Apple today launched several product refreshes, but the one that really catches my eye is the Mac mini server. It’s pretty much just a Mac mini with the optical drive replaced with a second SATA 2.5″ hard drive and a copy of Snow Leopard server in place of the standard Mac OS X.

The hardware is pretty uneventful. People have been swapping drives in the Mac mini for years to add more storage as well as external drives. Software wise people have been using server products on the mini for some time. Nothing here is revolutionary. But marketing the product as a server is for a few reasons:

Home/Small Business Servers

Like I said, I’ve had a home server for years. It’s great for backing up and sharing files and printers. It can also be purposed for a myriad of other tasks. While you can set this all up on stock Mac OS X, tweaking it all is a little daunting as the Mac OS X UI only exposes the very basics. Mac OS X server has much deeper integration making it easier for people who don’t know what they are doing. I expect we’ll see some third party products that further expand the use of this in the home and small business market. I wouldn’t be surprised to even see some Home theater PC (HTPC) backend solutions. (MythTV anyone?)

Efficient Servers

The Mac Mini only consumes 16 watts when idle. It’s still a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz CPU, and ships with 4 GB RAM. The place it suffers is disk I/O thanks to using 5400 RPM drives (It’s cost per GB isn’t that great either thanks to the 2.5″ drives). In previous models it wasn’t too difficult to swap the drive with 7200 RPM drives though I don’t know how the thermals will play out with dual HD’s. It may be possible to use software RAID, I’m not sure what sort of improvement in performance you could get since I don’t know the details of the motherboard. However, if you have a task that’s not IO bound, or you use a NAS via Gigabit Ethernet (or a Firewire/USB drive) it may not matter. That’s a pretty affordable low powered node in your grid. Even better if it could handle higher density RAM to get 8 GB into there via 2 x 4GB SO-DIMMs.

I presume Apple’s Xgrid will work too.

It’s an interesting move, and one that I think could be successful.

• The usual pep-rally – iPhone App Store is a success, lots of iTunes music download, iPod touch sales strong, Mac sales solid. Users happy. (Probability: 100%)
• iTunes DRM Free Content – More DRM Free Music. Much less likely is video. (Probability: 85%).
• 17″ Unibody MacBook Pro – It’s missing from the lineup. (Probability: 85%).
• iPhone OS 2.3 – Despite a lack of rumors on the iPhone OS 2.3 unlike previous versions which were more publicity tested I still think we will see an announcement on this front. Apple promised push notification back in September. It’s way overdue. If it’s not ready to ship today, I expect Apple will at least give a preview and a date. I also suspect at least one other headliner feature. I’m hoping for Copy&Paste. (Probability: 80%).
• Steve Jobs Health – It’s the elephant in the room. I suspect whomever holds the keynote will mention it. Assuming Steve Jobs himself doesn’t mention it either by video conf. or in person. (Probability: 80%).
• Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Preview – Apple will give us another taste of what’s to come. I also expect to see a release timeline at least down to a quarter, if not an exact date. My guess is it won’t go GM until at least WWDC. Demo is very possible. (Probability: 75%).
• Revamped Mac Mini – The Mac Mini is overdue for a makeover. The case has been the same since 2005. The internals are getting old. I see a modest speed bump, a refreshed design and NVIDIA chipset. (Probability: 70%).
• Updated iMac – The iMac is about a year old at this point and also still offers an ATI graphics chip in some models. I see that disappearing and NVIDIA taking over. This is in preparation for Snow Leopard who will want more GPU. (Probability: 68%).
• iPhone Nano – I know 2 manufacturers claim to be making cases for it. I still suspect it won’t happen, at least with the iPhone OS we all know. I figure this because it will be hard to use the OS on a screen smaller than the iPhone. That said, Apple may be working on a slimmer cell phone focused more as a music player than an application platform. Think iPod + Phone. Rather than iPhone. (Probability: 51%).
• Updated Apple TV – Mixed feelings on this. Until Apple has a vision for it, I’m not sure they will keep dumping R&D time into this product. (Probability: 50%).
• Random Price Drops – Throughout the keynote, expect prices on low end of each product line to drop compared to current pricing. New slimmed down products to tickle the fancy of those in conservation mode due to the economy. (Probability: 85%).
• iTouch Tablet – I think it will happen eventually, but I don’t expect an announcement soon. I think earliest is 3Q 2009 (TechCrunch suggests the same). More likely at some point in 2010. I think it will replace the MacBook Air and be a slim tablet style notebook borrowing heavily from the Air. I don’t think Apple has the cost-saving chops to produce an oversized iPod touch at a price consumers would go for. (Probability for MWSF: 20%).

