Bought a new Mac Mini. It is a beautiful machine.

[alfredo]

My wife's 10 year old eMac gave up the ghost, so I gave her my old Mini, and I bought a new one. She is very happy with the arrangement. I am using her large screen TV as the monitor. She was playing Chopper on it right now. She's beaten it several times, now all she is doing is seeing if she can beat her past scores.

[struggle4progress]

1. I think they're nice little machines. I only have a few reservations about them:

(1) user-upgrade doesn't seem particularly easy, so I've never had the courage to crack mine open to upgrade; and (2) apple exhibits a rotten attitude about connectors: the consumer may have to buy an adaptor from apple to run a non-apple monitor -- the sockets I've seen are slightly nonstandard, and the adaptor that came with mine had a stupid little jiggle in it that thwarts most monitors

The packaging is great, though, and you get OSX

[alfredo]

2. I got the adaptor for my VGA monitor, no problems at all.

I find that it renders filters (in GIMP) faster than my old Mini. A stronger graphic chip did that.

[struggle4progress]

3. Maybe apple's nicer today. I bought several minis in 2009, and they came with video connectors

and adaptors that didn't play well with the standard world. I could have bought the necessary connectors from apple at ~$30 a pop -- but since I use the devices remotely, I only needed a screen during setup; I do own an apple cinema monitor, so I just crawled under my desk and disconnected the monitor temporarily to use it. It wasn't really a big deal, but it was irritating

[alfredo]

4. I like the newer flexible adaptors like what I have now.

[alfredo]

5. The connector that came with my Mini wasn't for VGA, so

I shelled out the dollars for their adaptor.

[struggle4progress]

6. It's not a deal-breakers, just an irritation, but a real irritation:

Apple VGA Adapter Cheatsheet
May 17, 2009
Many years ago, Apple gave up on the standard VGA port and decided that all of their laptops should have very small proprietary video ports. This is an issue for anyone who would like to actually use that port to do something, like connect an external monitor or a video projector. To make matters worse, Apple changes the video port every two or three years and never puts any kind of identifying marks (other than a generic video symbol) on either the port or the plain white video adapters. Then, just to keep you on your toes, they only provide small, bird’s eye view photos of the adapters on the Apple Store, making it rather difficult to purchase the correct one ...
http://wickiss.wordpress.com/

Friday, October 02, 2009
The hell of Apple video connectors
At my day job I made the fateful decision to go with an all Apple shop. Everyone has an Apple MacPro ...
But there's a price to pay... when connecting laptops to the projector in the meeting room we are in adapter hell.
http://www.jgc.org.nyud.net:8090/blog/uploaded_images/apple-757688.png
To solve these problem I have one of each adapter with little stickers on them ...
http://blog.jgc.org/2009/10/hell-of-apple-video-connectors.html

Apple Mini DisplayPort adapter FAIL
http://farm4.static.flickr.com.nyud.net:8090/3282/2969264395_0db28f9b94.jpg
Apple's Mini DisplayPort to DVI adapter is a "DVI-D Dual Link". Their other adapter DVI to video (s-video & composite, which I use all the time) is a "DVI-I Single Link" ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/deapeajay/2969264395/

[alfredo]

7. I have everything but the adaptor for attaching my iPad to

the TV upstairs. I have one to attach my iPad to this VGA monitor.


Behind me is about 15 years of adaptors, dongles, Cat5, SCSI cables, and PS2 adapters galore.