ObLRPD: I think my curse has found a new home.

Posting from our new Mini.

I don't recall having been so impressed with a piece of hardware in a long time. What a really beautiful piece of work.

Even the power brick is sharp looking. The Mini itself is tiny, with a textured aluminum side and a white polished top.

It's extremely quiet, except when a) the Superdrive is being used for data transfer or b) the fan kicks up to high during a system update. Everything looks very nice on the 17" Sony LCD, which the Mini detected automatically.

This one has Bluetooth, Airport (more on that later), and a wireless keyboard and mouse. I like the feel of the keyboard, but it's straight so I can already feel my wrists complaining. I've already gotten used to the single button thing. One minor complaint with the mouse: it's very easy to accidentally click the button, since the whole thing is the button. I was a little perplexed as to how I was supposed to set up a wireless keyboard without a wired keyboard to start with, but everything was just detected automatically. Very impressive.

Safari looks very nice. I have the LCD font smoothing turned on but I can't really tell the difference. I played with GarageBand a bit, which sounds pretty good. The built-in speaker on the Mini is pretty amazing for a built-in. I still need to get externals, though, because that's just for a built-in. :-P

Airport... I have to update the software with the provided CD before anything would work. I have a Squeezebox that can't do WPA, so everything is 128-bit WEP here. The Netgear and the Mini couldn't agree with a 13 character ASCII password so I had to type the hex string in. No biggie once I updated the software; before doing so, however, nothing would work at all. I'm getting an excellent signal and have already done a full system update (80M or so) that went very quickly (not that even 802.11b would even be taxed by a cable modem, but anyway...).

Packaging: simply amazing. The Mini was shipped in a box enclosed within a shipping box, held in place by form-fitted foam. The inner box (the one with the handle) opens to show the software packet only, surrounded by foam. Remove that and the Mini is next. Not until you remove the computer do you see mundane things like cables and such. While none of this matters a tinker's damn, really, it just adds to the overall experience of setting the thing up.

Right now I'm sitting here thinking, "Desktop Linux? Whuzzat??" I'm severely jealous of my wife and son since they'll be the ones using this little thing.

Next up is transferring bookmarks and OpenOffice files. I need to figure out how to install OO here, and then figure out the fast user switching feature that's supposed to be somewhere.

Actually I'm more sensitive to stuff like that because of my eyes... as it turns out the low/medium/high font smoothing settings don't seem to make much difference, but I set the minimum font size up high and damn, did I notice it then.