Mac Mini? Or not?

November 20, 2006 5:31 AM

I'm thinking of getting a Mac Mini... but will it be able to do everything I want it to do?

I'm currently on an ancient, falling-apart Dell that I'm thinking of replacing with a Mac Mini. I'd use the thing mainly for web browsing, but also sometimes for graphics work -- InDesign, Photoshop, that sort of thing. It doesn't have to be lightning-fast, but will a Mac Mini be capable of this sort of thing? What's the most strenuous thing you've done with yours? Is there a big difference between the high-end and low-end model for these applications?

Apart from that, are there any big flaws I should know about? I also wonder if it's worth getting a used one, or if I might as well just go for new.

posted by reklaw to computers & internet (22 comments total)

Sure, a Mini will be fine for this sort of thing. It's not a super high performance computer but it can run anything you want to run. If you were doing graphics stuff on an every day basis you might consider something a bit more powerful, but it should be more than adequate for what you describe.
posted by mikel at 7:00 AM on November 20, 2006

Adobe's products haven't been released for the Intel Macs yet, so you'll be running relatively heavyweight apps on Apple's slowest machine *and* through an emulation layer, all in 512MB of memory. It'll work, but it won't be an impressive experience.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 7:11 AM on November 20, 2006

Up the ram and you should be fine. I'd buy the Core duo model (not the core solo), which should future-proof you for a least a couple of years.
posted by zpousman at 7:17 AM on November 20, 2006

I picked up a new one recently. I find it's quite capable, but I'd recommend at least 1 GB of ram.

I think going used makes sense, if you can find a good price on the Intel version. Check Apple's refurb section for pretty decent deals on the first iteration of Intel based minis.

Of note too is that the processor is upgradeable so a Core 2 Duo with a higher clock could provide a nice boost down the line.
posted by cramer at 7:21 AM on November 20, 2006

The mini will be fine. My wife works in the graphic-design business, and her mini at home is actually faster than the aging hulk she uses at her office.

I've been looking at used minis myself lately, and have been surprised at, uh, how well they retain value. Get a new one. Get the cheaper of the two and goose the RAM to at least 1 GB. As cheap-ish computers go, the mini is pretty high-spec. If you're in the market for a new display, Apple's are still overpriced—get a Dell (and search for coupon codes first).
posted by adamrice at 7:25 AM on November 20, 2006

Macintouch has an article about upgrading an older mini solo. You can check out the benchmarks of the original vs. modified versions.
posted by nightwood at 7:28 AM on November 20, 2006

Wait for the intel native Adobe apps if you really depend on them. In my experience, it's frustrating to use indesign and larger photoshop files on the intel mac minis (bought my parents one, tried out some apps on it), not much better than my powerbook G4 1.5 w. 1.5GB RAM. Just wait.
posted by lovejones at 7:34 AM on November 20, 2006

Assumedly you already own your Adobe apps if you're already doing this on the aging Dell. Assuming that's true, there should be no contest between the cost of any PC and the Mac Mini.

If you don't already own your Adobe apps consider that you'll be able to get better graphic throughput on a desktop pc with a PCI-E 16x slot since you'll have the opportunity to add a beefy GPU. Though the GPU is generally about the 3d performance, the greater bandwidth to the GPU and faster subsystem will make a palpable speed difference in the graphic intensive apps.

If cost were no object, you wouldn't be considering the Mini anyhow. With cost as a motivator, PCs are still generally priced better.
posted by shagoth at 7:43 AM on November 20, 2006

shagoth: it's very unlikely that PCIe would matter much. Almost all graphic design work is done with the CPU. The GPU matters not a whit, except in the lonely case of Aperture. The video bus speed is just not going to matter in any way unless he's trying to do BIG HD videos. And at that, the better bus would just allow him to play the movies back smoothly... (and, thus, work on them.) The actual processing wouldn't be sped up at all, because that all happens in main RAM before it even touches the video card.

At this point, the real reason for PCIe is for very sophisticated 3D worlds with multiple animated textures, ones that are too large to fit in the card's texture memory. PCIe is fast enough to allow the card to stream in multiple different texture animations at once, while still maintaining the 3D rendering at full speed.

Short of that, there's just not a lot of difference between AGP and PCIe. I'm not aware of ANY mainstream applications where the AGP bus is the bottleneck.

For what he's doing, a Mini with lots of RAM will be very comfortable, not to mention silent and tiny. Yes, you can build slightly faster PCs for the same price, but they're the big, loud, noisy boxes... and they're really not that much faster.

