My Mac Mini arrived today.

This is a very slick little machine.

I bought the bottom end 1.25 GHz model with the 512MB RAM upgrade. It came to $615.52 after tax. OOBE (out of box experience) was great as it is supposed to be with Apple. All of the shiny surfaces we wrapped in heavier than normal plastic wrap. Physical setup was a breeze. I bought an Apple keyboard ($29) for it as my spare keyboards were all PS/2 and I couldn't track down a PS/2-USB adapter in the local stores. I'm using a Logitech MX310 USB mouse that I already had on hand. My monitor is a 21" NEC XP21 connected thru the supplied DVI-VGA adapter.

Upon connecting the above items and firing it up, I realized just how quiet this thing is. I had my PC desktop machine on a the time. This is a machine that I formerly considered quiet (a P4 2.4Ghz with one of those big Zalman low-noise fans in a Antec Sonata case). I turned it off and all I can hear from the Mini is a slight hard drive whine and occasional chatter as it accesses said hard drive. Any other sound is no more noticeable than the DirecTivo unit I have that runs 24/7 and is sitting about 7 feet away.

The initial boot led me through a series of screens asking for registration info, offering to setup a .mac account (which you can skip and do later if you want), configuring an Internet connection (DHCP from my firewall made this a nobrainer), and time zone. It then put me at the desktop with the updater program listing updates to download (which I'll do in a sec.). Default resolution was 800x600 60Hz, which I promptly changed to a more tolerable 1280x1024 75Hz

I've only just begun to poke around in this little beauty, but so far I am quite impressed.

Next step, install updates and install iLife '05, which came on a separate set of disks (iLife '04 is already installed).

My current iPhoto library consists of 23 photos that I happened to have on my digital camera (Canon Powershot A80), and the readme didn't say I had to, so I didn't bother finding out how to rebuild my iPhoto 04 library before installing. It does say to backup your library though. I didn't bother with that either.

The install, while largely hands-off was kind of irritating. After going through the readme, license, and other wizard-like steps, it spent 10 minutes "preparing" the various iApps. For 10 minutes the DVD drive (I installed from the DVD media) repeatedly thrashed its head back and forth, sounding much like an inkjet printer. My conjecture is that the "prepare" script was reading file info from one location on the disc and reading he actual file at another location to verify it. If that or a similar cause is the case, they really need to optimize it. It sounded to me like a CD drive does when it gets read errors from dust or scratches. Not very reassuring.

Note that the optical drive is quite loud when in use, even when listening to an Audio CD. It's not something I'd want to put up with any more than necessary to get data off or on a disc. All the disc activity causes the internal fan to kick in, which is louder than its normal blissful state, but still nowhere near the volume of my PC. When things calm down the fan turns off relatively quickly.

Anyways, it eventually prepared the apps and spent another 10 minutes writing files (without the head thrashing racket this time).

Upon running iPhoto 05 for the first time, it wanted to update my library. It appeared to mainly want to regenerate thumbnails, which took next to no time on my paltry collection. The other apps didn't require any such step when opening.

Since I've never really used the iApps in their previous form, I don't know how these new ones compare. If I discover anything extra exciting about them I'll chime in here.