Mac mini - Didn't feel the love..

[padishahemperor]

Last thursday our Mac minis arrived after waiting a good month for delivery. The wait was painful, I could not get much done on the PC which was about to be sold, I got sick of looking at it. My partner too was looking forward to the Mac and being able to get rid of the buzzing PC horror which has been the main development machine that we use for our web business.

Now, I have to make it clear. I am a UNIX person, I have not touched Windows and refuse completely to run it unless it's contained within a virtual machine of some kind where it can do no harm, also I am quite unapologetic about it, I get stressed and violent after using running Windows. My partner though has never run anything other than Windows. Despite the attractiveness of many a Linux I've ran, the pre-requisites for my partner are a graphics tablet, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, IE6 - because that's what customers use and an email client capable of handling 1,000s of emails and lots of accounts.

As I've never developed a Windows dependancy, my transition was smooth-ish apart from the Mac getting confused about monitor refresh rates and booting into too high a resolution for my monitor, I panicked and reinstalled it, then I couldn't find Appleworks because it's not obvious where it is. I'm currently having an issue getting my Zodiac working with MissingSync but that's another story. Generally I feel the sweet, sweet lovin' of the Mac. I've even bought my first TFT (still think they're a crap fad) which matches the mini and a USB2 caddy to house my old PC's 40GB IDE drive. I've stuck a bluetooth adaptor on. I'm happy. But my partner...

Initially a hardware problem was found, the space bar on the keyboard was defective and leaned to the left, Apple did replace it within 2 days though. But the defective one has to be sent to the Netherlands!!! at our cost!! They can whistle for it. :-)

There were issues with the Mail application, finally after an afternoon of tears and profanities it was set up, but even with the 512MB RAM it ran like a pig (evidently) when scrolling though messages. Safari (and I can vouch for this) just wasn't compatible with lots of sites. I myself saw this when trying to do some online banking, I discovered IE for Mac and quickly removed it from my drive, it seemed to render things really poorly. Eventually we both settled on Firefox, but my partner does a lot of online server admin things and there was some kind of problem with input dialogues, not sure about that but the form I'm typing this on right now is all over the place and misaligned on the right. Then there was the graphics tablet farce. My partner does not use a mouse, only pens (dunno why but you can't teach an old dog new tricks) and that HAD to be the main input device. The only problem was the existing tablet we had which was allegedly Mac compatible did not allow anything to be selected, this resulted after a day of cursing in the destruction of the tablet and pen. A new one was ordered. It came and oh Lord I wish it hadn't! We tried driver after driver but they all performed really poorly. When selecting something it would take 1-3 secs to catch up, unusable. Eventually after hours of stress I removed all the driver files, hunted using Finder's Find all related files and binned them. Rebooted and it worked fine. Yet when we first plugged it in it didn't work. There is still a mystery as to what driver it was using. But in time we found out it's responsiveness was dependent on how busy the machine was and I don't mean like a mouse! Several apps open and it would start lagging behind again sometimes 5 secs later!

By this point we had orders piling up and no workable platform for any productivity.

Then we had the Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Flash problems. I don't use these 'products' at all, I have no understanding of them or what to do with them, my partner uses them heavily and considers them critical to our productivity. I can't give an opinion myself but my partner was not impressed, there were bugs and really bad performance issues. Having Fireworks and Dreamweaver open with Mail and Firefox and using the graphics tablet (which it how my partner has been working on a 1GHz AMD PC with 256MB RAM) caused the spinning ball to do it's thing constantly. Resulting in screams of frustration and for a moment I thought I'd see the mini come flying past my office. The final nail in the coffin was the critical need to test web pages on IE6, it has to be done as this is what customers want. Also there is no point in buying a nice compact QUIET Mac just to have keep a clumsy buzzing PC beside it! We wanted to be free of the damned things. So we got Virtual PC. I'm using it fine, but of course I know if I want to run it, do it full screen and without much else running too. For my partner this wasn't an option, it had to be running simultaneously with the web development tools. First we couldn't get XP to even install, we had to settle for Windows 2000, then update it to the latest service pack and IE6. This worked for a few reboots of virtual PC and then would stop working - everything was corrupt, I myself reinstalled Windows THREE times in as many days, eventually I made a fresh install and backed up the VirtualPC file so it could be restored.

But the whole thing ran like a pig, I mean really bad... there was no love, just frustration.

Today we had to make a business decision and get the development PC back out of retirement, complete with the unbearable buzzing and reinstall XP and go back to how it was a week or so ago before all this. In the experiment with a Mac we've lost a few hundred emails, documents, proposals and web sites, we've lost over a week of productivity. The thing that gets to me is that my partner is now looking at Dell - better the devil you know and the faith in Apple and Apple's software is gone. I'm still keeping mine, I feel the 'ooooooh baby' lovin from it but I feel that I wish I'd never recommended it in the first place. Even I have made some major changes and accomodations for the new machine (like PDA) but so far I'm not exactly reaping the rewards yet.

