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June 16, 2007
My First Month with a Mac
About a month ago, we acquired a Mac Mini to use as our home theater PC (if you recall, our old one died back in January). After working off and on to get the Mini set up to serve our home media needs, I've come to a few conclusions I thought I'd put to pixel. Many of these conclusions are not unique, but as this is my first Apple product since my IIe back in high school, they were all surprising to me.
1) The Mac Mini is a darned impressive PC for its size
One of the main reasons the Mini was attractive to me as an HTPC was its small size and quietness -- both very desirable qualities in something that will sit 6 inches above your primary television. Now that I've had some time to become more familiar with it (and Mac OS X), I'm really pleased at how capable the Mini is. Ours is a 1.66 GHz Core Duo unit with 1GB of RAM, and there's nothing I've asked it to do that has made the Mini seem like it's going to break a sweat. In Windows machines, you can always tell when they're stressed, as the UI starts to falter and you get the dreaded hourglass pointer for long periods at a time. Not so with the Mini; so far, it has seemed rather unflappable. And that impresses me given its rather modest specs (at least for the Windows world). Plus, the Front Row remote just caps off the entire package, at least for our use.
2) Mac OS can do things Windows (at least XP) cannot
I had desired to repurpose an external hard drive from backup on my main Windows machine to media storage on the Mac Mini. It didn't occur to me at first that the reason the Mac wasn't able to write to the new drive was that it was in NTFS. I've been using NTFS drives exclusively now since 2001, so I didn't even think about the file system. Well, it turns out that the only file system viable on both OS's is FAT32. But, and this just amazed me, Windows XP cannot format any drive larger than 32GB to FAT32; larger than that and it must be NTFS. So, after an hour or so of banging my head against the Windows machine's keyboard ("why is FAT32 not coming up as a format option?!??"), I discovered that little limitation. So, I trotted the drive down to the Mini, initialized the drive, and formatted it to FAT32 with no problem. If Mac OS is more capable at something as simple as formatting a hard drive, it makes me wonder what advantages Windows has (other than being an industry standard) to warrant its market share.
3) Mac OS does "just work"...mostly
As this is the first time I've actually used a Mac OS device, the experience has been pretty delightful. Many, many activities that are arduous or unintuitive in Windows (at least XP...I've not played much with Vista yet) are dirt-simple in OS X. For example, unmounting a drive means clicking an icon next to the drive picture. In Windows, you need to click the "safely remove hardware" icon in the task bar and then select the correct drive, often from among several similarly named options differentiated only by a drive letter. However, there are many things I find less convenient (or more cumbersome) in OS X, with most of those emanating from the lack of a right-click context menu. Of all the UI elements in Windows (beyond the requisite ones like icons, dialogs, and slider bars), I think the context menu is probably the single most useful addition. I also do not prefer having to go up to the top of the screen to access drop-down menus; maybe it's an issue of familiarity, but it seems weird (to me) to divorce the menus from the app window. I'll get used to all these things, I'm sure, but this experience has shown me that while Mac OS does seem to have an overall "cleaner" UI, neither OS has a monopoly on ease-of-use.
4) iTunes on a Mac is actually usable
After struggling constantly with iTunes on our Windows machine (for use with my wife's iPod), I had decided that I hated iTunes with every fiber of my being. But, using it on a Mac is an entirely different experience. It actually works...and works well! Cover Flow mode is a gorgeous interface to use, even if it does tweak my obsessive-compulsive tendencies such that I spent too many hours looking up cover art for many of our more obscure albums. Could iTunes still be greatly improved? Easily, especially in ways that would please advanced users (e.g., could we have a UPnP music server function built in, please?).
5) Apple was shortsighted when it disabled optical audio volume control
In a rare example of retarding the unit's usefulness, Apple decided that if the Mini's user decides to use the unit's digital optical audio output instead of analog, system-level volume control should be disabled. That means that no volume control at all can be done via the Mac itself. That means that we lose functionality on two of the six (a third!) Front Row remote buttons as well as the dedicated volume control buttons on our wireless keyboard. Some may argue it's a good decision because then the audio stream coming out of the Mini is pure and untainted by system manipulation of the signal. OK, I don't buy that. Nobody is going to use a Mini for state-of-the-art sound quality. Anyone that concerned is going to have a dedicated DVD player that likely costs more than the Mini. In addition, even if that's a valid argument for locking audio output as line-out, at least give us the option of disabling system-level audio volume control. Many of us are willing to give up some audio quality for the convenience of a fully functional Front Row remote; is a simple checkbox in System Prefs too much to ask?
More as I think of it...
Comments
I've had a Mac in some form since 2003. I first had a PowerBook, and now a Mini (512mb RAM, PPC processor) that I've been abusing for almost two years. I'm lovin' it.
The one thing that initially surprised me about OS X is how easy it is to uninstall a program. On Windows you have to go through a 12-step program it seems. ;)
Posted by: Sledge at June 17, 2007 1:15 AM
Good point, Sledge...that's another interesting bit. Installation/uninstallation on the Mac took me (pleasantly) back to my DOS days when there was no "installation" -- you just created a directory, ran the executable, and that was it. Ah, simplicity.
Posted by: Craig at June 17, 2007 4:26 PM