MiniMac

I've had the new Intel Core Duo Mac Mini for about 3 weeks now and I'm having mixed feelings about it. I've been a loyal Apple customer ever since I bought a Apple ][+ a long time ago. Sure, for the past 10 years I had to live exclusively in the Wintel world but the new Intel Macs were supposed to be fast and cheap. Well, $800 is not that cheap and they're not too fast. Maybe because all the software are coded for the G4/G5 processor and I need to upgrade to 1GB of RAM, the Mac Mini feels a lot slower than my work PC (1.6GHz Pentium M w/1GB RAM). Applications also seem to crash quite often but nothing catastrophic like the Blue Screen of Death on Windows. I've been mostly using it to rip DVDs to my iPod, patiently waiting for Tascam to write a new FireWire driver so I can use it to run my FW-1082.

I hope Steve Jobs is enjoying his 10 million shares of restricted stock (5.4 million after tax). That'll teach me to be the first on my block to buy new technology.