aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Praise for the Mac Mini

You know I want one, even as my friends pooh-pooh it. Today James Fallows has high praise, mainly for how easy it is to switch:

The mini is a flattened white cube, smaller than most hardback books. It has no keyboard, no screen - it is just that cube with a variety of ports on one side allowing connections to most normal computer peripherals…

Less than five minutes after I had taken the mini out of its box, I was sitting at my desk typing on my usual keyboard, looking at the usual flat-panel display, automatically connected to the Internet through the usual Wi-Fi link, with pages coming out of the usual printer - but now I was using Mac software, under the Apple operating system OSX. No configuration was required for anything…

And it goes a long way toward addressing the PC user’s concern that whatever the Mac’s benefits, they couldn’t possibly be worth the nuisance of transition. You can use a home network to transfer data files from one system to another, or use certain applications on each machine rather than making a total change. The mini’s existence is no longer news, but it is worth re-emphasizing because of the choices it creates.

I like the Mac for photos and email and music. My favorite OS feature is Spotlight (I’m hobbled on the office PC without it). I’ll use my old iMac for shared storage and backup. And continue using the PC for finances and Office.

Fallows also likes TiVo:

[S]ome elegant advances distinguish it from the generic competitors. One is online scheduling, the answer to that modern heartbreak of leaving the house without remembering to set TiVo to record a show. From an Internet connection anywhere in the world, you can give instructions to your home machine as if you were standing in front of it. TiVo’s other recent innovation is a home-networking option that lets you transfer the recorded programs to your own computers, using Wi-Fi or some other network.