Everyone knows that I’m a great fan of the Mac mini. If you don’t, know this now. I bought one of the very first ones to arrive at my store, too impatient to wait for it to be available at employee prices, and have set it up in my entertainment center. At the time, Apple was billing the Mac mini as a second computer for potential Switchers to try out before plopping down some serious jack on an iMac. But I saw it for what it was and, after the release of the newest Mac mini, what it was to become.
Everyone’s crazy about how the Mac mini is the center of your home entertainment center, but I’ve gone further and made it the center of my home’s network. My mini runs OS X Server and provides Mobile Homes to my other Macs. There will be no data lost in this house. It stores my music, movies encoded from DVD for instant access, and is connected to my TV as well as having VLC set to multicast stream video-on-demand to other machines in the house. It does it all.
The New mini
The new Mac mini is a solid upgrade, proving faster processors that are upgradeable by enterprising individuals. Not a whole lot else has change. Oh, except the graphics system. And it’s a doozy. Apple once lampooned other PC vendors for using integrated, shared-memory graphics systems. This week, they joined the club. The GMA950 isn’t a bad choice among the integrated chips out there, but it certainly won’t light any gamer’s hair on fire. Apple seems to have seen the shift in how the Mac mini is being used and is now engineering the machine to match. You don’t need a Radeon X1600 to backup the other computers in the house, nor to watch video on your TV.
Apple seems to have noticed the trend in dorks like me buying the mini, not as a pre-Switch second computer, but as a digital hub to my home network. The Mac mini is not a replacement for my iMac or PowerBook, it’s not a cheap computer to give to my parents. It’s a stripped down, bare bones XServe. And it even has a feature that beats the XServe – it comes with a graphics card standard.
I do have a small concern though.
Memory available to Mac OS X may vary depending on graphics needs. Minimum graphics memory usage is 80MB, resulting in 432MB of system memory available.
Mac mini – What’s Inside
If the GMA950 is only getting 64MB of RAM from the system, but the system is giving it 80MB, what happened to the other 16MB? That’s a huge chunk of RAM to just go missing. It also implies that the GMA950 can steal more than 80MB from the system, leaving you with even less system memory. Is that 16MB static, or capable of rising with the 80MB? This is why shared memory has such a craptastic reputation after all, and it’d be nice to know with certainty how your RAM is being used.
I’ll Still Buy One
Regardless of the video chipset and memory quandary, the new mini fits my needs well, and while I’ve hacked Front Row to run on my current Mac mini, it will be nice to have the real Apple Remote instead of keeping a Wireless Keyboard floating around the living room.
If only the price hadn’t gone up…
Given how the Mini has been redesigned, both internally and the graphics changes, I’d order it with at least a full 1GB.
I’ve also been tempted to pick one up and use it as a quiet home server. But that would require disposable income, and the MacBook Pro took care of that.
I’m not ready to dump my TiVo yet – Front Row doesn’t appear to have Live Video hooks – and EyeTV 2.0 still doesn’t look like it has the human factors worked out. Unless one runs the Mini Duo as a video encoder, streams some music to the local wireless, and watching a DVD on the home theater system simultaneously, the standard 512 Mb should not pinch usage. Now the imaginative macgeek will load lots of usage on to the new digital hub and soon feel the pinch.
JC – since you’ve used this as your music and DVD hub. What’s your experience , if any, using the Mini as a PVR for broadcast or cable TV? Any opinions on output options such as the Belkin AV5000 for local or remote display? I’m contemplating an installation similar to yours but including video and remote viewing. Any advice would be appreciated.
I didn’t say I was ready to dump my TiVo, not by a long shot.
I have a TiVo and the Mini. I have the Mini hooked up via S-Video to my TV, and I have a Harman Kardon AVR-140 to manage my inputs, so I haven’t really bothered to try getting live video through the Mini. When I want a DVD or encoded video or (insert anything than VLC and/or Front Row can do), I flip to AV1 and watch. When I want TV, I flip to AV2.
