Apple Mac mini (1.25GHz)

Apple has tried everything to get Windows users to switch to the Mac. First, it created a revolutionary operating system, Mac OS X, then it launched the 'switch' ad campaign, with former Windows users frankly explaining why they like Macs better. When these efforts didn't produce the intended results, Apple employed a more straightforward strategy: make Macs cheaper. With the Mac mini, Apple has finally conceded the possibility that most people shopping for a desktop choose price above all else and don't want to ditch their expensive monitors to move to the Mac platform. Now, at £339 (inc. VAT), the standalone mini (and it really stands alone, without a keyboard, a mouse, speakers or a monitor) offers would-be Apple converts a more affordable and flexible, but still stylish, entry-level Mac. Its performance limitations make it glacially slow at processor-intensive tasks, so power users, look elsewhere; but for everyday home computing, it's a great buy. Even with a few recommended upgrades, the Mac mini still costs less than £600 -- an enticing price point for investigating the Mac platform and the included software, such as the bundled iLife '05 suite.

Design
Apple has become synonymous with sleek, minimalist design, and the Mac mini certainly embodies this ethos. A low, square box with rounded corners, the mini is made of white plastic and anodised aluminium, and it measures 16.51cm wide by 16.51cm deep by 5.08cm high and weighs 1.4kg. Smaller than any Shuttle system we've seen (and Shuttle pioneered the small-form-factor PC), the mini looks great in any environment, equally at home on a desk or in the study. And when in use, the mini is marvelously quiet, with its cooling fan making less than a whisper. True to Apple's styling, the top of the Mac mini displays the simple Apple logo, and on the front, there's only a slot-loading CD/DVD slot and a small white power light. In order to maintain the mini's elegance, Apple has put even commonly used items, including the power button and the audio jack, on the rear. You may tire of feeling around back to turn on the thing or to sync your iPod, but the Mini's small dimensions mean it's likely to be sitting on top of your desk rather than under it, making its back-panel ports more accessible than they would be on a tower design. Also on the back of the Mac mini, you'll find two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 400 port, a 10/100BaseT Ethernet port, a modem port (for the included 56Kbps V.92 modem) and a DVI video-out port. We were happy to see that the mini ships with a DVI-to-VGA video adapter so that users can connect both digital and analogue monitors. We were less than happy to find only the pair of USB ports; unless your monitor or keyboard provides such ports, you'll need to get a USB hub. It's not exactly an expensive item, but it will somewhat diminish the mini's small footprint and clean design. The mini's case isn't sealed, but opening it is a bit of a challenge and not for the nontechnical (it involves some elbow grease and confidence with a putty knife). If you want Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or extra RAM, we recommend ordering them as custom options when you buy the mini or taking it to a local Apple reseller. Adding an AirPort Extreme card is especially challenging, since besides installing the card, you'll also need to add an internal antenna. If you plan to shuttle the mini from room to room, as Apple suggests, you'll want to add the wireless upgrade prior to purchase.

