Alive

A new Mac Mini arrived the other day. As well as the customary ten minutes from opening the box to checking my email (actually my wife's email), which I was expecting, the Mini had a few surprises.

The first was Rosetta. After copying all my stuff of my Powerbook (it managed to start up for a few minutes) I started running through my important applications. And it truly is seamless switching between x86 (Universal) binaries and PPC binaries. The only time I noticed was the occasional beach-ball.

The second was the speed in general. This is how a Mac should be. It's like OS 9 on my old iMac (still going and now running Panther). My Powerbook was a 1Ghz G4. The Mini is a dual-core 1.6Ghz. So 3x faster, in terms of raw cycles (ignoring all the usual CISC versus RISC rubbish that was all a load of guff anyway - it's not the 90s anymore). Can OSX really have been hogging that much processor power? Obviously, it was.

The third was Tiger (OSX 10.4). I never bothered to upgrade, after reading the reports of Spotlight slowing the machine down. The Powerbook was occasionally sluggish, not slow per se, but I didn't want anything to push it over the edge. Plus Panther was pretty good. But Tiger is better. Spotlight is great - I use it a lot. The Dashboard is a bit of a gimmick, but it's nice to have a one-hot-key weather forecast. The speed, as noted above, is not an issue.

All in all, pretty damn good for 500 quid.