Product Reviews

The Mac Mini is meant to fill the gap left by computers that have grown too powerful for everyday use. It's not uncommon these days for a £1,000 computer with a 3.2GHz P4 processor, GeForce 6600 graphics card and 200GB hard disk to be used for nothing more than surfing the web, checking email and archiving digital photos.

These tasks don't really push the latest hardware to the extremities of their performance. However, they're ideal for the Mac Mini, which can't run games at a ludicrous frame rate but can browse the web, cope with email and even show a slideshow of your digital photos.

The first thing you think when you see the Mac Mini is how small it really is. Barely larger than a small stack of CDs, the tiny white and metal unit looks great, too.

The 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 processor uses passive cooling, so there aren't any fans in the case, giving you a completely silent computer. The only sounds you're likely to hear are the whir of its 80GB hard disk and the slot-loading CD-RW/DVD drive.

Although the 1.42GHz processor is slow

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compared to new Intel and AMD chips and the latest G5 used in the full-sized Macs, it can cope with Mac OS X, Apple's latest operating system. Although lambasted by the Windows fraternity as basic, the uncluttered appearance of Mac OS X makes it perfect for those who don't really care about the finer points of computing. Alongside Mac OS X, Apple includes iLife, a useful suite of tools for general home computing.

The fact that the Mac has only a limited computer games catalogue doesn't make much difference to the Mac Mini. Its 32MB ATI Radeon 9200 is fine for general computing, but even if the 3DMark03 benchmark test could run on a Mac, the Mac Mini would return a woeful score.

You begin to realise the problems associated with buying a Mac Mini when you look at the extras you'll probably need to buy to make it a full system. With no keyboard and mouse included with the computer, you have to spend an additional £70 to get the official Apple set.

While you can plug a monitor into the Mac Mini's DVI-I port, an ugly old CRT is going to spoil the computer's good looks, so you need to spend at least £150 on a 17" LCD.

This takes the price from a rather reasonable £399 to around £600. At this price you can get a much faster PC, capable of any task, including playing games. Those PCs have more software available, too; just see this month's Labs.

That said, the Mac Mini is a really easy computer to get working and looks much better than any PC for the equivalent money. For the person who doesn't want all the extras a PC can offer, the simple, clean OS X and beautiful Mac Mini are probably well worth the money.