Note: Apple, what the heck are you thinking? If you're billing the Mini to be the BYOKMM (Bring Your Own Keyboard Mouse Monitor) entryway for WinPC users to "Switch (c) Apple", you have to include a VGA adapter with the Mini. My G4 had one. Unfortunately I couldn't chain my mini-DVI to DVI adapter to my old DVI to VGA adapter, so I had to shell out a few bucks. Wish I hadn't opened the mini-DVI to DVI... could have gotten a few more bucks for it on eBay, I reckon. Still, Apple, please, add the VGA adapter back into the Mini box. The last thing you want is for a potential switcher to take their Mini home and find they can't attach it to their old PC monitor.

Otherwise, that huge shortcoming aside, the new mini is, so far, pretty much everything it was billed to be. Only issues so far are some major black screening playing World of Warcraft, apparently an overheating issue (so far solved by adding smcFanControl to up the minimum fan rate) and some lockup with iPhoto trying to figure out Faces. iPhoto has also had trouble with importing my old pictures and dating them. I've been playing around with exifViewer to make sure the dates are a correctable; they are. That is, the EXIF data in the jpegs shows the correct "taken on" date. iPhoto doesn't, and the bad dates are apparently the symptoms of an iPhoto bug. Faces hard locked iPhoto after it'd spent all night grinding, which was bad, and iPhoto also told me that I had 52,000+ pictures when I only have 8k. Makes me wonder what someone has to do to get a good photo management app. Write one, I guess. Picasa is doing okay, but a few pictures, when expanded, came up blank. Not good. It better not be losing pictures somehow, though on WinPC Picasa was not particularly destructive.

But yeah, the Mini is insanely fast compared to my G4s, runs iTunes without draining the processor, and allows me to once again do two things at once on my Macintosh. It's great. I imagine I'll shell out for max RAM in a few months, but otherwise, very cool and likely nearly worth the dough, assuming the economy picks up in the next, oh, two or three years. Next is downloading the iPhone/iPod touch dev kit, which only works with Mactel, which I (ob) finally have.

And the Apple store had a hard time hooking me up with a Mini. Apparently they were too hot off of the truck, and it took about 10 minutes for them to track one down. The concierge looked befuddled, kept saying that she was finding a sales specialist for me, and one guy who asked if I needed help while I was waiting turned out to be the guy that would be assigned to me a few minutes later. At least he apologized for the mix-up. Also note that student discounts must be taken at the local Apple store; I received one that was $30 less than it should have been for being too far away. Crock.

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