Features
We tested the basic £339 Mac mini, which equips you with a 1.25GHz G4 processor, 256MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive and a combo drive (CD-RW/DVD-ROM). Apple also sells a £398.99 (inc. VAT) model that has a faster 1.42GHz G4 processor and a larger 80GB hard drive. The mini comes with only 256MB of RAM, which makes it a poor performer (as you can see in our test results below) for any processor-intensive applications, including editing video or high-resolution photos and playing 3D games. Memory has long been a shortcoming in Macs, including both the iMac G5 and even a couple of Power Mac G5 configurations, which also ship standard with 256MB of memory. In fairness to the G5 machines, they do use faster 400MHz memory, but 256MB is still not enough. If Apple wants its computers to be seen as cutting-edge media machines, it should make 512MB of RAM the standard and ship high-end machines with a full gigabyte. We'd recommend that anyone eyeing the mini should spend £50 to double the memory to 512MB. And if you plan to make use of iMovie and iDVD, you'll want to upgrade the combo drive to Apple's DVD-burning SuperDrive. That upgrade was more costly than we expected at £70. In our real-world testing, the mini's limited RAM meant it performed complex tasks much slower than would a Power Mac G5, but the difference was usually in seconds, not minutes. Working with clips in iMovie was noticeably slower but never so slow that we needed to make a cup of coffee while the machine caught up. Transferring an iMovie file to iDVD, however, gave us more than enough time to boil the kettle. The mini also choked on GarageBand songs with several instrumental tracks, occasionally pausing for a split second in the middle of a song during playback. In addition to the memory, the slow-spinning hard drive contributes to the Mac mini's performance limitations. In order to pack it into such a small case, Apple uses a notebook hard drive. Whereas the iMac G5 uses a 3.5in., 7,200rpm drive, inside the mini spins a 2.5in., 4,200rpm drive. Expansion, or lack thereof, is also another obvious drawback to the mini; there are no free PCI slots, and opening the case is difficult and discouraging. One way Apple has kept the mini's price down is by not including a monitor, a keyboard or a mouse. If you're switching from a Windows computer, that won't be a problem, as Macs can use nearly any peripherals that Windows PCs can use -- as long as your keyboard and mouse are USB and not PS/2. If you're a new user, however, you'll need to tack on the extra expense. Look for a Logitech or Microsoft mouse and keyboard (Apple's one-button mouse and tacky plastic keyboard are so poor that it's probably a plus that the mini doesn't come with them). You can also configure the mini with wireless capability: Bluetooth (£39) for wireless keyboard and mouse -- saving valuable USB ports in the process -- and 802.11g (£49) for wireless networking. Apple has just lowered the price on these two upgrades; you can get both for a reasonable £69.99. The £339 price pulled us in, but when we had finished customising the Mac mini, the price rose to £559.02 with four upgrades: doubling the memory (£50.01) and the hard drive (£30.01), upgrading to the SuperDrive (£70.01), and adding wireless Bluetooth and the AirPort Extreme card (£69.99). The mini has another ace up its sleeve -- in addition to its small footprint and quiet operation -- in the shape of its software bundle. The Mini comes with the recently released iLife '05 suite, which includes iMovie HD, iTunes 4.7, iDVD 5.0, iPhoto 5.0 and GarageBand 2.0. You also get AppleWorks (oddly, the Mini doesn't come with iWork, Apple's new office suite) and a few games. The abundant software bundle greatly adds to the mini's overall value.

Performance
Application performance Using an older, slower G4 processor, the Mac mini couldn't keep pace with its G5 family members on our Photoshop benchmark. Also hurting its performance was its meagre allotment of memory: the Mac mini ships with 256MB of RAM while the iMac G5 and the Power Mac G5 models we tested previously had 512MB and 4GB, respectively. The Mac mini took 23 minutes 1 second to complete our test of applying a variety of techniques to 15 images. The iMac G5 completed the same test in 8 minutes 31 seconds, while the Power Mac sped though the test in 3 minutes 13 seconds -- more than seven times faster than the Mac mini. But that's to be expected; the Power Mac G5, for one, has two processors to the Mini's one -- each of which is clocked twice as fast -- and it has eight times the memory. For lengthy photo-editing sessions, you may grow frustrated with the mini's modest specs. If your photo editing rarely goes beyond reducing red-eye, then the mini can save you a lot of money and still suit your needs. We do recommend, however, spending the additional £50 to upgrade the mini's memory to 512MB. The Mac mini had a better showing on our iTunes test, taking just over 45 seconds to convert a 10-minute song (in AIFF) to MP3. It still trailed the iMac G5 and the Power Mac G5, but not by nearly the large margin as in our Photoshop test. And the mini narrowly outpaced the similarly equipped eMac, which we attribute to the optimisations Apple has made to Mac OS X between versions X 10.3.3 and 10.3.7. Graphics and gaming performance The Mac mini produced a playable frame rate on our Quake III benchmark at just over 60fps, but before you get too excited about that , we should note that Quake III is an older game, and the test was run at a fairly low resolution of 1,024 by 768. The mini's 32MB ATI Radeon 9200 is a step up from an integrated graphics solution that borrows resources from main system memory, but it's still not a card you'd find in a high-end gaming system. Today's games, although not generally available for Macs, will prove too taxing for the mini. Then again, any gamer shopping for a sub-£600 computer isn't being realistic. The mini can handle running the applications found in iLife '05 -- for manipulating photos, music and movies -- which should keep most prospective mini owners pleased and productive.

Service & support
Apple's support options have always been a bit skimpy, although the quality of the help is good. You're out of luck when it comes to phone support: where most computers provide a year of free phone support, Apple offers only 90 days. You can also visit the mini's support page, which contains links to excellent forums. The Mini comes with a one-year limited warranty. For £129, you can purchase the AppleCare Protection Plan, which gets you three years of phone support and a three-year warranty. For a system that costs only £339, we can't justify paying nearly 40 percent of that price for an extended warranty.

Benchmarks

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