Driven by the Apple craziness that's been on the rise for the past few years, I bought a Mac Mini about a year ago to see it for myself if it's worth it.
It's a nice little box. Very quiet. I enjoyed it for the first 30 minutes.
In the middle of the first hour I realized that there's no way I can expand a window, under Leopard, to fill the whole screen, which I've been doing for the past 15 years or so.
The next thing I discovered the little guy doesn't like about half of my external devices (printers, scanners, etc) and I have to say bye-bye to a bunch of Windows-only software that I came to love over the years.
This was not an option but hey - you can run Windows on a Mac!
I threw Win XP on it and was happy again. Nice little box. Very quiet.
The weather had been sunny for what feels like 9 months.
Then one day a DVD refused to unload. I mean really. As you might know, there is no hardware eject button on a Mini. There are quite a few ways to soft-eject the disk. And quite a few more to soft-eject it if you really need it. None of them worked.
Pried the thing open... Ta-da! After a few hours I have my disk back - life is good again.
Fast forward another month. The weather gets cloudy again. This time the little guy fell asleep and refused to wake up.
Having tried all kinds of hacks, I ended up in an Apple Store. That was the best customer service experience I ever had. Hands down. Walked in the store, handed the dead thing over to a technician, got it back - with logic board replaced - a few days later. Had to sign two papers - one on my way in, the other on my way out. The only thing I had to tell them was my name. Plain fantastic.
Another month passes by... All of a sudden the little white box started dropping Ethernet network connection. Disconnect - reconnect - and you are in the game again - for 5 more minutes.
To my great astonishment I figured out it seemed to be a systemic problem with Mac Mini design or manufacturing process. The suggested workaround is to upgrade the networking hardware and/or downgrade network speed to 10 mbps.
While 10 mbps technically "worked" - I had a very stable connection - I couldn't do anything useful with it.
Today I'm going to visit the Apple Store again. Not to get the new iPhone 3G S.
Maybe I'm lucky but I have never had a hardware problem with any of a dozen of off-the-shelf and custom-built machines I owned. I'm not talking about hard drives. Motherboards, networking, etc all worked like a Swiss clock.
This is going to be my last Mac... At least for a while.
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