My concern is if Apple are wanting to use the Mini to win over PC users on fairly tight budgets, although it's worked for me it obviously doesn't work for everyone. There appear for some to be usability issues and poor software from Macromedia which can be very disappointing. Even I run into usability issues, I'd be lost without Expose. I know Apple will win over quite a lot of people, I just wonder how many will switch back. I also know of another similar case with a friend, again Outlook and Dreamweaver were the critical apps.

"Once you go Mac, there's no going back" Nice sentiment, but sadly not true.

Rant over, I had to pour this out to other Mac users as a form of catharsis ;-)

[adambyte]

Considering my PowerBook is only a little better equipped than the Mac Minis, I'm extremely surprised by your complaints of speed when it came to running the Macromedia apps as well as Mail and FireFox. I routinely run Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Mail running while I listen to my iTunes, and I couldn't possibly complain about performance.

Also... yeah... Virtual PC is not a replacement for a real PC, and I definitely wouldn't run it all the time. I check web sites in Windows every once in a while, but if I were professional web guy, I'd keep both comptuers around. It seems like rendering a web page requires more CPU power than one would think.

Sorry to hear it doesn't work out for your partner's experience.

I suppose you could try and use the Disk Utility to fix disk permissions, but... I dunno what else to say. Anybody?

[texanpenguin]

I'm with AdamByte; the performance of that computer should be better than my old PowerBook, but it certainly doesn't sound that way...

I'm very surprised.

I also think VirtualPC should be avoided where possible, but used in some instances makes sense (I use it for openCanvas only).

[Viro]

Something sounds screwy and you might have some rogue background process. Fire up the activity monitor to see if there is anything that's taking too much CPU time (or use the top command from the terminal since you're a Unix dude).

The performance shouldn't be that bad. I run a Powerbook 12" and OS X was never that bad.

[andychrist]

padishahemperor, were you having those problems even before installing Virtual PC? 'Cause VPC 7 requires 512 MB RAM all by its self, and even VPC 6 should probably only be run on a system with at least one gig of RAM (from what I've read of customers' reviews.) And both Fireworks and Dreamweaver each require their own 128 MB (256 recommended.) So with only 512 MB in your mini, it is not surprising that you are getting spinning beach balls with all those apps and files opened at once. So I would doubt that your tablet is to blame. Everyone I know who uses one with their Mac has no problems, even on much older and slower machines. Have you checked VT or MU for driver updates? I'd also agree with adambyte, check your disk with DU and also Repair Disk Permissions.

Also, did you mean to say you reinstalled the OS? With all the updates? AppleWorks would be on the Software Restore disk, of course, as it is not included as part of the OS.

Safari used to be completely incompatible with most banking sites, but at least here in the States those problems have all been rectified-- although, I admit, I did have to call up Citibank to get through entering a log-in password. But that snafu was not the fault of Safari but of the bank, they had a dead end hyperlink. Can't believe you deep-sixed it in favor of Firefox, which I have found has loads more rendering problems.

Sorry that you and your partner have been going through such trials. Still I'm sure your experience is not typical.

Hope you get everything sorted.

[chornbe]

I'm on an iBook 1.33 with 1.25 GB RAM and everything... including Virtual PC runs fine. VPC gets a little laggy when I'm running big builds and such, but I've got the virtual machine's memory capped at 256.

I think you either have: 1) a bum unit 2) some really poor installations or 3) a user who unknowingly caused more harm than expected fudging around with settings.

I assume you, being the more familiar with Macs and Unix have looked over all the major stuff and generally know where to look for such things.

I'd seriously suggest you have questionable unit. It's worth rebuilding and changing software load order and such.

Also... Put more memory in it. You really do need it in both boxes. I'm convinced that a gig is the minimum for serious computer users, especially when graphics, gaming or development are involved.

[padishahemperor]

Well, a little update. My mini had 256MB RAM and I've swapped units, so my unit is going back and I'm keeping the 512MB machine for myself.

I did notice it felt slow but I reinstalled it. Now it runs like lightning, I'm chuffed to bits and really pleased. My partner is still going for a Dell for 6 months or so then is planning to get a G5 and use the Dell as a headless machine via Remote Desktop.

I think something was wrong somewhere, probably with all the installations/removals and God knows what else. I don't think a G5 is the answer myself, just spending some time learning how it works and getting used to something other than Windows.

As for me, so far so DAMN good, no spinning ball, no lags - it just works!

;-)

[Viro]

256 MB is way too little for OS X. Maybe alright for Linux, but if you're better off with 512 MB on OS X.