In sympathy for my advancing years my very lovely boyfriend bought me a Mac Mini for my birthday. It’s so tiny! The Windows desktop it is going to replace is a Shuttle, so not exactly a monster of a thing, but you could stack 5 Mac Minis in the same space.
First impressions are good - it feels fast, applications launch very quickly and Mail.app is as nice as Kmail which I use at work. I have to have a mail client that I am happy with, email issues make me grumpy. Other than that I’m still just poking around at the moment, playing with my new toy. I’ve ordered Office so once that arrives I might actually be able to get down and do some real work.
What spec did you get? I’m planning to buy one as soon as they’re shipping with Tiger, but haven’t quite decided on which model to buy.
Comment by James Stewart — April 21st, 2005 @ 1:41 am
As a recent Mac buyer, you should be able to get a free upgrade to Tiger when it comes out, which has an even better version of Mail. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/
You can also get by without MS Office, but it’s still nice to have, I agree.
- Nicholas.
Comment by Nicholas Shanks — April 21st, 2005 @ 5:33 pm
And you know that apt, the debian package manager, is available on OS X too, don’t you? It’s called Fink.
Comment by Nicholas Shanks — April 21st, 2005 @ 6:36 pm
James - it’s the 1.42GHz one and Drew also got me 1Gig of RAM to put in it and did a nifty job with a palette knife to take the case off and install the memory.
Nicholas - the ability to run Office is one of the reasons I went to Mac as opposed to just going to Linux at home. I write and so need to be able to open Word documents, I use OpenOffice at work and it’s fine for most Word documents but once they have a lot of commets or use a ertain template it sometimes starts behaving a bit strangely. I didn’t know about Fink - that looks splendid.
Comment by Rachel — April 22nd, 2005 @ 4:39 pm
Congrats on the Mini !
You might want to give Appleworks a try before opening up that office software you bought. Also, There is a free open source office application that is free. Very nice and fully loaded. Here’s the info.
http://www.neooffice.org/
NeoOffice/J is a full featured office productivity suite including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing, database, and macro functionality. It can be used as a free alternative to Microsoft Office:Mac. You can exchange documents with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org users, even on other platforms!
Comment by Pottsc — April 25th, 2005 @ 2:18 pm
Now it’s 26 July. What’s your second impression?
Comment by John — July 26th, 2005 @ 8:18 pm