As some of you know I recently purchased an Apple iBook off eBay and sold my HP notebook. Well I loved my iBook so much that I decided to replace my desktop with an Apple also. I purchased the Mac Mini to replace my HP desktop. So I'm now totally Apple, no more Windows Machines for me!
Wow! That is quite a step! I have been thinking about getting a Mac for a few months now. I have a laptop for work, so I was thinking about the Mac Mini. Have you been happy with it so far? My concern of course is going to be the learning curve. I haven't used a Mac in YEARS!!!
I've been very happy with my iBook and Mac Mini. Mac OS X is a great OS and very stable. As far as the learning curve is concerned I'd never really used a Mac much and within a few hours I was already pretty well comfortable with the Mac OS. Within a couple of weeks of use you will be very comfortable with the Mac and find the OS is actually easier to use and more user friendly than Windows.
Nice! I'm reassured to hear that you didn't have any issues with it. What about the Mini, does it have enough of the things that you need? My primary purpose in getting a new machine would be to help with The Cell Phone Junkie podcast that I do, and I know Mac's are good at them. Is the unit pretty well equiped? I wonder about that versus the big $3K desktop looking one that have. I tend to think that one would be overkill for me...
The Mini so far is working fine for me. As long as you don't do intensive graphics or video games I think the Mac Mini would work fine for you. For podcasting the Mac Mini should work very well. However if you plan on using graphics quite a bit you may want to consider an iMac since they have a separte video card and superior graphics.
Dan is right. The Mac mini is certainly powerful enough for most things, except 3D graphics and gaming. If this is a consideration, I would not recommend it. On the plus side the Mac Mini is cheap, small and quiet. Since it's not very expandable in the box, I would recommend getting the largest hard drive (160 gigs) and the max RAM (2 gigs). Bumps up the price a bit, but you don't want to be cracking this case open - better to let Apple do it. You can then choose your own monitor, unlike the iMac where the monitor is built-in. I have the Apple 20" but the 23" is a beautiful monitor, and this machine also accommodates a wide range of non-Apple monitors. For more disk space, there are some nice external drives made to fit under the mini, like the MiniStack v2. As far as your podcasts, it has audio in and out (both analog and digital optical), and Apple includes all the software you need, free. Here's a tutorial on using Garageband and iTunes for making and distributing podcasts. SW
