I brought back my third Mac mini from our recent trip to Japan (it is cheaper there than here in Shanghai). Unlike its predecessors, it is not going to be a replacement machine, but an addition: I am going to continue using my MacBook Pro as my main computer (especially for work) for the foreseeable future, but its hard disk has been filling up, and the new mini's first main purpose is to offload our media libraries.

Hardware

Nice things come in small packages. The mini was quite compact to begin with, so that the new one is only half the size of the other two is not a big deal for me, but I do appreciate that they have done away with the external power adapter, which used to be almost the same size as the computer itself, and thus rather inconvenient. Probably as part of the shrinking process, but maybe just because Apple just wanted to kill it, there is no optical drive anymore. I cannot remember when I have last used the drive on my MacBook Pro, so that is probably not a problem. The three use-cases that come to mind are installing the operating system, watching DVDs and ripping audio CDs. The first does not apply anymore, since Apple no longer ships disks and has replaced the process with a combination of recovery partitions, memory sticks, Time Machine backups and downloads. For everything else, one should be fine as long as there is at least one other computer with a drive in the household. A welcome addition is the SD card slot on the back.

Magic Trackpad

The first thing I noticed after turning on the machine was that it did not detect my USB mouse. That is a pretty bad situation, because you cannot do anything with a Mac without being able to move the pointer. It is also a complete mystery to me, since at least the basic functionality of USB mice is very standardized, and the same mouse works just fine on the MacBook Pro. Fortunately, I also bought a Magic Trackpad, which seems to be getting a prerequisite with the ongoing move towards gestures. There was another unexpected hurdle connecting it, though, as I was prompted for a Bluetooth peering code. A Google search (which I would not have been able to do without another computer at hand) had the solution (just type 0000), but why this dialogue is necessary is unclear to me. It must have been a bug, because it is not mentioned at all in the Trackpad's manual. Not quite the unboxing experience you want from Apple products.

Time Machine migration

There is a Migration Assistant that you can use to get your data from your old Mac to your new one. It has a number of options, including restoring everything or individual users' data from a Time Machine backup. I used this to migrate Cissy's user account and it worked like a charm: The new user account was created, all data was copied and everything looked just like on the old machine, from account icon to desktop background to open tabs in Firefox. From my own account I manually copied just the iTunes library off the backup disk. That also worked without problems. I want to do the same thing with the iPhoto library (another seventy gigs that the MacBook Pro could do without), but before that I will have to set up Time Machine backups on the new mini. I cannot quite decide if I want to enable backup encryption. While that is of course something that I have been wanting for a long time, the feature is new in Lion, and I would not be able to share the encrypted disk with Snow Leopard.

Lion

I cannot say much about the new operating system version yet, because my main Mac is still on Snow Leopard (and will probably stay that way), and I have only really used the new computer while I was setting it up (my day-to-day interaction with it at the moment is limited to updating my iPod every morning). Cissy does use the computer a lot, and has offered no complaints, but she practically lives in Firefox and hardly sees the OS at all. From what I have seen so far I like the new approach of showing applications full screen and using a three finger swipe to switch between them. Of course, this will probably not work for all kinds of applications, and there is currently no good way to integrate this in a multi-monitor setup. As for "natural scrolling", the reversed scroll direction is less confusing than I feared. If you are switching to Lion exclusively, this should not be a problem at all. Even if you are using going back and forth between Lion and older Macs or non-Macs, you'll pretty soon figure things out. It definitely helps to use a trackpad only on Lion, and a scroll-wheel mouse otherwise.

Standing desk

Our standing desk construction unfortunately does not accomodate a monitor, so we had to revert back to a more traditional arrangement for now. We replaced the chair with a yoga ball to make amends.