There you have it. Those are my guesses. Now lets see what happens.

My initial though is to eventually get a MacBook Pro once it’s truly 64bit and supports at least 8GB RAM. GPU accelerated video decoding would also be nice. I like my computers expandable and to last a while. In 3-4 years time I think I’ll want more than 3GB of RAM considering I think 2GB is the minimum today. Yes the hardware they ship today technically supports this, but Apple’s firmware doesn’t for reasons unknown. I’d also like one or more USB 3 ports, but we’ll see if that happens in the 2nd half of 2009 or not. I don’t think the lack of would be a deal killer though. I think it will take quite a while for USB 3.0 speeds to be necessary to the point of widespread adoption.

Laptops are great since they can be moved around which is handy from time to time (though I use my laptop more at my desk than anywhere else), but they do lack the power that I sometimes want. The Mac mini obviously never delivered what I really needed in that department. My thought is to build a desktop rig composed of a multi core CPU (whatever makes sense at the moment), min 4GB RAM, at least two SATA drives (primary/backup) and dual boot Windows and Linux. This beast would be pretty much for when I need some real horsepower. By building it myself I could invest a little wiser in a good case, power supply, etc. and upgrade this thing through several revisions for years to come rather than throw it all away after a few years. I can also target my $ towards components I care about.

My primary (day to day) computer would be the MacBook Pro and would likely have Parallels installed so I can run Windows if/when necessary (mainly since Quicken for Mac sucks last I checked and so I can test web pages in Windows). When I need to do something that laptops suck for due to small slow disks or just being slower, I would have the desktop rig available.

One of the downsides here is that while my current display is VGA/DVI, both of these systems would be DVI. I could either degrade the signal to VGA and use my current KVM, or upgrade to a DVI capable KVM switch which isn’t cheap (I haven’t seen less than $250 for something like a IOGEAR GCS1782). The DVI switches don’t support dual displays unless you drop some serious cash, so that’s pretty much out of the question. This adds to the complexity. Is building a KVM for DVI really that much more difficult to warrant the price difference? Or is it simply there aren’t enough in the market to drive the price down?

When should I start this? What system should I target first? Which should that system replace? Who the hell knows. I’m thinking later next year. It’s not so much a “plan” as an idea. I know I need to upgrade to more modern hardware since I won’t be able to run Mac OS X 10.6, and XP is getting to me. Both use 2.5″ ATA/100 drives which are becoming hard to find, and even when you find them are pretty small. Both are maxed out in RAM.

I’ll likely retire the Thinkpad to just for travel and other silliness, and perhaps save the G4 mac mini for some diabolical scheme. Apple even alludes to some of the possibilities on it’s site (see “Big Ideas” on the right rail of the Mac mini page).

It gets surprisingly complicated when you want it all and have it fit on your desk.

Packaging

Apple’s packaging has always been known for being better looking and easier to use (no need to rip it apart, easy to get stuff out). Unlike Mac OS X 10.0 – 10.4, Leopard uses a new smaller box. It’s about the size of the DVD box Apple ships with the Mac Mini (and I believe the iPod has a similar box). On the front is an eye catching holographic cover. Inside is one DVD set inside the cardboard sleeve (rather thick) unlike the plastic/paper cover used in previous boxes. Also inside are the standard Apple stickers and a rather thick color book going over new features in Leopard. The photos are a little small, but good enough for the explanations. In an age where most manuals for software are in PDF format, a physical manual is a real luxury.

Install

I decided to do a clean install on my Mac Mini (rev 1 G4 @ 1.4GHz 1GB RAM) since I installed 10.4 on top of the stock 10.3, and lots of stuff has been installed over the years. I made two partitions one for Mac OS 10.3 (so I can try running 10.3 with Classic), and the main partition for Leopard and my data.

Install went very smoothly really nothing to complain about. The OS DVD has improved since 10.4. The first great enhancement is that it now can partition without reformatting (technology first seen with the Boot Camp public beta’s). I choose to zero my drive anyway, but it’s nice to know I can adjust partitions. Also interesting is that if you look at the top right side of the menu bar, you can see that WiFi is available on the installer. Not exactly sure what you would use it for, but you can connect to an access point. Overall it took over an hour until I was ready to restart into Leopard. Initial restart brought me to the first launch video “Welcome” obviously redone for Leopard. Setup went as expected an I was on my desktop without any pain. Afterwords I put in the Mac OS X CD that came with the computer and installed the apps that came with it (AppleWorks, iMovie HD, GarageBand). Also very painless So now onto the toys.

