We’re an all Mac family here at the Serle household except for those times when my wife drags in this Dell work laptop that I grudgingly let onto our network. So when it came time to start considering new desktop machines for our two sons, my first stop was the Apple refurb store looking for decent 20-inch iMacs.
Let me start by talking about what this new Mac was going to replace. My older son Guy used to share a computer with my other son Peter. This computer is a 17-inch iMac G5 from around 2004-05. A servicable machine, but when both want to use it at the same time things can get ugly. I still had an older 2003 era G4 PowerMac Tower (native 933MHz processor replaced by a dual 1.4GHz) that was essentially just used when I needed to do something in Mac OS 9. It had been some time since it was really used for anything at all and I decided to re-purpose it so that Guy could have a computer of his own.
This worked out well for awhile since what Guy was mostly using it for was homework (Pages, Keynote, and Safari). I connected a cheap (but very nice) Acer 22-inch LCD display and he was set. At least for awhile. The tower was running OS X 10.5, but was not at all happy about it. Safari would crash (as would FireFox) and Pages/Keynote was dog slow. Of course this Mac is now almost 7 years old, it only had 768MB of RAM, and with it being limited to a 133MHz bus it’s probably not too much of a shocker that it was starting to choke on more up-to-date software. So I decided it was time for Guy to have a more modern computer.
One thing that’s important before buying any computer is to consider exactly what they’re going to be used for. Guy’s needs in my opinion are relatively light. Any Intel Mac with a Core2Duo was going to be a big upgrade from what he was currently using. The 20-inch Macs I saw from the refurb store were all suitable, but with a starting price of almost $1000 not exactly a done deal. Then I gave some thought to a Mac Mini. I mean, he already has a decent LCD display, keyboard, and mouse so why re-invent the wheel? Except there’s that stigma of it actually BEING a Mac Mini. Crappy graphics, little storage, and it’s so tiny. Can’t really be a serious computer can it? Then the big, “What’s Guy actually going to use this computer for?” thought came into my head. Word processing, light graphics, presentations… Not exactly breaking the limits of what I perceived the Mini being capable of. So I bought the low-end Mini and upgraded the RAM to 2GB.
After it arrived, I had the none-to-envious job of transferring all the information from the G4 Mac to the Mini. Used to be you would just connect a FireWire 400 cable to each machine, fire up the old one in Target mode, follow a few simple instructions and off you go! Except the Mac Minis don’t HAVE FireWire 400, just a FireWire 800 port. If I HAD a 400 to 800 cable I would have been alright…if I had one. So I used Apple’s Migration Assistant software instead. This involves connecting up through your network (I just plugged an Ethernet cable between them) and entering in a six-digit number that your new machine gives you. Not nearly as intuitive as the old way, but it does work.
Finally got it all situated, fired up the new computer and frankly I wasn’t expecting much. However as I started using it to get all the current updates something surprised me. This Mac Mini was actually a pretty nice little beast! Everything I tried was snappy and worked well and I guess the biggest surprise was just how freaking quiet it was. I mean it’s silent. Even my 24-inch iMac every once in awhile decides it needs some cooling down and while it’s not that loud it’s certainly noticable. I won’t even mention how loud my MacBook Pro gets (well I guess I mentioned it after all). I actually found myself a little envious that Guy had a new computer and that mine (while a little more capable with it’s 256MB graphics card) is now almost three years old. Even GarageBand worked really well with no noticable audio lag.
After a few weeks, I even decided that my son Peter who likes to do some light video editing could use one of these. I found an upper level unit refurb for $699. The main difference between the two models is that the higher priced unit has more storage (320GB vs 120GB), more RAM (standard is 2GB instead of the 1GB the lower end has), and that the NVidia 9400M graphics set can access 256MB of system RAM as compared to the 128MB of the lower end. That one came and in no time at all every desktop machine in the house (used regularly…I still have the G4 tower down in the basement) is now Intel. One added bonus is that since all the machines are now 802.11n, my single-band Airport Extreme Router doesn’t bog down trying to satisfy B (the G4 tower), G (Pete’s G5 iMac), and N type wireless signals AND I was able to re-purpose the Airport Express Router I had to use on the iMac G5 (because it just wouldn’t connect any other way) in Bridge mode to our XBox 360 so we could use ir for XBox LIVE.
I just love it when a plan (that I had absolutely nothing to do in implementing, it just worked out that way) comes together!
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