I launched, in order: Mail, Safari, Activity Monitor, iTunes, iCal, DVD Player, iPhoto, Photo Booth, Quicktime Player, Disk Utility, Preview, iMovie, Front Row, Garage Band and Aperture. I decided to take it to the next level and write a quick script to launch 15 applications in a row, timing how long the entire process takes. General OS usage is a difficult thing to quantify, but one measure of performance has always been the number of bounces an icon in the dock makes before an application loads.
I did throw in some results from the early 2008 iMac I reviewed a while back. I didn't have any previous generation Intel Mac minis on hand so the performance comparison is mainly to the MacBook/MacBook Pro. While that may change in another quarter or two, we still need Apple to take SSDs more seriously than it has been. These days the name of the game is SandForce.
I’m going to take this opportunity to again plead for Apple to include a decent SSD in its customization options. The Mac mini is absolutely begging to have an SSD, and unlike the rest of Apple’s Mac lineup, one isn’t even offered on the mini. To Apple’s credit, OS X does a good job of caching frequently used data but without enough RAM this is a wobbly crutch. The drive keeps power consumption and noise down to a minimum, while being awful for performance. The second is the hard drive.Īpple ships the Mac mini with a 2.5” 5400RPM notebook drive. Even light multitasking exposes this weakness.
The first is memory, and I’ll touch on this in more detail later, but 2GB of RAM is simply not sufficient for a computer running a heavyweight OS. There are two problems with the overall performance of the mini that will contribute to it feeling slow, particularly over time. Given that Apple’s iPad is fast enough for many users today, I don’t think it’s too difficult to understand that the 2010 Mac mini is sufficient for most needs. The original Mac mini was fast enough for the entry level Mac user back in 2005.
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