BSD guy flirts with the dark side.
I did it. I cheated a little. I still consider myself faithful to my OpenBSD and FreeBSD. I’ve spiced the relationship with various Linux Distros over the years (14 years now, wow!). Last month, though, I started an illicit affair with Cupertino. I bought a new Mac Mini.
I have had issues with getting my home recording studio working correctly with the various BSDs, and I have had some issues with Linux as well. They all work great for everything else, but when recording, I would get odd pauses or what sounded like the bitrate dropping. Flac, MP3, Ogg. . . all would give various issues. Most of the problems I tracked down to the Realtek chipsets. Some were just too random to troubleshoot. How do you troubleshoot something if you can’t reproduce it exactly?
Anyway. I’ve looked at the Minis for a few years, and nearly bought a G4 Mini when they were first released. Things just just didn’t happen, and I wasn’t comfortable with something I couldn’t put my finger on.
With this new model, the extra USB ports, the nVidia graphics, the support for up to 4GB Ram. . . And the release coinciding with my Bonus. . . . I took the Nestea Plunge.
My impressions so far? GarageBand 09 works Very well for what I do. Easy to learn, easy to use. Trying to remember that all of my old Keyboard short-cuts are now Command Key instead of Control, not so easy. The machine is extremely quiet. I have not managed to pick-up the slightest noise from it on my mic (MXL 990), even though it sits on the desk less than 2 feet away. It is quite peppy. I have not bogged it down yet. Granted, I upgraded the ram to 4GB and the HDD to a Western Digital 500GB Scorpio Blue, and installed the OS with Case Sensitivity enabled before booting the first time. My 65GB iTunes Library populated very quickly, and Genius was finished in no-time compared to my old XP SP3 box with 8GB Ram and 7200RPM HDDs (yeah, yeah, XP can only recognize about 3.2GB or so. . . I was triple-booting with XP, Ubuntu, and OpenBSD at the time with XP used only for iTunes. I don’t like the iPod management with Amarok or Banshee, or the rest so far. for regular MP3 playing and library management, they’re fine.)
I’m still experimenting with Ardour and JackOSX. Audacity works like a champ. No skips, runs, or errors. . . so-far.
I was very close to buying an MSI Wind for this, but I’m glad I changed my mind. I still plan to buy the Wind, and run a headless home-server. Load it out with 2 2TB HDDs, 2GB Ram, and move my external USB HDDs over to it.
What I didn’t like. The Apple Store. It was pretentious. The ‘Concierge’ at the door, taking names. The snobby people walking around glaring at you. The fact that they had this idiotic idea for being ‘Green’ by not providing a shopping bag for an armload of items that you just purchased, even though each item is wrapped in multiple layers of plastic. Hell, even Target, Publix and Lowes have ‘Green’ Re-usable and Recyclable tote-bags that you can buy for $0.99 that are store-branded with their traditional colors and logos. This pretentiousness and snobiness seem to be due to the ‘Cult of Mac’ the Jobs has cultivated over the years. I remember when certain upgrades for Macs required you to solder capacitors and wires. I don’t remember any pretentiousness back then. The Mini had the audacity to warn me that there were NO Consumer-upgradable components inside, or words along those lines. The hardest part was one of the four tiny phillips-head (cross-head/plus-head) screws kept getting wedged diagonally instead of going in the hole (can’t find the hole . . . its a guy-thing).
Overall, I love the new Mini, although I do feel rather poncy about the experience. If I were to do it again, I think I would buy online and skip the Store.
And remember. I like Pie.