

I at first used Locomotive for Ruby and Rails, but found out that Ruby 1.8.2 is installed instead of 1.8.4. So, I quickly got rid of Locomotive and downloaded the tarball and installed through the Shell. It was very easy to do.

My files, PNG’s, Ruby Projects, past designs and coding for other sites all transfered nicely. I have a 250 gig external hard drive that I had been using with my laptop and was hoping Apple would read it and it did. OS X reads FAT, FAT32, NTFS with no problem. Bookmarks, Open Office files, and everything else transfered fine and are all usable in OS X.

For me that was one of my main concerns. I had heard people say it’ll work no problem, but you can never tell who is telling you the straight scoop. I guess I tend to be one who will be convinced when I see it.

Conclusion

Basically it boils down to this, OS X. OS X is what made me switch, not Apple’s hardware or support or anything else. Just the OS. Having used both Windows XP and OS X, OS X is superior in everyway. Defrag your disk? Not in OS X because of the HSF. OS X puts your saved files in the correct place, instead of all over the place like XP does. Obviously, viruses aren’t a big concern because of not very many people write them for OS X, being a UNIX system – BSD.

OS X is the perfect OS for developers, designers, and people who just want a simple computer to do their web surfing, email reading/writing. This is the beauty of the OS X, on the surface it is dead simple to use, yet underneath it is very powerful.

Now I am just waiting for Apple’s creativity to wear off on me where design is concerned. Then, the transformation will be complete. Muhahaha….