Last week I took the plunge - swapped to a Mac. There wasn't a real reason for it, I suppose Windows was getting boring and Windows 8 in particular is irritating. I sold off my home built SSD based HAF desktop and sprung for the base mini - no upgrades, just the base i5 model. I needed a basic office box to connect to my 24" Dell Ultrasharp (and 1920 x 1200 works fine via the included DVI adaptor) and I'll never do any browsing on a tiny tablet or laptop screen. The point of this rather long thread is to do a mini review on the hardware and how everything ticks along, so:
CPU: As the mini is basically a laptop with no screen, the base processor is the i5 3210M, dual core. Its roughly 10-15% slower than a desktop i3 3225, but for a basic office or HTPC there is no real difference. I wouldn't do any heavy duty rendering or encoding simply because its a dual core and those take forever to do anything that heavy. I doubt the mini is intended for those sorts of task anyway. General performance is indistinguishable.
RAM: Been bumped up to a default 4GB, and interestingly 1600MHz, the maximum that the CPU can run at stock. I've noticed that Mountain Lion is rather porky in its RAM usage even with 4GB. Page outs never exceeded more then 1 or 2MB, and swap was only 10-20MB after a few hours of standard office tasks - 5 or 6 browser tabs in Chrome, one or 2 pdf's, libreoffice etc but OS X swallows as much memory as it can get its hands on, from my initial impressions. However, I wouldn't upgrade beyond the default unless you really do need it i.e. for a basic box 4GB is still sufficient.
HDD: 500GB, 2.5", 5400RPM. Coming from an SSD you'd think this would be laughably slow. OS X ticks along nicely though and I've only noticed a brief wait time to load apps, and maybe a bit of stuttering on some flash heavy sites on initial load, and that is very brief. The only substantial difference for me is that boot up and shutdown take a while, as opposed to an SSD, but overall no real difference.
GPU: This is Intel's HD 4000. It has the puff for 1080p video and desktop work and thats about it. Gaming is possible on maximum ugly settings. For the mini it does the basics fine.
OS X: Seemingly the elephant in the room, I've found that I actually prefer the whole UI to Windows. Seems more logical, from the dock to the menu bar up top. The only real problem was NTFS, I need full support but Paragon NTFS fixed that easily. As for the iOS features, I still use a $30 dumbphone, so I couldn't care less. The point is OS X is its very stable and works for whatever I need to do, end of story. Its also refreshing to have everything literally just work, no fiddling with drivers or BIOS settings or anything.
OVERALL: I'm impressed. I know that iMacs and iPhones/iPads are Apple's bread and butter, but the mini shouldn't be overlooked. It does the job for basic tasks extremely well and is an excellent primary system to boot.
CPU: As the mini is basically a laptop with no screen, the base processor is the i5 3210M, dual core. Its roughly 10-15% slower than a desktop i3 3225, but for a basic office or HTPC there is no real difference. I wouldn't do any heavy duty rendering or encoding simply because its a dual core and those take forever to do anything that heavy. I doubt the mini is intended for those sorts of task anyway. General performance is indistinguishable.
RAM: Been bumped up to a default 4GB, and interestingly 1600MHz, the maximum that the CPU can run at stock. I've noticed that Mountain Lion is rather porky in its RAM usage even with 4GB. Page outs never exceeded more then 1 or 2MB, and swap was only 10-20MB after a few hours of standard office tasks - 5 or 6 browser tabs in Chrome, one or 2 pdf's, libreoffice etc but OS X swallows as much memory as it can get its hands on, from my initial impressions. However, I wouldn't upgrade beyond the default unless you really do need it i.e. for a basic box 4GB is still sufficient.
HDD: 500GB, 2.5", 5400RPM. Coming from an SSD you'd think this would be laughably slow. OS X ticks along nicely though and I've only noticed a brief wait time to load apps, and maybe a bit of stuttering on some flash heavy sites on initial load, and that is very brief. The only substantial difference for me is that boot up and shutdown take a while, as opposed to an SSD, but overall no real difference.
GPU: This is Intel's HD 4000. It has the puff for 1080p video and desktop work and thats about it. Gaming is possible on maximum ugly settings. For the mini it does the basics fine.
OS X: Seemingly the elephant in the room, I've found that I actually prefer the whole UI to Windows. Seems more logical, from the dock to the menu bar up top. The only real problem was NTFS, I need full support but Paragon NTFS fixed that easily. As for the iOS features, I still use a $30 dumbphone, so I couldn't care less. The point is OS X is its very stable and works for whatever I need to do, end of story. Its also refreshing to have everything literally just work, no fiddling with drivers or BIOS settings or anything.
OVERALL: I'm impressed. I know that iMacs and iPhones/iPads are Apple's bread and butter, but the mini shouldn't be overlooked. It does the job for basic tasks extremely well and is an excellent primary system to boot.
