Apple's Mac mini - Tempting PC Users Everywhere
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2005 7:39 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
iPhoto 5
For the most part, I detest photo management applications. They are usually riddled with cumbersome interfaces and/or lack any sort of real editing power. I tried using iPhoto 4, which was a part of the iLife '04 suite, and I was left fairly disappointed. I had to switch between editing and organizing modes to edit or just flip through my pictures. Images took entirely too long to flip through and despite the fact that iPhoto had the best interface of any photo management application that I'd used, it was still not enough. In the end, it was just like everything else to me and I happily continued using Photoshop for editing and saving pictures for AnandTech articles. I used folders to organize the pictures according to article, so I didn't need the organizational aspects of iPhoto for that. But then came iPhoto 5 - time to give it another try, but this time, it looked like there was hope.
During his keynote at Mac World San Franciso, Steve Jobs talked about iPhoto 5 as the only application that you'd need for both editing and organizing your photos. For my uses, Photoshop is basically overkill, but I've never found anything to suit my needs better without sacrificing usability in one way or another. But with a better interface and a new editing dashboard, iPhoto 5 seemed promising.
The iPhoto 5 interface has been greatly simplified. No longer are there different modes to switch between, everything happens in the same browsing mode. You get photos into iPhoto using its import feature, which is activated automatically whenever you connect a digital camera or a removable disk (a configurable option).
Thankfully, iPhoto gives you the option of deleting your photos automatically from the media/camera after it is done importing them. Once you confirm your intentions, iPhoto goes off and copies all of the photos into your iPhoto Library. Your photo library can be viewed at variable sized thumbnails, adjustable by a slider in the lower right of the application. The scaling of the number of pictures on your screen at one time happens very quickly as iPhoto will render the thumbnails quickly, and then later, sharpen the images once you're done playing with the slider. iPhoto is much faster (especially on the G5) now, and photos no longer take a little bit of time to come into focus when browsing through them one at a time (as opposed to a page of thumbnails). Also, when browsing quickly, they will appear as thumbnails rather than blurry images (more useful in my opinion).
The iPhoto Library is organized by year and feeds off of the information written by your camera to the images. If you have a lot of photos, the Library quickly becomes cluttered, since it is organized by nothing more than date. This is where some of the indexing features of iPhoto come into play, but they do require a bit of user intervention.
When you import images into the Library, you have the option of tagging the images that you import with a title. For example, when I imported the images for this review, I titled them "Mac mini". Now, even if I have thousands of images taken in 2005, I just type in "mini" in the search box and all my Mac mini images come up instantly, thanks to a fully indexed search in iPhoto. Now, titling images isn't something that I'd normally take the time to do, but the way iPhoto works is that you just create one general title and it will apply it to all of the photos that you're importing (or you can selectively import them).
After they are imported, you can go back and add ratings, keywords and comments to photos on an individual basis, all of which are fully searchable fields. You also have the option of populating these fields after the fact using iPhoto's batch processing. Just highlight what photos you want and you can add a title, comments or even modify the date/time. And if you actually take the time to make good use of these searchable fields, or even if you just make use of the batch titling upon import, you can create Smart Albums based on searches of these fields. For example, you can create an album of all pictures of "video cards" or "cars I'd like to buy" or just about any other combination that you can think of.
Personally, I'm not enough of a photo enthusiast to put that much time into my digital library, but if you have a habit of taking a lot of pictures, iPhoto 5 offers some very excellent and intuitive ways of organizing them. Plus, the interface works and feels just like the rest of OS X, which is a very strong point of iPhoto. There is one exception to my last statement, however. Hitting Command + W will actually exit the iPhoto program itself, something which breaks the way that almost all OS X applications work. One thing that I was a fan of with OS X is the consistency with which all applications behaved, and iPhoto unfortunately breaks that consistency - not something I was too happy with.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
198 Comments
View All Comments
wildgift - Monday, September 19, 2005 - link
I bought one, and it's nice. It's very quiet (meaning it doesn't add to the noise in the office), reasonably quick, and very easy on the eyes. It is a decent development machine, at least for smaller database driven websites, and is portable enough to tote to the office. There's definitely something to be said for carrying your entire development environment around, but without spending all the $$ for a laptop. The price/performance ratios suck, but the overall fit and finish, and very nice software, more than compensate for the approximaely $150 premium you pay for going with a Mac. A SFF PC / OS combo to match the Mini simply cannot be purchased. A fairly comparable SFF PC (like the AOpen that's quiet) with the same RAM and larger hard drive, and slightly faster CPU, costs almost the same, and lacks the software. (Yes, I'm getting one of those too.)Also, going with any Mac at all gets you the better aesthetics that Windows lacks, and Linux totally lacks. You get better typefaces. You get better color calibration. Printing is smoother (and the addition of gimp-print is a big plus). You can type in any language you know. Even the screensaver photos are nicer. With iWork, you get nicer templates. Even the old AppleWorks clip art is pretty good (not really good, but, ok for "free" clipart). These things matter a lot if you work with documents.