Finder

Overall the look and feel of the OS is great. The most obvious change is the newly remodeled dock. I personally think it looks pretty nice, but maybe that’s me. Since I’ve got a Mac Mini with an ATI Radeon 9200 (a mere 32MB) I don’t get some of the more fancy graphics/animations such as the semi-transparent menu bar that’s so controversial. Regardless it looks good. Rounded menu’s are a nice little bit of polish.

Coverflow is an interesting way of browsing media. I didn’t expect it to work on my Mac Mini because of the weak graphics card, but it actually works pretty well. It did however consume a bit of CPU, and disk IO was a little high so if you went to fast, the images weren’t always preloaded. Still handy.

Stacks are rather handy, especially for downloads. Not having them clutter the desktop is a major win. In just a few hours I can see how great this feature will be in the long term. Downloads are also tagged (similar to IE on Windows) so you’re prompted the first time you open them. I’d love to see the ability to turn a folder on the desktop into a stack (for easy access). The new sidebar is really good, it makes things even easier to access with less clicks. Notable is that it found my file server and make it a breeze to connect to. I can’t complain about that.

Scrolling windows that are not in the front is also a great usability tweak.

The Path bar, disabled by default (In the view menu select “Show Path Bar”) is great for keeping track of where you are. Adjustable grid spacing = awesome.

Quick Look

Really fast, and really awesome. I can see myself using it quite a bit. This is definitely a time saver. Ability to go full screen is just a bonus.

Fonts

It looks like Apple did some tweaks to how it handles fonts. Most obvious is that the default minimum for anti-aliasing is now 4px, down from 8px (which looked bad on a few websites with smaller fonts). The fonts look a little more crisp than they did before, but still feel much smoother than they do on Windows. I think it’s a significant win.

Spotlight

I didn’t really use Spotlight to much on my Mac with Tiger. With Leopard I think I will. It seems good enough to get rid of QuickSilver which I have yet to install. You can indeed use it to launch applications. Indexing didn’t take to long, search is pretty zippy.

Spaces

The one feature I really wanted most was Spaces. I love the feature of multiple desktops when using Linux and really love that Apple adopted the innovation. The spaces implementation is pretty good, it’s in the dock for easy access, also available in the menu bar and via key commands. Easy to use. The one thing I would like to see added is a graphical representation of what’s in each space on the icon. So I know what spaces are occupied and what are empty like Linux does. This is a minor thing. Overall it’s great.

Safari

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard ships with Safari 3.0.4 (5523.10) installed. Perfect for downloading Firefox. Kidding aside it’s fast and sleek. Nice additions include the ability to resize a text area on a form (Firefox extension will do the same). Also new (and very handy) is Web Inspector.

Dashboard

Dashboard didn’t change much, but there’s now a feature (in conjunction with Safari) called Web Clip which lets you select a piece of a web page and turn it into a widget. Not a bad idea, but I doubt I’ll be using it much since I don’t really use Dashboard that much to begin with.

Front Row

Front Row is now available for those computers that didn’t ship with it, such as my Mac Mini, but without a remote I’m not sure how useful it would be without the buying a remote such as the Keyspan ER-RF1.

iCal

Lots of little stuff, but until CalDAV is a more accepted standard and accepted by Google and friends, it’s mostly useless to me.

Developer Tools

I need to play with DTrace. Xcode looks good as usual, Dashcode is awesome, more polished than the developer preview under Tiger. Also noteworthy is Tiger includes:

• Apache 2.2.6
• Perl 5.5.8
• PHP 5.2.4
• Python 2.5.1
• Ruby 1.8.6
• Java 1.5.0_13

Mail

I don’t use Mail to often, but on occasion I play with it. Forward as an attachment is finally available. RSS integration isn’t bad, but not very powerful. In no way would replace Google Reader. Archiving mailbox isn’t such a bad idea. Could use that in Thunderbird.

Preview

Preview got a few nice little additions including a more polished UI that just seems more
intuitive. It also seems faster with large files. Lots of new features I’ve yet to play with.

Printing

I was able to setup my networked HP DeskJet without a problem. Wasn’t the greatest quality or the fastest but good enough. I wish HP would provide good drivers themselves, but they are still trying to push their overpriced JetDirect system. I can always use my Laptop to print so it’s never been an issue (can also print to PDF for easy transfer).

