A few words on the Mac Mini
I recently helped my parents move to a Mac Mini. Here are some observations:
1. Power Adapter: The machine was purchased in the US. While Apple’s notebook line comes with univesal adapters that work both in India (220V-240V AC) and the US (100-120V AC), the power adapter that comes with a Mac Mini is geography-specific. Which means that I had to arrange for a 220V to 110V step-down transformer so that I could use the Mac Mini brought in the US in India. Also the adapter is quite big – almost like a brick. You’ll never see it in Apple’s Mac Mini marketing material.
To be fair to Apple, the specs clearly mention the voltage rating – it’s just that given my past experience with several notebooks (Apple and non-Apple) and iMacs, it didn’t occur to me to check if Mac Mini had a US specific voltage rating.
2. Video Adapter: Mac Mini has both Mini-DisplayPort and Mini-DVI video connectors. It comes bundled with a Mini-DVI to DVI convertor. That might be fine if you have a relatively new monitor but if you purchased your monitor 2-3 years ago, there is a good chance that it’ll only support VGA input. Since we had an old Samsung 17″ LCD, we had to buy a Mini-DVI to VGA adapter separately.
3. Keyboard: Microsoft makes and sells PS2 keyboards to date. While their mouse line has moved to USB and comes with a USB to PS2 adapter, that is not the case with a lot of their keyboards that are sold in India. Although we had brought a new Keyboard just last year, it had to be discarded because it only came with a PS2 interface (no PS2 ports exist on the Mac Mini).
4. Ethernet: For some weird reason the Mac Mini’s Ethernet port was incompatible with the old MTNL branded ADSL modem that we had at home. At first I thought that the machine had come with a DOA (dead on arrival) Ethernet port – since the old machine was working fine with this modem. Connecting the Mac Mini to my MacBook over an Ethernet cable quelled that doubt (I am used to using a cross-over cable for connecting two PCs from my PC days, but for some reasons both Macs could “see” each other on a normal Ethernet cable without any issues! See this Apple KB article for more details.) So our modem had to go as well. Its replacement – a relatively recent, Beetel ADSL2 modem, worked like a charm.
All of these things meant that the slender price advantage of getting the machine from the US ($599 = Rs. 29,950 @ Rs. 50 to 1 US$ vs. Rs. 33,530 – the retail price in India) came to nought. Not to mention a day spent troubleshooting/acquiring the various pieces.
Moral of the story – if you are thinking of moving to a Mac Mini, do your research. If the reason behind your move to a Mac Mini has anything to do with the squirrel’s nest of wires behind your desktop, seriously consider an iMac.