The machine is seriously small, my external hard drive enclosure is larger than the whole mini (and louder). The installation was quick and smooth, all I did was turn it on, watch a video, and then avoid giving Apple my personal details. I'm certainly not giving them my telephone number and address, let alone a breakdown of my work activities.

This is by far the least amount of tweaking to a UI I've ever done, it just looks good, although compiz-manager has spoiled me, and I spent some time seeing if I could make wobbly windows (I couldn't). Even the terminal had been considered, and with a few clicks I had a white on black transparent number helping me look under the hood, and an equally good looking Console window. Glad to see Apple remembered the geeks.

The performance is great, and so far there have been no noticeable slow down even in some of OS X's more intense bits. Better yet, it is dead quiet, with the only time it has made a noise being when FrontRow thrashes trying to play an avi (see bugbear below). The fan is more like an audible CPU usage meter.

Next, I got to patching. Apple looses points here. I was told I had approx 600Mb to download, a bit steep, and it doesn't support resuming, worse still, if you completely download the patch but don't get to installing it, it re-downloads the whole thing. After two power outs wasted a good 400Mb of cap, I took to installing them one at a time. While doing this, I realised you aren't presented with all patches up front, it was only after installing the 315Mb OSX upgrade that I was presented with the first set of security patches, and only after installing those, that I saw the rest. If I was a normal home user, with the default weekly software update check, I would only have all the security patches installed in 3 weeks (assuming nothing interrupts the initial process). Also, there is no differentiation between security and feature packs, so I ended up installing a 30Mb QuickTime update which was a half a security fix and half a feature pack. Not cool for anyone trying to pursue a 'minimal change' strategy.

I spent some time playing with the cool tools like Front Row and the Dashboard. These are lots of fun, and I really enjoy the little remote and 'browse from bed' interface. I was also impressed to see that the security fuss has produced some fruits, and I now have ClamXav watching my high churn, perimeter folders.

This brings me to my next bug bear. Apple are trying to win the format war by crippling their support for almost everything. From the stupid adherence to deprecated DVD region codes on the DVD player, to a lack of support for a majority of reasonable formats. VLC is great, and I like that it supports the remote control (use the 'VLM remote control interface'), but it doesn't work in Front Row. I spent some time fiddling with Perian and the like, to no avail. Any hardened Mac addicts able to help?

Next, I plugged in my external hard drive to find there was no support for reiserFS (partially excusable) or ext2/3. I eventually found the ext2fx project, but I'm still not happy. I eventually copied what I needed from a mount on my Ubuntu laptop, ensuring Linux remains a hard requirement for any real geek. I'm still getting my head around the NTFS-3G with MacFUSE compilation, but right now at least it can read NTFS.

Despite my whining, I am very happy with the purchase. I fell asleep watching Futurama, woke up with a smile and some banging tunes all from the comfort of my bed. Next, I'm going to get fink going with some X apps.