Terminal

The terminal now has tabs! My #1 request for a long time. Yes there are third party replacements that add this, but those are buggy at best. This officially makes Terminal cool.

TextEdit

Everyone’s favorite text editor now supports OpenDocument and Word 2007 Formats. Other than that, I don’t see anything too noteworthy, just polish (smart quotes, auto linking, etc.). All work very well.

Time Machine

I haven’t tried time Machine since I don’t have an extra drive large enough at the current time. I don’t keep much data on my Mac since my PC laptop is backed up frequently. As a result I mount the drive when I need something. Works well enough. This might change things though. So much for reviewing the most talked about feature right?

Performance

Overall the performance of Leopard on a 1st generation Mac Mini is extremely good. I personally think it feels more responsive than Tiger and Panther did. You won’t see the fancy animations or graphics (it still looks stunning though), but it’s very usable. I originally thought it might be a little sluggish based on the discussions of optimizations for Intel based Macs, but Apple seems to (for now) still care at least a little about PPC users.

Quirks

I did notice a few quirks with Leopard:

• Panther/Tiger let me put the computer to sleep and switch to the other computer on my KVM switch. As long as the switch was done pretty quick the computer just went to sleep. Leopard doesn’t like this. The workaround is to switch, wait about 10 seconds then hit the power button once to put the machine to sleep.
• When switching back to my Mac, Leopard doesn’t see a mouse and prompts me to connect a bluetooth mouse. Obviously my mouse exists, but it’s USB and my KVM doesn’t emulate hardware. Not a major problem, but a little annoying. See below for instructions how to disable this.
• Safari seems to have become a little more memory hungry. Might be a leak, I only have 1 tab open. See comments for instructions how to disable this.
• Time Machine doesn’t let you use network volumes to backup. Would be the best option of all.
• Not a quirk but something that’s “missing”: Still no ability to use iCal to write to Google Calendar.

So that’s all for my initial impressions with Tiger after almost 24hours. I personally really like it, a worth while upgrade. Can’t wait until I can upgrade at work. It’s by far the best OS Apple has ever put out. Having played with Vista I can safely say it is a much more functional, easy to use, and more powerful OS. It’s clearly designed with the user in mind.

Edit [11/4/2007 @ 10:15 PM EST]: There is a way to disable the bluetooth input device prompts.

I’m guessing an announcement about pre-orders for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and new iMacs. Possibly a speed bump for Mac Mini’s and some sort of iLife product upgrade.

Come on Steve… release the SDK and let us have some fun and make your product even more useful. The availability of good software is what has kept the Palm Treo and every Windows Mobile device alive despite Blackberry fever.

It would be an interesting platform for a Mobile XULRunner via Mozilla’s mobile efforts.

Don’t forget. Part of the Mac mini’s success is that it is small enough to embed in all sorts of places. Apple has even taken advantage of that press by putting it on their Mac mini page (lower right “Big Ideas”). Hackable products sell. Just ask Linksys about the WRT54G.

…On each machine we have two volumes: ChangeOS and Mac OS X. The Mac OS X volume is where we install the different versions of the OS. We boot to the ChangeOS volume to free up the Mac OS X volume for modification. When we trigger an automation run we specify the OS version and language. Each machine then reboots to the ChangeOS partition, caches the OS .dmg locally and uses the asr command line tool to restore the image. The tool that does this work is one I wrote (in AppleScript Studio no less!) called Lab Assistant. We have images of the Mac OS from 8.1 all the way up to 10.4.6 in all the languages our products support. …

Very cool stuff. I’d love if they would automate that into a nice little installer, similar to Apple’s new Boot Camp. Very cool stuff indeed.

Now today a Windows XP system decides to corrupt itself. Not quite done with evaluating the damage and repairs. I got it to boot, not sure what else is hiding under the murky waters of Windows XP. That’s the goal for tonight.

What did I learn? I really need to get some better backup systems working on these two computers. I’m sick of doing this.

Also saw a MacBook Pro the other day. Oh so very sexy. Very slick as usual.

Now what I really want to see (and have) is the replacement for the PowerMac. In my dreams it’s quad core, ships with 2GB RAM, dual SATA hard drives, and has a pretty similar design to the current PowerMac line. Oh yea, a 2nd media bay for another drive or accessory. I don’t like having a whole tower and 1 bay.