I did have a Mac Mini and ran OS X almost exclusively (as much as I could) for about 7 months. I liked the Mini but it was slower than even my older P4/XP machine that I had switched from. And that’s even after I upped the 2GB and used an external firewire drive as the boot drive to speed up performance (the Mini had (has?) an extremely slow laptop drive in it stock). Not to mention I was ticked with Apple from the start because the Mini had some serious issues with video output with a lot of different monitors, and they censored/removed a lot of posts on their message board from people like me who complained about the issue. I had to buy a new monitor just to get a decent, clear display from the Mini. Not to mention I felt ripped off a little because at the time they were selling two versions of the Mini – both with the same specs on the box (which is what I got), but the majority of folks were getting much better spec’d machines. This was during a transition period to new hardware specs. Things like processor speed and video ram were bumped up without people knowing. Everyone else I knew got lucky but me : ( Yeah, I know, I got what I paid for/expected. But it was disheartening : )

All that said…I loved OS X. But there was one HUGE problem for me – I think MS Money is a great app – the best personal finance app there is. Quicken for the PC is still pretty good (not as good as MS Money, but good enough for what I need). Quicken for the Mac is absolute garbage. It works/looks nothing like the PC version, which is really strange and disappointing. So I had to dual-boot just to run MS Money. I searched and evaluated every alternative available at the time (and since) and I didn’t like any.

But….I was still going to stick with OS X and had ideas on buying an iMac (which are a good value!). A couple of weeks before the MacWorld conference (I think that was the one) I kept reading rumors online about how they are going to revamp the Mini. So I decided to ebay mine just before the announcement and, if the new Mini was appreciably better then I would buy one but otherwise I was gonna buy an iMac.

So I sold my Mini on ebay within an hour (people pay retail prices for used Apple gear…it’s nuts – I actually made $50 on my whole setup (keep in mind I had installed more ram, faster external drive, etc)). I was thrilled. But I had a problem…I was without a non-Windows computer for close to two weeks before I could find out what to buy from Apple (after the announcement). So I tried Ubuntu linux and…..loved it. I liked it better than OS X for some things even. And I even got Dreamweaver and Flash 8 running in it (although a bit kludgey).

Then, I got a new PC last year thinking I would go with Ubuntu and just use a virtual machine for the PC stuff. But alas, Ubuntu kept locking up my new machine, while I have never had a lockup/crash with Windows on it in over a year of use now. So…I’m back to Windows until my next computer purchase. When that time comes, I just may go the whole hog and buy a MacBook Pro or an iMac. : )

Sorry for the long story (could have been a whole post!).

mark

P.S. I love your blog!

Mark, I would highly recommend you venture down that path. How can you know what you may be missing if you never try?

I think once you are in OS X (running Windows in VMWare Fusion when needed), you’ll never look back.

Worst case: you hate it, you sell the iMac, you lose a couple hundred bucks.

But there will be no “worst case,” of that I’m quite confident.