Mac Mini first impressions

[generik]

Alas it arrived!

Ok, took a while to migrate all the applications over, and the first snag I immediately hit is with Little Snitch. It pops up a dialog saying that its installation is corrupted, and when I attempt to close the dialog the machine dies with a kernel panic. I can't uninstall nor update it (presumably for this reason). Just emailed the dev for it and hope there is a solution.

Contrary to some nay sayers Office X works great! On stock memory! Really great!

However something I really noticed is things seem to take forever to load. I'll try to get 2GB of memory for this thing soon and hopefully it'll improve.

Meanwhile it is really annoying running the system with the little snitch error dialog box left open

 

[R.Youden]

I am sure you are going to get hunderds of request tests so I will get mine in first!

What is FrontRow like? I am temped to get a mini to run on my TV to play all my music, photos and films.

Do you have the solo or daul core? (if you have the dual can you turn off one proc and see if effects FrontRow)

Thanks alot!

 

[iBunny]

Yes, How is the graphical interface and how is video playing.

I think everyones biggest concern with the new mini's is the integrated graphics

 

[Passante]

How much vram does your profiler show?

 

[lightbluecollar]

Recieved Mine Too.

My first Impressions are as follows:
Machine:mini Duo stock 512 soon 2 gig.
Video: Great, all ratios and resolutions play flawlessly
UI: Kind of Iffy. Dashboard the first time after a restart or sleep or just after 10 minutes stutters and just appears insead of transistion effect. The dock stutters sometimes. When things are loading, the UI has slow response times. Their are wierd artifacts sometimes while scrolling in safari. Spotlight can be slow to respond when doing simples tasks. All of this is i believe is due to unavailbe memory.
RAM: Get more, just with a safari and itunes and say garageband you have 5 mb free.
Games: I loaded marble blast from my ibook G4 and it played just fine at full resolution. In the beginning it stuttered some but that went away quickly. Not the most 3D intensive game in terms of number of polygons but it played smooth.
Conclusion: Great little machine if you add ram although I'm uncertain if that will help because I have not added the ram yet. I am hoping this solves the little problems of multitasking. Any other question I'd be glad to answer just no benchmarks or installing of doom3 or related games.

 

[chibianh]

Yes, How is the graphical interface and how is video playing.

I think everyones biggest concern with the new mini's is the integrated graphics

benchmarks have already shown the core duo mini will do 1080p flawlessly. as for games, as expected, framerates are about the same as the outgoing G4 mini with the 9200 ati card.

 

[MRU]

Does it do the nice screen wobble when you load a widgit in dashboard...

I've just sold my mac mini 1.42 G4 with 1gb of ram for €600, getting a dual core mini in the states in the next month for the equivalent of €660 nice cheap upgrade.....

 

[lightbluecollar]

Yes it does the ripple effect in Dashboard with no stutter unless something is going on in the background, then it will stutter.

VRAM = 64 MB of shared system memory

Front Row plays well. displaying of photos from albums takes awhile to start up. Shared feature works in all instances, not sure about hi def video streaming. Also found out that the remote if you hold the play button puts the computer to sleep. The screen gets a screen over it that has the remote with some zzz's coming off it then the computer goes to sleep. Nice feature

 

[asencif]

My first Impressions are as follows:
Machine:mini Duo stock 512 soon 2 gig.
Video: Great, all ratios and resolutions play flawlessly
UI: Kind of Iffy. Dashboard the first time after a restart or sleep or just after 10 minutes stutters and just appears insead of transistion effect. The dock stutters sometimes. When things are loading, the UI has slow response times. Their are wierd artifacts sometimes while scrolling in safari. Spotlight can be slow to respond when doing simples tasks. All of this is i believe is due to unavailbe memory.
RAM: Get more, just with a safari and itunes and say garageband you have 5 mb free.
Games: I loaded marble blast from my ibook G4 and it played just fine at full resolution. In the beginning it stuttered some but that went away quickly. Not the most 3D intensive game in terms of number of polygons but it played smooth.
Conclusion: Great little machine if you add ram although I'm uncertain if that will help because I have not added the ram yet. I am hoping this solves the little problems of multitasking. Any other question I'd be glad to answer just no benchmarks or installing of doom3 or related games.

Did you transfer all your data from an old mac via the import feature when OX is first setup? Just curious as to why there is some stuttering going on. The stock RAM should still be ok for the basic apps your running simultaneously, since on an Intel iMac there is not that issue. Some other user did not report some stuttering, althought adding more RAM will help, but that's with any computer.

 

[lightbluecollar]

No I didn't transfer any settings it was just from scratch. The stuttering is not extreme but just little not so smooth things that just if you are looking for is annoying. Another thing i noticed you need to turn safari to run under rosetta to play flash content. Doing this I notice safari opens twice as slow. One more thing I wish would work is flip4mac they need hurry up with an intel version.

 

[asencif]

No I didn't transfer any settings it was just from scratch. The stuttering is not extreme but just little not so smooth things that just if you are looking for is annoying. Another thing i noticed you need to turn safari to run under rosetta to play flash content. Doing this I notice safari opens twice as slow. One more thing I wish would work is flip4mac they need hurry up with an intel version.

That's interesting. I thought there was an Intel Mac Flash Player version included in the Mac OS X Intel Version. I know only PPC versions are available online as someone tried to upgrade it and overwrote the Intel version. He had to use Pacifier and re-install it from his Intel iMac Mac OS X Tiger Disc.

 

[R.Youden]

Yes it does the ripple effect in Dashboard with no stutter unless something is going on in the background, then it will stutter.

VRAM = 64 MB of shared system memory

Front Row plays well. displaying of photos from albums takes awhile to start up. Shared feature works in all instances, not sure about hi def video streaming. Also found out that the remote if you hold the play button puts the computer to sleep. The screen gets a screen over it that has the remote with some zzz's coming off it then the computer goes to sleep. Nice feature

You mentioned that iPhoto playback was slow. What is it like if iPhoto is already open? I have made a script which automatically launches iPhoto when FrontRow is activated which appears to increase the speed of the slideshow loading.

 

[MacSA]

So much conflicting information coming from people with these mini's...I think it best if you try and find one to have play around on.

 

[lightbluecollar]

I just tested both iPhoto open and closed and they were identical. It took 20 seconds to start playing an album with 70 pictures both low and hi res in front row. I guess I find that slow.

 

[lightbluecollar]

Quick Question

How do you make it so flash content doesn't get all slow when it is not the active window. For instance I have a flash animation playing and i click over to another window but still want to watch the animation. But what happens is it slows the frame rate to around 2 fps. Also happens with flash video too, probably anything to do with the flash player. Is there a way to stop this from happening and have it play full frame rate all the time.

Thanks.
Chris

 

[macOSX-tastic]

i played about with a new intel mac mini at the apple store regent street yesterday. as far as i can tell, it is generally much faster and it even has the infamous ripple effect in dashboard!

responsiveness is up, and frontrow is very good too....it took a small while to load, but very good when there.

S

 

[R.Youden]

Hmmm, that is slow....