My first Mac was a Mac mini that I received as a birthday gift about a year and a half ago. Like anybody using OS X for the first time, I was soon completely blown away at how user friendly and well designed OS X really is. But the hardware in that early Mac mini was limited, having only a 1.2GHz G4 as the CPU. Once I had bought a Power Mac, a Powerbook, an Intel iMac and a MacBook the poor Mac mini had become disused. It was relegated to the guest bedroom where guests very rarely stay.
More recently I had become interested in using a Mac as a home theatre device. My PowerBook has no infrared receiver or Front Row installation, and neither did the original Mac mini. And when I installed Elgato EyeTV on my G4 Mac mini I found it used nearly all the CPU cycles just to record TV shows.
So when we heard that a friend was looking to buy a second G4 Mac mini as a backup device we decided to do an out with the old and in with the new. Just a little while ago I de-authorized the Mac mini from my iTunes account, something you really should do before parting company with a Mac, and now I’m wiping the hard drive in preparation for an OS reinstall.
And I’ve just ordered a new Mac mini with the 1.66 GHz Core Duo, 1GB of RAM, and a 120GB hard drive. This will be going into our family room with the Dish Networks HD DVR, the Pansat FTA satellite receiver, the Panasonic 42″ Plasma TV, and our sound system. It will be on our Ethernet backbone so it will be able to access my 36,000 digital photos and 38GB of music on my Power Mac 2 rooms away. There shall be much couching out with ice cold diet sodas. Watch this space for updates.
[tags]Elgato, EyeTV, hardware, OS X, Mac mini[/tags]