The Mini's Intel graphics suck terribly for games, but he's not playing games. Photoshop and InDesign live on the CPU, so he'll be fine. If he gets into something where the slow graphics actually matter, he can resell the machine for nearly what he paid and upgrade to an iMac or even a Mac Pro.

reklaw, you might like the dual core Mini if it's not too expensive. Dual cores improve the responsiveness of a machine a very great deal. It feels like it's a much larger upgrade than it actually is. Applications mostly take the same amount of time, but you can run a number of them at once, and flipping around between tasks is generally much faster. With two cores, it's generally easier to peel one away to run the UI response, so the machine feels much crisper and snappier, particularly under load.
posted by Malor at 7:59 AM on November 20, 2006

I use my dual processor 1.66GHz mini for the same thing that you want to use yours for. (I run Illustrator and Photoshop, mostly.) If I have any speed problems, it's news to me. I love it.
posted by waldo at 8:12 AM on November 20, 2006

FWIW, even the cheaper mini now comes with the core duo, not core solo.

Just speculating here, it's probably not too long before Apple breaks down and installs the core 2 duo.
posted by adamrice at 9:01 AM on November 20, 2006

Ok, my commentaries are blown off by the macstrubators. Fine. I like it. Fap on to the ravings of Steve. Rub one out with your iPod. Anything that's interpreted as Windows positive is inevitably lambasted around here as if there is some holy superiority granted by the Steve. Hence my general lack of commentary here. Please read this Penny Arcade and insert "Steve Jobs" instead of "Wil Wright" and insert "Macworld Keynote" for "E3".

As for PCI-e vs. AGP, AGP is dead. What few cards are out there for AGP are hugely more expensive than their PCI-e counterparts. Bandwidth vs. AGP might not be hugely different but a GPU with DDR of any flavor will be significantly faster than the Intel 950 graphics that the mini ships with. The 950 is patently unacceptable for high resolutions in my experience but I anticipate that I'll be called an idiot or somesuch for saying that too.

Ultimately my point is more for less, particularly if you already own the Adobe apps for Windows. Whether the questioner already owns the apps remains unanswered.
posted by shagoth at 9:17 AM on November 20, 2006

I use a G4 mini which is much weaker than the new Intel Core Duo minis. Photoshop and inDesign run acceptably well and benchmarks suggest that the G4->Core Duo transition is generally worthwhile, even though Photoshop and InDesign are not Intel native yet. Photoshop responds quicker than my reflexes for just about every task that doesn't involve automated actions on dozens of images, or really masive files. NeoOffice is a dog, but NeoOffice is a dog anyway.

You won't be able to play some games on the Intel mini due to the integrated GMA graphics chip, and I'd strongly suggest buying with as much memory as you can buy. If you can accept that limitation, I'd go with the Intel Mini. If you think you might want to play some games later, or add an internal drive, you might be better off with a cheap tower and WinXP.

If you own the Adobe aps already, then you might want to think about sticking with WinXP. With the Intel shift, Macintosh provides good bang for the buck compared to equivalent WinXP systems.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:32 AM on November 20, 2006

Thanks, everyone -- this has actually been quite useful, I think. It's good to hear that everything works fine, which was pretty much all I wanted to know. The resale value thing sounds great too, though, and the processor upgradeability... hell, it all sounds pretty good, doesn't it?

And, yes, I know I could probably get a PC cheaper, but it'd be HUGE and it'd be UGLY. You know? Besides, that's what I did last time with the Dell, and the damn thing fell to pieces badly enough to be unusable just a few years later.

So I think this is pretty much decided, at least for me. The only thing I'm still wondering about is if it's worth the extra £130 to go from 1.66Ghz Core Duo to an 1.83Ghz one (plus 20GB extra hard drive). I have a feeling the answer on that score is probably "no, spend it on RAM, dummy".
posted by reklaw at 10:02 AM on November 20, 2006

Um, since apparently the "HUGE" and "UGLY" were deciding factors, why did you even ask this question?

I have another question too since you've still not indicated that you already own Photoshop. Are you budgeting for the costs of these applications in your purchase as well?
posted by shagoth at 10:22 AM on November 20, 2006

Um, since apparently the "HUGE" and "UGLY" were deciding factors, why did you even ask this question?

shagoth: what question do you think was asked?
posted by nightwood at 11:50 AM on November 20, 2006

You'll also get a DVD burner in the 1.83 Ghz model, if that changes the equation at all.
posted by cramer at 12:57 PM on November 20, 2006

You'll do fine, unless you're a serious photoshop power user whose workflow includes batch-Gaussian-filtering thousands of images at a time.

