Mac mini Computer Review

Software and Performance

The Mac mini comes with OS X Lion, the latest version of Apple’s Mac operating system. We love Lion because it is filled with valuable new features. With Lion, you can finally easily run apps full-screen to take advantage of the large monitors that are popular today. A feature called Mission Control brings together full-screen apps, Dashboard, Expose, and Spaces to give you a hub where you can get an overview and navigate everything on your system.

The new Resume and Auto Save features are very useful. Resume reopens closed apps right where you left them so you can get back to work immediately. With Resume, you can also restart your Mac and return to where you left it. The Auto Save feature automatically saves your work for you. Anyone who has ever lost several hours of work because they forgot to save the document will love this feature.

In addition to these features, the Mac mini also comes with iPhoto, iMovie, Garage Band, Mail, Address Book, iCal, iTunes, Safari, Time Machine, FaceTime and Photo Booth. Unfortunately, a useful program called iWeb, which created Web sites quickly and easily, is no longer included or supported.

The new Mac App Store is the place to go if you want to download Pages or any other Mac software. Luckily for Mac mini owners, there is a large selection of programs that download quickly and easily. Without an optical drive, downloads and/or programs that can be installed from a USB drive are the easiest way to get programs into the mini.

One other feature of Mac OS X Lion that we find very useful is the Multi-Touch gestures. After using iPhones, tablets, and other devices by swiping and touching the screen, these gestures have become second nature to many of us. To take full advantage of the Lion gesture-based input commands, we added a USD 70 Magic Track Pad to our mini. As you can see in Figure 8, the Magic Track Pad is a small pad that perfectly matches the sleek, aluminum finish of the mini.

Figure 8: The Magic Track Pad

This device is very thin, as shown in Figure 9, but is also quite solid. It can sit on your knee as easily as it can sit on your desk. It offers precise cursor control. It allows you to scroll, select, pinch and expand, swipe, rotate, click and drag, and perform several other finger-based commands. There is a two-finger scroll as well as three-finger and four-finger swipes.

We thoroughly enjoyed using Mac OS X Lion, especially with the Magic Track Pad. The Mac mini’s applications performed well (even when we loaded it up by running six or seven apps at the same time), as did videos and, surprisingly, most of the games we tried. Some heavy duty apps such as Photoshop took a fairly long time to load. We also noticed a definite slowdown after running these applications and/or graphic games for several hours. Two gigabytes of memory is adequate for light work, but we would suggest that for those planning to run heavy-duty apps, more memory should be added, or purchase the better model which has 4 GB of memory and a slightly faster processor.

One very nice thing about the Mac mini is that it is extremely quiet. Even up close, you can’t tell that it is on by the sound. Also, in spite of what we did with it, the Mac mini stayed cool.