For remote viewing, I just use VLC’s streaming support. That said, I’ve been having a little trouble with some codecs in VLC and my iMac Core Duo, so we may need to wait for an update to VLC before it’ll work flawlessly. Perhaps the nightlies, if I could ever find the blasted things on videolan’s website again…
I was just wondering, as I’m running a Mac mini as server as well, how do you manage the amount of data stored and how do you keep it safe. Do you have external drives connected via firewire or USB, are you using RAID or create backups ?
Just curious,
R
i use a Lacie Mini Disk. it’s a stackable drive that fits underneath the Mac mini, matches its appearance, etc.
And how do you manage backups. One drive full of data, movies and music might get damaged ? Remember Murphy’‘s Law…
looks like i should just write an article…..
I’ve only had it for a couple of days, but I’ve already ripped several DVDs in better-than-realtime with the mini Duo, and I’m seriously impressed.
One issue, though, is that it really doesn’t want to run without a keyboard and mouse. I used a VGA display and USB keyboard and mouse for the initial setup, then I unhooked it and hooked it back up sans wired controllers in my entertainment center. Any time I boot it, Bluetooth Setup Assistant comes up in the middle of the login process. Using the Apple Remote, I was able to get Front Row to come up, but the entire system is dog-slow until you quit the Bt Setup Assistant.
I guess I’m now in the market for a fake keyboard/mouse USB dongle, at least until someone comes out with a compelling Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad combo. Anyone know where I can find either?
Look in the Bluetooth prefpane in System Prefs, and you’ll find an option entitled:
Open Bluetooth Setup Assistant at startup when no input device is present.Turn it off. Problem solved.
Done and done. Thank you very much.
Hey JC, I’m curious. I purchased OS X Server and had planned on running it on my dual 2.7 machine that I use as my workstation, but changed my mind and just ended up using standard workstation. I had started on Mobile Homes but for some various reasons it didn’t seem as intuitive as I’d thought originally.
I set up Active Directory and am a network admin for quite a few companies, etc. etc. and run my own consulting business, but I’ve not taken the time out to really figure out the nuances of OS X Server. I was curious if you’d write an optimal setup guide for Server.
Now, one thing for me is that access speed is important as I do a lot of video editing, dvd creation and some 3d animation + graphics design, etc. I’ve been concerned that I’m not going to reach my speed needs with it, particularly only having a 100Mbps network at the moment. I probably need to upgrade to GB and then set up a massive RAID-5 array on a server, but I’m a not in the cash flow mode at the moment…
At any rate, curious as to what you’ve had success with and in your opinion as an optimal setup for backup/redundancy, etc. on a reasonable budget as well as an outline and steps as you think would be necessary.
Apple’s manual for OS X Server is relatively strong, and contains hints on lots of the gotchas of Server setup.
I’m a competant hack with OS X Server. The codepoet is the resident God of All Things Server. I’ll poke him with a rusty rod until he gets around to it.
I have, in total, the Mini, and two external Lacie drives. No RAID (repeat after me: RAID is not backup.). Once a week, psync runs to copy the contents of Drive A to Drive B. Very little is stored on the Mini’s internal drive.
We’re starting to get a bit afar from the topic of the article, but RAID 5 is probably not the solution you want if I/O speed is you chief concern – all those parity calcs and such give RAID 5 a fairly decent performance hit. You should probably consider a straight up striped array. If you need redundancy and backup, have two distincy arrays, and back one up to the other (read: do NOT mirror them. RAID is not for backing up).
Thanks, you know that’s one place that I’ve never even really searched!
Funny thing, so used to knowing everything that the manual escapes me. I’ll check that out.
Also, with regard to RAID-5, yes, software RAID-5 is a “Bad Thing.” I’ve been looking at some options from Sonnet that may resolve that performance issue. I look at RAID as a convenience in terms of not having to worry about 1 drive going out and then being out of luck.
Thanks for the info! And yes, that would be nice to see some info come out from codepoet in this regard!
Hey, I just bought a solo intel mini, planning to install OSX Server, partly on the strength of tips here at MacGeekery.
Turns out that OSX Server won’t run on an Intel mini! Bummer.
Any idea when that might happen?
No telling. Either with Leopard or with the Intel Xserve. And there’s no guarantee that the Intel Xserve’s version of Server will be sold in retail.
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