In sympathy for my advancing years my very lovely boyfriend bought me a Mac Mini for my birthday. It’s so tiny! The Windows desktop it is going to replace is a Shuttle, so not exactly a monster of a thing, but you could stack 5 Mac Minis in the same space.
First impressions are good – it feels fast, applications launch very quickly and Mail.app is as nice as Kmail which I use at work. I have to have a mail client that I am happy with, email issues make me grumpy. Other than that I’m still just poking around at the moment, playing with my new toy. I’ve ordered Office so once that arrives I might actually be able to get down and do some real work.
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What spec did you get? I’m planning to buy one as soon as they’re shipping with Tiger, but haven’t quite decided on which model to buy.
As a recent Mac buyer, you should be able to get a free upgrade to Tiger when it comes out, which has an even better version of Mail. See http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/
You can also get by without MS Office, but it’s still nice to have, I agree.
– Nicholas.
And you know that apt, the debian package manager, is available on OS X too, don’t you? It’s called Fink.
James – it’s the 1.42GHz one and Drew also got me 1Gig of RAM to put in it and did a nifty job with a palette knife to take the case off and install the memory.
Nicholas – the ability to run Office is one of the reasons I went to Mac as opposed to just going to Linux at home. I write and so need to be able to open Word documents, I use OpenOffice at work and it’s fine for most Word documents but once they have a lot of commets or use a ertain template it sometimes starts behaving a bit strangely. I didn’t know about Fink – that looks splendid.
Congrats on the Mini !
You might want to give Appleworks a try before opening up that office software you bought. Also, There is a free open source office application that is free. Very nice and fully loaded. Here’s the info.
http://www.neooffice.org/
NeoOffice/J is a full featured office productivity suite including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing, database, and macro functionality. It can be used as a free alternative to Microsoft Office:Mac. You can exchange documents with Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org users, even on other platforms!
Now it’s 26 July. What’s your second impression?