I'd caution you, though, that Minis need quite a bit of RAM. I upgraded mine (the 1.66 Duo) to 1GB and it's not enough; I'd suggest 1.5 or 2 minimum. I wind up having to close apps before I open other ones; that's sort of a pain and it slows me down.
posted by ikkyu2 at 2:46 PM on November 20, 2006

I concur that the Mini will have no problem running fairly demanding applications. The best possible thing you can do to ensure it is able to do so is to give it lots of RAM. Mac OS X will make use of pretty much as much RAM as you can give it. 1 GB is a bare minimum; 2 is better.
posted by raf at 3:14 PM on November 20, 2006

Ok, my commentaries are blown off by the macstrubators. Fine. I like it. Fap on to the ravings of Steve. Rub one out with your iPod. Anything that's interpreted as Windows positive is inevitably lambasted around here as if there is some holy superiority granted by the Steve. Hence my general lack of commentary here. Please read this Penny Arcade and insert "Steve Jobs" instead of "Wil Wright" and insert "Macworld Keynote" for "E3".

Dude, you're not reading the same AskMe the rest of us are. You seem to be thinking that this question is about whether a Mac or a PC is superior. That's just wankery. The question is, "Will a Mini do what I need", and it most emphatically will.

As for PCI-e vs. AGP, AGP is dead. What few cards are out there for AGP are hugely more expensive than their PCI-e counterparts. Bandwidth vs. AGP might not be hugely different but a GPU with DDR of any flavor will be significantly faster than the Intel 950 graphics that the mini ships with. The 950 is patently unacceptable for high resolutions in my experience but I anticipate that I'll be called an idiot or somesuch for saying that too.

For what he's doing, bandwidth to the GPU is TOTALLY IRRELEVANT. The GMA950 is a very weak GPU. It sucks. But that does not matter in any way for the applications he wants to run. For those apps, all the GPU does is draw 2D windows. Even the weak 950 is fine for that at any resolution the Mini supports.

You are, in essence, jumping up and down shouting that he should buy a Ferrari for grocery shopping. If he was drag racing, sure, a Ferrari would be better, but he's just doing the grocery thing here.

Ultimately my point is more for less, particularly if you already own the Adobe apps for Windows. Whether the questioner already owns the apps remains unanswered.

Realistically, it would be "more for the same price".... and, at that, not that much more. If the extra power is stuff he won't use, the tradeoff of a large, noisy PC is probably not worth it to him. You can do an acceptable PC for $600, but the Mini is also just fine for this problem set. If he loads it up with RAM, he'll have a dyamite little machine.

And if, for some reason, he doesn't like MacOS, he can just install Windows instead. He's trading away GPU power (which he doesn't need) for a tiny, quiet system that runs an OS he may enjoy. Seems sensible to me.

I think your advice is targeted at a different problem set than what's actually in the question.

reklaw: You're not going to see much difference from 1.66 to 1.83ghz. I think you would indeed be better to spend it on RAM, unless you want the DVD burner. I don't know how hard the Mini is to take apart... if it's easy, you might prefer aftermarket RAM, as it's usually much cheaper. Crucial.com is expensive, but still cheaper than Apple. Kingston or Corsair or Mushkin from newegg.com would also be fine. You need DDR-2 PC5300 speed, in 200-pin SODIMM form. There are two slots, each of which can take a DIMM up to 1GB. The machine comes with 1 512-meg stick.

You can probably add an aftermarket burner later too if you don't need it now. If you need more drive space, you can add an external drive or a NAS box in another room.

You're getting dual core no matter what (I didn't realize that all the Minis had gone dual), so the cheap one plus RAM should be great.
posted by Malor at 3:08 AM on November 21, 2006

I actually think that the mini comes with paired 256 in the base config. The mini is pretty simple to take apart, but it's not trivial. This is the first time I can recall that going with Apple RAM rather than third party might make sense.
posted by cramer at 8:52 AM on November 21, 2006

Yes, yes, get Apple RAM. The Mini is difficult to get open, unlike other Macs, and the price differential (at least when I checked back in January) was very small between aftermarket install-it-yourself RAM and Apple RAM installed at the factory.
posted by ikkyu2 at 11:12 PM on November 21, 2006