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MEDIA CENTER PC NEWSJanuary 21st 2005 Mac Mini – Is It The Best Media Center….PC?
Speculation was rife before last week’s Mac World conference that Steve Jobs would announce a low cost Mac aimed at capturing PC users who had fallen in love with the iPod. Jobs didn’t disappoint and revealed the Mac Mini – it’s a Mac, it’s cheap(ish) and it’s mini. While we don’t doubt that this will be enough to tempt a lot of people to give the Mac a try, we’re only interested in its ability to fill the spot under our TV, currently occupied by the DVD Recorder, the PVR and that humming PC that we try to ignore during the quiet bits of a film. Let’s break down our requirements and put the Mac Mini to the test. Storage Storing all those movie files is going to use up a lot of hard drive space so we need a whopping drive – 120GB at least. Sorry, no can do. The Mac Mini comes in 40GB and 80Gb flavours which will soon get used up, particularly once you start to store music and photos as well. No upgrade information is available yet, but presumably the Mac Mini will lose its ‘cheap’ tag as the hard drives get bigger. OS The Mac Mini comes with Mac OSX. If you’re used to Windows XP this won’t be too much of a culture shock, but Mac does things slightly different. It also does things slightly wrong. OS X is a deeply unsatisfying OS where everything seems to take twice as long as it should. All style and no substance. Still, it is based on UNIX so that puts it one up on previous Mac OS’s already, but that’s no help to the average media center pc user. At least you get iLife included, so you have all the music and image storage software you need. Performance The processor is roughly the same as that found in a G4 Powerbook so the world is not going to be set alight by the performance. But then this is a media center pc (maybe), not a games machine, so does it matter? Media Center Kit What do we need? A DVD drive, preferably a burner. A TV tuner. Great on board sound and support for external amps. Do we get this? Yes to the DVD drive, but if you want a burner you have to pay extra. TV tuner – you must be joking in a package this small! You’ll have to buy in an external tuner and that means Elgato Eye TV at around US$300. Hmm, OK so our ‘cheap’ Mac Mini is starting to become a US$1000 computer. Great sound? Well, it will do and there is line out so you could make the best of what you’ve got, but we’d prefer component audio. Volume It’s virtually silent – certainly as quiet as so called silent systems such as the Shuttle – until it goes under heavy load. Then the fan kicks in and the volume rises to a level that would certainly distract you while watching TV. Looks A great media center pc should have looks to die for. Ideally it should be tiny, if not invisible. Well, the Mac Mini certainly scores on looks. It has the trademark Apple silver sheen and is almost featureless. Words cannot do justice to how small it is – no bigger than a stack of CDs at 6.5-by-6.5-by-2 inches, but the power supply is external so you’ll have to hide that somewhere behind the back of the TV cabinet.So the Mac Mini scores on looks. Well, hold on. Not quite. Remember that TV tuner? That has to sit somewhere, so suddenly the pristine lines are starting to be tarnished. Conclusion Although Apple are pleased that people are starting to talk about the Mac Mini as more than just a cheap Mac for iPod lovers, they freely admit that they were not aiming at building a media center. Good job too, because if they were, they’ve failed. A system that will manage your digital life need to be top end, and Apple just can’t do it at the price they are marketing the Mac Mini.However, we have to admit that the Mac Mini looks great out of the box. It won’t be long before some enterprising modder rips out the Mac innards and puts a media center PC (and we mean PC) into the case. That we would like to see. Update - 23 Jan 2005 SInce we first published this story we 've come across a few online tales of people who've put their Mac Mini to media center use. The guys at htmini.com really didn't like our piece and deconstructed it bit by bit. Fair play to them, but we're still not convinced, particularly by OSX (and if anyone from htmini.com reads this, we are forced to use OSX every day by virtue of the fact we work in publishing and we would kill to be able replace it with XP) or by the fact that there's no point having a Mac Mini if you have to supplement it with a whole load of bigger, uglier equipment. cNet have a less technical piece, but interesting read all the same. http://news.com.com/My+Mini+Mac+and+me/2010-1041_3-5546581.html |
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