The Store

I strolled into a busy Apple Store location in Pasadena on a Thursday afternoon. This was my first visit to an Apple Store and its interior layout was very typical of Apple. The store was clean, organized, and free of clutter. I appreciated its "art-gallery-less-is-more" approach which gave emphasis to the products on display. After becoming mesmortized by one of the 30-inch Cinema displays I managed to flag down a busy store employee who enthusiastically offered to assist me once he was finished with his current customer. Within about 10 minutes I had gleefully purchased my Mac mini and was on my way home.

The Box

Apple does a good job of putting some style into everything they do. The first thing you see after opening the box is the "Designed by Apple in California" notice that reads on the top of the software packaging. Being a Californian myself I thought that it was a nice touch. After getting passed the software packaging, which contains copies of Mac OS X and OS 9, you are then graced with what has to be one of the coolest looking personal computers ever. After removing the Mac mini a power supply and DVI-to-VGA adapter are revealed the very bottom.

The Machine

The clean, spacy look of this machine is just great. In fact, its size brought to mind the larger 5.25 floppy drives I used as a kid with Apple IIe's and Commodore 64's. I can definitely see how some people might have difficulty in grasping that this little box is actually the "entire" computer.

The front the Mac mini sports the slot loading Combo Drive (CD-RW/CD-R/DVD) and a tiny white power light that has a cool glowing effect when the machine is asleep.

The back sports the following connections: (from left-to-right) power button, power plug, Ethernet, modem, DVI, two USB 2.0, firewire, audio out, and a lock hole.

The Specs

I decided to go with the $599 model with the 1.42 gigahertz processor, 256 mb of RAM, and 80 gigabyte hard drive. I can always upgrade the RAM later as I'm accustomed to opening hardware for sake of upgrades anyway. From what I've read on the subject, RAM upgrades for the Mac mini are a fairly delicate but simple process.

The Operating System

OS X. The operating system that opened my eyes by filling the gap between my Linux desktop and my old Windows 2000 desktop. What more can I say. No matter what you use a computer for, if you want to want to get right down to business then OS X is for you.

The "Switcher"

Now this is actually the most interesting aspect of the process for me. Handing a Mac to over to a first time user. In this case, my wife, Josie. She had never used a Mac before so I was very interested to see how the whole transition from a PC would work out. Of course, I made certain to transfer over the following for her:

- Firefox Bookmarks to Safari
- Thunderbird Mail to Mail.app
- Thunderbird contacts to Address Book
- Quicken to Quicken

After installing Office and Adobe Photoshop she was all set. I also set up CyberDuck for FTP access.

From here the rest was up to her. Sure enough, within minutes she was browsing, checking email, using iChat, and preparing for her next Mystery Shopping assignment. The operation was a success as far as I could tell.

A few days would pass and over time she began to acclimate to the new operating system. Not surprisingly, the Finder proved to be the most cumbersome element of OS X for her. After a short amount of time she was able to make sense of the Finder and managed to find our network share of Michelle's baby pictures.

Beyond this, our Quicken import apparently put us out of balance for about $150. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the specific cause of the imbalance in a reasonable amount of time so we just posted an adjustment for it.

All in all, the "switch" has been a remarkable success and Josie has been very pleased with her Mac mini. Performance is great for simple tasks considering the 256 megabytes of RAM. Best of all, she can finally say goodbye to viruses, spyware, and all the other usual Microsoft Windows "features".