Product Reviews

Apple Computer Inc is on a massive roll, surfing the wave of the iPod with considerable finesse. On the back of its newly supercharged brand awareness comes the Mac mini, possibly the cutest computer ever produced.

The hardware itself is remarkable. The mini is a box just 165mm square - a little wider than a CD - but our review model packed a PowerPC G4 processor at 1.4GHz, a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive, 512MB of RAM, an 80GB hard disk, 802.11b/g WLAN (AirPort Extreme in Applespeak) and Bluetooth. All the wireless gear is hidden away inside the box so there are no lumps, bumps or sticky-out parts. The casing itself is as minimalist and clean as it could be, and at the back there's a modest collection of ports covering the bare essentials: two USB 2, a FireWire 400, 56K modem and 10/100 Ethernet, headphone socket and video connector. As standard, the mini comes with neither monitor nor keyboard and mouse, but the price we quote here includes a wireless mouse and keyboard.

The video output is a DVI-I port, allowing you to connect either digital or analog monitors. Maximum Desktop resolution over a digital interface is a healthy 1,920 x 1,200 and over analog a still very high 1,920 x 1,080, so you can partner the mini with as big a monitor as you like. The graphics adaptor itself is an ATi Radeon 9200 with 32MB of dedicated memory - this does limit you to 'productivity' and multimedia applications, but the Mac has never been a gaming platform.

At around 1.4kg, the mini is light for a computer but actually quite hefty for something so small - pick it up and it feels weighty and extremely sturdy. The outer casing is machined aluminium and the whole thing feels as classy as it looks. And its weight, combined with a rubberised layer at the bottom, ensures it won't succumb to the dreaded cable-drag syndrome. This can plague small pieces of kit: while these often get pulled around the desk by the weight of their own connector cables, the mini stays precisely where you put it.

The operating system is Mac OS X, as installed on all new Macs. For a hardened Windows XP user, it's at once familiar and alien. It shares the same basic Desktop metaphor, but the subtleties of implementation are very different; at first, it feels as though you're doing everything with the wrong hand.

For a PC user, the biggest everyday annoyance is the fact that most standard Ctrl-key shortcuts - such as Ctrl-S for save, Ctrl-C for

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copy - use the Apple key instead. But since the Apple key is placed where you'd normally find the Alt key on a PC keyboard, your unconscious shortcut movements need to be unlearned - for the first few days, you'll find yourself continually met with a rude Apple 'bonk' when you get it wrong. A second and infuriating difference is the behaviour needed to access submenus. In Windows, clicking on a menu entry opens its submenu. If you were trying to get to the Control Panel, you'd quickly click Start, then Settings, then Control Panel. But Mac OS X's behaviour when you click on the parent menu entry is to close the menu rather than display the submenu; you have to hover the mouse for a brief moment to access submenus. The constant phantom disappearance of menus is both bizarre and utterly annoying until you get used to it.

Foibles aside, the RAM and CPU combination in our review machine gave a super-slick OS X ride. The metallic look and feel of windows, with the ocean-blue colour scheme of the Aqua interface, look superb. And it's secure by default - the Unix heart means that to change system settings you need to enter a username and password to gain temporary root access rights. It will talk to Windows machines simply by clicking the option in System Preferences. USB flash drives formatted with the Windows FAT filing system work fine for sharing data as well, appearing instantly on the OS X Desktop when plugged in. And speaking of plug and play, attaching a 1,280 x 768 widescreen TFT - that the mini had never seen before - produced nothing but a crystal-clear Desktop set to the correct resolution. It just worked, without any superfluous pop-ups to tell us so.

There are some lovely touches that Microsoft, with all its resources, can't match. Apple can bundle applications and features that Microsoft is prohibited from supplying because of its monopoly position in the PC market. Pop a DVD movie into the mini and up pops the DVD player application. Do the same thing with a standard installation of Windows XP, and Media Player will inform you that you need third-party decoding software for it to work. The mini also comes with iLife (consisting of iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and GarageBand), plus the AppleWorks suite of office applications (word processor, spreadsheet, database, presentations and both vector and bitmap drawing).

But what really swings it is the noise factor. There's a fan in the mini's case that kicks in if it's working hard, but during testing that never happened. The only moving part in everyday use is the hard disk, which, being a 2.5in notebook drive, is very, very quiet indeed. It's audible, but only in a silent living room.

So it's a tiny, powerful, gorgeous-looking, fuss-free computer that, while not dirt cheap unless you're prepared to put up with a limited spec, is reasonably priced for what you get. If you want a machine for surfing, writing, ripping or burning, there isn't a reason not to buy one of these. And that certainly provides some serious food for thought.