If you're in the Unix niche, a Mac is nice because it has Unix under the hood. It's not quite the standard Solaris, BSD, or Linux environment, but it's close enough for most things.
The Mini is a pretty good computer, and a very good *product*. It's not the monster of spec benchmarks, but, most people, including technical people who you might think would care, simply don't care about those numbers.
steveo561 - Friday, April 1, 2005 - link
Interested in a FREE MAC MINI???I just got mine FOR FREE...EVEN SHIPPING...NO JOKE
Just copy and paste the link EXACTLY as you see it below:
www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=16680884
All you have to do is go to the link, sign up for one FREE offer, and have some of your friends do the same and it's all yours for FREE.
www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=16680884
steveo561 - Monday, March 28, 2005 - link
Interested in a FREE MAC MINI???I just got mine FOR FREE...EVEN SHIPPING...NO JOKE
Just copy and paste the link EXACTLY as you see it below:
www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=16680884
All you have to do is go to the link, sign up for one FREE offer, and have some of your friends do the same and it's all yours for FREE.
www.FreeMiniMacs.com/?r=16680884
MarshallG - Monday, February 28, 2005 - link
I love Anand's Mac articles. It's great to see an obviously pro-Windows guy like Anand look at the platform with such an open mind.Our home PC just died and this looks like a great replacement. I like the fact that I won't worry about viruses or spyware. I might get my 70 year-old mother one for the same reason.
But I'm surprised that Anand makes little if any mention of the Unix core of these machines. This is Linux for people who don't want to deal with driver problems. You can open a shell window, and run Perl or a zilllion other UNIX languages and apps. I'm really impressed by that! Now I can *really* teach my children how to use computers.
WorkingHardMan - Friday, February 11, 2005 - link
The way Tiger has been described by Apple is that Tiger will still handle the pixles if the GPU can not. Having said all that, the mini isn't really being marketed to the kind of people who want or need high quality 20" and 23" displays. One of the Apple desktop computers would make more sense for that crowd.Xmate - Thursday, February 10, 2005 - link
I'm sorry if this issue has already been addressed, I'd apreciate if you could restate the solution if it has been:OS X Tiger is supposed to use to GPU instead of the CPU to render all the pixels on the display correct? Well, while the Mac mini seems to be a very good solution for a PC user wanting to try out OS X, but from what I can see, the mini simply doesn't have nearly enough power in the GPU to power any of Apple's Cinema Displays. I have currently heard that most people are happy with the mini 20" CD combination, and I might (not certain) have heard people being happy with it even with the 23". With Tiger this is almost definetly not going to be the case.
I was wondering if anyone has any input on that, and if they know of some possible solution that could be implemented to solve the problem.
Thank you for your help,
Stefan
Wightout - Tuesday, February 8, 2005 - link
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050120....PhoenixPyre - Sunday, February 6, 2005 - link
Yeah, that Dell configuration isn't normal. To get those specs normally, you would have to pay well over $499. Not to mention it would be under the Small Business section of Dell.com and you would probably have to pay a good amount for shipping (as noted in #189).jaxcs2002 - Thursday, February 3, 2005 - link
Hey good aricle but you tried to discuss too many things with this article. Two notes:1)The comparison Dell and the mini is fair but Dell doesn't sell any standard configuration computers. Every week (really, not kidding here), they run some kind of a promotion. You were able to snag a free LCD when you browsed the Dell page that day, but did you get free shipping? I guarantee the next week, you won't be able to get an LCD but maybe extra memory and a larger hard disk. They do this obviously to make each week a sale and to induce you to buy immediately.
2) You make note that the comp is not for Apple power users and then promptly seem to forget that fact. What user would buy a mini mac and hook it to a 23" Cinema Display? It is interesting to note that it would not do well, but the Dell standard vidcard (integrated probably) wouldn't either. Judgeing from your article, it would probably be fine on a 15 or 17 inch screen.
I think it would have been helpful, especially since you hint at it anyway to talk about its utility in performing more "average joe" type taks such as usng it in conjunction with the apple air port as a music file server or as video server. You know, those tasks that a buyer of an ipod might do with a mac mini. In every way, you seem to perfer its bigger cousins but this a mini, what tasks does the mini do well?
pitdog - Wednesday, February 2, 2005 - link
sorry for the double post....new to the forums