Apple Mac Mini Review

Overall Rating

Tiny (about the size of a stack of 6 CD cases)
Virtually silent
Built in wifi and bluetooth
Works with any keyboard and mouse and monitor (I hooked up a widescreen, and it looked perfect without any tweaks)
Plays and burns CDs or DVDs (I have the more expensive version, the cheaper version doesn't burn DVDs)
Surprisingly fast.
It's a mac - things just seem to work together.
For Unix geeks, it has Unix under the hood. For non-Unix geeks, you can ignore this fact, and just marvel at the fact that it rarely crashes.

Sub-par audio quality (I ended up and recommend getting an add-on USB audio adaptor). I should have expected this, but for a machine which seems to be designed around home entertainment I'd have expected at least Ipod quality sound (this is why I didn't give it a 10)
Very difficult to open (to upgrade memory, internal disk, etc)
All USB connectors on back, and not enough of them (4)
It's easy to unplug the power cord while reaching behind the machine
Default configuration has way too little memory

I got a mac mini thinking that it would make a great heart of a home entertainment system. The size is certainly right for this. Installation and migration (from another mac) was a piece of cake. In fact all I did was connect my vintage macbook and 30 minutes later all my programs (yes!), settings, etc were copied. At home, I am mostly doing email, web browsing, managing my photo collection, and managing my ever increasing audio collection, tasks which the mac is well suited. Any application can print to a PDF, and word documents can be opened (sort of) without MS Word (I have MS word, but rarely use it). There is not as much freeware/shareware as there is for Windows, but what's out there seems to be of slightly higher quality (and most malware simply doesn't work). Also, a lot of Unix software works (though Xwindows based software is a little awkward). I have not attempted to dual-boot XP, but it's possible.

Now the bad points (minor)..
The first thing I did was hook it up to my stereo. Sound was not natural sounding. When I hooked up an external USB audio adaptor (buy carefully - some don't work with a Mac), things got much better, but it sometimes reverts back to the internal speaker after a reboot. 1gb memory is simply not enough. I brought a third-party memory card, and opening up the case involved using a putty knife (the memory vendor had a detailed video on this). Max memory in my box is 2gb, but I think newer ones can take more. Another thing I brought was a USB adaptor - I suggest buying one (or two).