Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Funny that P-A would run this on Friday... I got my new Core Duo Mac Mini on Friday.

First impressions, pretty good. I was actually quite disappointed with the "out of box" experience. Most of the problems were rather small ones:

• The power brick has a strange connector that leads to the wall. It "clicks" twice. When I first set it up, I get everything hooked up and push the power button and nothing happens. It took me like 10 minutes of thinking "I don't want to return this bitch" before I found that you have to push the three prong connector HARD into the brick to get to the second "click". (Insert your IT Crowd joke here)
• The network setup on first-boot needs an "advanced" mode that just takes you right to the network prefs. I use MAC filtering on my WiFi and there was no way to see what the MAC address IS when you first get started, so I had to turn it off and see what popped into the DCHP table of the router. Shouldn't require two computers to get going.
• My Logitech Cordless Comfort Duo keyboard is a "dual platform" keyboard. The Windows/Alt keys are dual labeled with Command/Open Apple and Option. However, when the machine came up, for some reason these were reversed. I was able to correct this in the KB prefs, but the interface for that panel is confusing and if I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, it might have been terminally so.
• The Mini is connected to an 18" CTX flat panel I have had for quite some time. When it first started up, however, it didn't default to the highest supported rez on the monitor. It knew it was an LCD, it knew the max rez, it should have started at 1280x. It took a minute for me to realize why it looked like crap.
• GCC and X11 aren't installed by default, and you kind of have to hunt for them on the OSX disks to get them installed. There is actually a good bit of optional software on the disk that isn't installed by default. First-boot really should finish by prompting you to install optional packages.

I am quite impressed by the speed of the PPC emulation. The PPC VLC runs quite well emulated -- actually better than the CVS snapshot build of the x86 version. In all, a lot of the PPC software I used worked well. The one failing of this approach is it breaks down at the library level. Azureus, for instance, doesn't work because the x86 JRE won't talk to the PPC .so files that contain the SWT implementation.

I have to say, the software mix you get out of the box -- iLife, iWork, Quicken -- is truely impressive. You have a top-shelf app for 90% of what you might want to do with a computer.