Mac Mini to max, Part 2

Computerworld - I call it Macinstein.

Sitting here on my desk is the Mac Mini Apple sent several weeks ago for review purposes (see story). It's not plugged into anything else Apple-made, and it's humming along just fine. Actually humming isn't quite right; it's silent in day-to-day use.

As you may remember, when the $499 Mini was unveiled by Apple last month, it was billed as a "bring-your-own-monitor-keyboard-and-mouse" computer. So after finding that it works just fine with the 20-in. Apple Cinema display and wireless Apple keyboard I have at home, I brought it to work and cobbled together my own little mismatched system.

The VGA monitor is an aging 17-in. MultiSync from NEC. The keyboard is from MacAlly, and the mouse -- the two-button variety, of course -- is from Kensington. (The monitor, beige and scuffed up a bit, required the included VGA-to-DVI adapter.) One of our IT folks dropped an extra Ethernet line for me and after plugging everything in, I fired up the Mac Mini and it was quickly computing away.

Now when I say quickly, I don't mean dual-2.5-GHz Power Mac G5 quickly. I mean that in a more leisurely sense, since the Mini I have sports a 1.25-GHz G4 processor. From Mac chime to desktop takes 1 minute and 4 seconds, perfectly reasonable given the older G4 processor and the slow, 4,200-rpm 40GB hard drive. Launching four applications in quick succession (Mail, Address Book, Safari and iPhoto with 1,140 photos in the database) took about 30 seconds. The mini's GUI response was fluid, although I wouldn't quite call it snappy, and on occasion the spinning-color-wheel-of-waiting reared its head. No doubt, doubling the RAM from its current 512MB would help there.

Happily, the relaunch time for those four apps was half the original launch time; they took just 16 seconds to show up for duty.

Running the benchmark utility Xbench yielded consistent scores of 104 and 105. In comparison, my Power Mac G5, which has dual 2-GHz chips, turned in an Xbench score of 230. That's with two, 10,000-rpm Raptor hard drives from Western Digital set up in a striped-RAID configuration and a price tag close to six times that of the Mini.

A top-of-the-line Power Mac G5 with dual 2.5-GHz chips benchmarked at 249 (see story), while an iMac G5, with a single 1.8-GHz processor and a Raptor drive came in at 165 (see story). And the latest 17-in. Powerbook, which sports a 1.67-GHz G4 processor and a 5,400-rpm hard drive (see story), clocked in at 135 on the Xbench scale. It, like the other high-end machines, costs several times as much as a Mini.