Oooohhhh right, now I get it.

So my mac mini arrived last week. Three seperate boxes, one for the mini, one for the wireless mighty mouse and another for the wireless keyboard. What made me laugh was the fact that Joyce, arguably the smallest person in the world was carrying them to give to me. This stuff is actually completely tiny, it’s really incredible. So much so, that I’m not actually sure what I’m going to be doing with the rest of the real estate of my desk, the bottom of my desk is also looking pretty barren, so I’m thinking there’s going to be a trip to Ikea to get a table to put my stereo, thus freeing up enough space to get myself an A1 drawing board, as I see that coming in handy a lot in the coming year.

It took a total of 12 minutes from the second I connected all the wires to the second i was surfing the net and talking to Bonsai online. The machine picked up the mouse, keyboard and wireless router in seconds and I was actually up and running in no time at all.

So what is my initial reactions to OSX now that I’ve played around on it for more than 30 minutes? There is genuinely a hell of a lot to like. Things that as a windows user I came to accept because that was the norm. That all changed last year when I got into Ubuntu and realised that there was actually a different way. The problem I faced with Ubuntu however was the lack of sophisticated software aimed directly at the operating system and the lack of hardware drivers for a lot of my peripherals. Obviously this isn’t the case here.

One of the greatest things for me however is the lack of having to shut down my computer every day. I put it to sleep and that’s pretty much it. Loading it up again takes a total of 3 seconds and I’m up and running again. The quiet nature of the machine is an incredible selling point to me, since my previous machine, although a work horse in it’s own right was fucking load as you like. So this was a breath of fresh air.

Then there’s how it all clicks together. All downloads go into the downloads folder which I can access. Hardly anything is actually on my desktop anymore (save for my blue shuffle icon, which I love btw). Installing a programme requires me to move the downloaded programme into the applications folder. I’ve got several funky ways to see my documents and applications in that is slightly less archaic than the traditional drop down menu and the list goes on.

Reading through that last paragraph you’d think that I had absolutely no negative comments about the system. Unfortunately you’d be wrong about that. However as that’s another post in and of itself I’ve had to split it up a bit.