MacandPcStore.com

Oct 2009 Mac mini Computer (MC239LL/A)

Customer Rating:
I thought that existing owners of earlier Mac mini Computers might find my observations useful.

I recently purchased a used Mac mini (the MC239LL/A released in Oct 2009) to replace a spring 2006 mini (first generation Intel with Core Duo processor).

My 'old' mini has the much maligned GMA 950 graphics processor and, although it has worked OK for playing DVDs (and fine for audio tasks), that seemed to be about as much as it could do (trying to play some high resolution videos was completely unsuccessful with much video 'stuttering' and freeze-ups).

When the revised Intel minis were released in the spring of 2009, with the Nvidea GForce 9400M graphics device, I wondered if it might provide a genuine improvement over my 2006 mini.

The answer is a resounding yes ! It may not be as fast as a PC with a stand-alone video card but compared to my first generation Intel mini the Oct 2009 mini is a race horse.

Although the mini 'Wikipedia' article (a storehouse of information) says that the Oct 2009 minis have to run 'Snow Leopard' that is not correct. I've been running my 2006 mini off an external FireWire drive for several years and, when I got my 'new-used' Oct 2009 mini (once I made sure that it booted OK off its internal drive - with Snow Leopard installed), I hooked-up my FireWire drive and rebooted the Oct 2009 mini .... it came up without any problems (there were a couple of 'changes are detected' messages but I 'clicked-OK' and that was all).

What forcefully showed me how much better the Oct 2009 mini was than the spring 2006 mini was that it is now possible to play a DVD, running in Windows XP that is itself being run under VMware's 'Fusion' environment which is running as a Mac OS X application. That was totally impossible on the older mini (spring 2006; first generation Intel CPU). (Note: the software being used to show the DVD in Windows XP is the 'VLC' application. I tried to load an old version of 'WinDVD' but kept getting peculiar error messages and, from everything I read off-the-Web, no-one has been able to get WinDVD to run in a 'virtual' environment. When running XP from 'BootCamp' there was no problem on the old mini to run 'WinDVD 8'.)

Now you may be wondering why I bought a used mini from Oct 2009 instead of the recently released (June 2010) minis ? Two reasons : money and some future planes. Although the most recently released minis (June 2010) have an even faster video processor (Nvidea GForce 320M) than the 2009 design from what I've been able to tell (reading) it does not seem to show the great improvement that was immediately apparent when the 2009 minis were first released in March 2009. I was able to buy my Oct 2009 mini for what I thought was a bit more than a hundred dollars less than a new (2010) mini (my 2009 mini has 4 GB RAM) would cost me and, in the not too distant future, I intend opening-up my 'new' mini to gain access to its two SATA ports. My ultimate goal is to have two 3.5 inch SATA drives connected to the 2009 mini and it seemed foolish to spend the money for one of the sleek now 'unibody' minis when I'm planning to do that.

- Paul

AWESOME--I DECIDED TO _PASS_ ON THE NEW "IMPROVED" ONE!

Customer Rating:
So glad I got this--and just in time! They are now discontinued; replaced by an ugly, skinny/hard to stand on it's side "new" model with less RAM and a slower 2.4GHZ processor. The graphics in the "new" one might be "better" but I'm not a gamer and I don't give a rat's patootie about HDMI. And the jury's still out about the built in power supply--if my power supply dies, I plug in another one instead of replacing the whole motherboard like with the "new" model. Bottom line, I'll take this 2.53 with more RAM and faster processor for $100 LESS than the "new" $699 "improved" Mini anyday ;)

My First Mac

Customer Rating:
I have been a MS PC person for over 25 years, not really by choice, but by exposure and necessity. My Apple experience was extremely limited to the Apples at school and as most people of the 80's and 90's know, those were absolute garbage. While I could appreciate what the higher end Macs were capable of, I was never going to be exposed to one and could not afford one and therefore have put off Apple for many years.

The price was still an issue. I didn't even know the Mac Mini existed until I saw one at work(not a Mac friendly place). I realized that the price was no more an issue.

I received my Mac Mini three weeks ago. I was surprised at how quickly it started up.

I immediately started putting it to the test. Can it see the router? No problem. Can it go online? I didn't even have to ask. Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office? They all work great. My RAZR(yeah, i'm old school) was a nightmare to sync in Windows. iSync said that it needed a device added to sync to and I knew that I finally got it. I was the asked if I wanted to add my RAZR and away it went; the Mac probably saw the phone in the other room. Microsoft and Motorola couldn't do this why?

I have Parallels running XP in a virtual machine. That works just fine. I can run my Windows version of Adobe CS3. I can print postage labels through PayPal on my Dymo label printer; PayPal does not support label printers on Mac for some reason.

This is also an extremely compact machine. It is quite the space saver.

This was the best $800 I ever spent!

The one problem that I encountered is that the power cord does not seem to be very secure. While plugging in USB devices, the power cord inevitably gets hit and seems to fall out very easily.

Apple Mini

Customer Rating:
It is working as expected. No surprises. The only downer was the firewire connection provided did not fit my old mini and the connection for the monitor of my old mini did not fit the new one.

POOR AVCHD / BLURAY SUPPORT

Customer Rating:
Unbelivable that macs do not support AVCHD or bluray nativelly .Anyone who has bought an HD camcorder in the last 3 years will be frustrated trying to use a mac to edit there videos. APPLE's solution is either to use there own codec which either creates very poor qualty videos almost like standard definition or creating huge files 5 times the size of your original. Even worst is that they deliberately cripple there dvd drives using some feature called Riplock that slows the dvd drive to a crawl if you wish to backup your dvd collection. I gues it's back to windows untill Apple solves these problems