I won't bore you with pictures

Apparently the thing to do when you get a Mac Mini is to detail every first moment with a camera and then post that on the net. I'm not going to do that here. I have a hard enough time being interested when those moments are someone else's living, breathing human newborn ... so the emotional angle is out - and as I noted, there's plenty of places to find such documentation if you're actually interested.

But you already know the most notable detail. It's small. I mean, it's really, really small. This isn't a desktop style footprint, or a laptop style footprint. The Mini is more like a toaster or a stapler. Suddenly you get the fact this company that keeps churning out computers-like-monitors and computers-like-cubes and other oddly shaped appliances really have no interest in how computers have looked on your desk for the last couple of decades.

Now, I've installed many a computer. About five different distros of Linux, Mac OS9, Mac OSX and every flavor of Windows that has ever existed except for WinME (thank god). Getting the Mini up and running on the net was too insanely easy for words. My previous OSX experience was a first gen iMac, and it was a pretty close second. However, in less time than I would normally be making additional entries under "Network Connections" in XP, I was calibrating the color of my monitor.

To be fair, I haven't tried much with it yet - so I'm probably still in the honeymoon period. I've got the Torque 2D kit down but haven't even installed XCode yet. Or tried to hook up the scanner or printer, etc. But right now I love the little thing. I swear it's faster than my AMD64 box, which by all rights should have been twice as powerful in literally every measureable way.

The only cons I'd note for Apple so far are small. First, the $499 price point is a bit of a myth. Look, the display models you'll see in the Apple Store have 512MB. There's a reason for that. From what I've heard, they don't want you to see the slower version. It's also a shame that you can't have it configured on the fly if you go into the store. The Friendly Mac Guy said it was coming, but right now it's more convenient to just buy it off the net.

Still, I can't wait to hammer some code into the little guy. Since the PC is taking some R & R, I'll be focusing on my top-down 2D shooter with a twist. What's the twist? I'll tell you if I ever get it working...