[jsherman999]

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Liking my mini so much I jumped on a late-2011 Macbook pro I found on craigslist for $350!


(above is a Serverauditor ssh session being run from my iPhone - logged in to my new mac mini via ssh from my phone, ran the archey command.)


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[reeftool]

It appears the Mac is working out well for you. I'm still considering going Mac since my 2 Windows PC's are showing their age. My desktop is 4 years old and the laptop is 3. My wife is tied to Windows and she is pretty hostile to the idea of switching so if I go with a Mac, it will be mine alone. I'm spoiled on how well Windows 7 computers network together. I know Apple products work together but a mixed network might be more difficult. My router has a built in processor and USB 3 ports for external drives. I wonder if I could keep my photos on the external drive and access them from both a Mac and Windows computer through the router.
Has anybody tried this?

[LensBeginner]

It appears the Mac is working out well for you. I'm still considering going Mac since my 2 Windows PC's are showing their age. My desktop is 4 years old and the laptop is 3. My wife is tied to Windows and she is pretty hostile to the idea of switching so if I go with a Mac, it will be mine alone. I'm spoiled on how well Windows 7 computers network together. I know Apple products work together but a mixed network might be more difficult. My router has a built in processor and USB 3 ports for external drives. I wonder if I could keep my photos on the external drive and access them from both a Mac and Windows computer through the router.
Has anybody tried this?

I didn't, but I believe it should be possible...
The router should have a Samba server or somesuch and you should probably format the drive in FAT32...

[jsherman999]

One important note - Yosemite, which is pretty new, does not work well with most third-party SSDs.

Mavericks, everything before Yosemite, worked OK and allowed TRIM to clean up de-allocated blocks on the SSD - Yosemite has a new driver-level security "feature" (kext) which will cause your trim-enabled SSD to not be bootable after a few reboots.

Regular Apple SSDs are fine (of course,) as is OWL's products, I think. But I spent a couple hours with my Samsung 850-pro SSD + macbook pro (not my mini) troubleshooting drivers in a maintenance mode root shell until I did some googling and found this. (link)


Bad Apple!

Everything else is fantastic, though. I'll just wait on the SSD until the driver issue shakes out. Anyone reading this who's at Mavericks and has an SSD should stay there or be prepared for the workarounds of either disabling trim or disabling kext if you go to Yosemite.

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[Rupert]

Win8 is not bad at all... quite stable actually and fast-loading.
If you want to future-proof yourself however you're doing the right thing.

Well, I think you are right, now that I bought Mrs Rupert a little Nextbook Transformer running the full version of Windows 8. It is fast, and after a couple of hours using it, she likes it much better than her notebook that is running Win 7.
I actually like the Win 8 too and would have no problem running it over my existing XP...it's really not that much different in many respects.
Maybe what we hear about certain systems influences our thoughts in a negative manner? I was not aware of the advantages of Win 8 until I tried it for a while and made the adjustments to fit what Mrs Rupert is used to. It's actually a pretty nice system.
I'll continue to wait for Win 10 for my personal desktop.....I am hearing good things about it from my friend at the Computer Store. However, I would not hesitate to go Win 8 if necessary.

Best Regards!

[johnmflores]

One important note - Yosemite, which is pretty new, does not work well with most third-party SSDs.

Mavericks, everything before Yosemite, worked OK and allowed TRIM to clean up de-allocated blocks on the SSD - Yosemite has a new driver-level security "feature" (kext) which will cause your trim-enabled SSD to not be bootable after a few reboots.

Regular Apple SSDs are fine (of course,) as is OWL's products, I think. But I spent a couple hours with my Samsung 850-pro SSD + macbook pro (not my mini) troubleshooting drivers in a maintenance mode root shell until I did some googling and found this. (link)


Bad Apple!

Everything else is fantastic, though. I'll just wait on the SSD until the driver issue shakes out. Anyone reading this who's at Mavericks and has an SSD should stay there or be prepared for the workarounds of either disabling trim or disabling kext if you go to Yosemite.

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Ugh! Glad I haven't upgraded!

[LensBeginner]

Well, I think you are right, now that I bought Mrs Rupert a little Nextbook Transformer running the full version of Windows 8. It is fast, and after a couple of hours using it, she likes it much better than her notebook that is running Win 7.
I actually like the Win 8 too and would have no problem running it over my existing XP...it's really not that much different in many respects.
Maybe what we hear about certain systems influences our thoughts in a negative manner? I was not aware of the advantages of Win 8 until I tried it for a while and made the adjustments to fit what Mrs Rupert is used to. It's actually a pretty nice system.
I'll continue to wait for Win 10 for my personal desktop.....I am hearing good things about it from my friend at the Computer Store. However, I would not hesitate to go Win 8 if necessary.

Best Regards!

One should really try and learn how to use MS OSes, which is sometimes NOT the way MS would like us to run them...
For instance, UAC should be a good thing, it theory. Then there's the actual implementation, which makes you realize that you'll actually have less problems by disabling it.
You lose all the metro apps this way, well tough luck. That's better than having programs install apparently ok and then not working, even when installed as admin.
When one is aware of some key pitfalls, then Win8/8.1 is actually a fine and quite stable OS for everyday use.

[faceless_el]

one thing to note as well if you are set on a mac mini
if you read the fine print on their webpage it says
"Please note that the memory is built into the computer, so if you think you may need more memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase."

[jsherman999]

one thing to note as well if you are set on a mac mini
if you read the fine print on their webpage it says
"Please note that the memory is built into the computer, so if you think you may need more memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase."

Yep, 2014 model is not RAM-upgradeable. I chose 8GB and that's going to be fine for my purposes for as long as I'm going to be using it, but it does make a lot of sense to look at say a 2012 model if you don't know if your initial amount will be enough - you have the option of adding more ram later yourself there. I almost went that route but I've been living fine with 4GB on Windows for years now and my usual footprint just doesn't require more than 8.

My 4GB 2011 macbook pro (which I'm still thrilled about finding on CL for $350! ) will probably get an upgrade to 8gb fairly soon here, although from what I've seen OS X is just very ram-efficient... everything just seems snappy and fast even on the macbook. And to me this mini seems like it's punching out of its weight class a bit, with the fusion drive and this burst-enabled CPU, and the IRIS graphics gives me some nice performance (My 7yr old sneaks down to the office to play minecraft on it because it gets '60 FPS dada' )

So, yeah, so far aside from the Yosemite/SSD incompatibility this has been a fun adventure. We'll see how these macs hold up to daily usage, disk fragmentation, app-data sludge etc as time goes on.

Here's a little script I wrote after hearing about the 'say' command for the first time, used it to disturb my wife via an ssh session from the other room, mac users enjoy

Code:

#!/bin/bash

IAm=`id -F | awk '{print $1}'`

Msg="Hi $IAm  my name is "

for Voice in `say -v ? | awk '{print $1}'`
do

        say -r 200 -i -v $Voice "$Msg $Voice"

done