Apple's Mac mini - Tempting PC Users Everywhere
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 25, 2005 7:39 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
iWork '05
Although it doesn't ship with the Mac mini, Apple's new "work oriented" application suite, iWork, was released alongside the mini. Priced at $79, iWork is cheaper than a single copy of Microsoft Word and obviously cheaper than Microsoft Office, but only comes with two applications - Pages and Keynote 2.
Pages is a document publishing application in its first iteration; Keynote 2 is the second version of Apple's presentation software. I've been mostly using Pages and I don't make presentations too often, so I will save in-depth discussion of Keynote 2 for a later article, but there are a few things that I did find nice about the software that I'll mention here.
The built-in themes are worlds better than what you find in PowerPoint and the user interaction with them is much more simplified. Keynote 2 features handy guide tools that will appear when you're trying to center text or graphics to help you find the vertical and horizontal centers of a text box or of the slide itself. Keynote 2 can import PowerPoint presentations and does so relatively well, although there are going to be some compatibility issues as you can probably expect:
Keynote 2's export capabilities are extremely strong, as you can export presentations to QuickTime, PowerPoint, PDF, JPEG/PNG/TIFF images or a Flash movie.
But now on to the application that interested me the most - Pages.
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elvisizer - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
also, someone needs to tall anand that you can get pictures out of iphoto via drag and drop, not just going to Share->Export.Saist - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Wanted to step in and comment that the Microsoft Office problem is also solved by a little application that you may or may not have heard of.It's called.
OPEN OFFICE.
http://www.openoffice.org
wilburpan - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
#44Not to mention the lack of a need to buy an antivirus subscription, which kicks in at $25/year for Norton's antivirus program. If you keep your Windows PC for 4 years, that's an extra $75 in software updates you'll need to buy.
shuttleboi - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
"The comparison above was very deliberately set up to focus on hardware alone, ignoring things like software differences and form factor differences. "Hello? The Mac Mini comes with over $100 worth of software. Where are you going to get a software suite on Wintel for $100? Kazaa?
edwardhchan - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
#25: I used a Kingston ValueRAM PC2700 1GB DIMM... Works like a charm. Just a note on using as a media server: Divx and MPEG4 playback is fine with VLC. DVD is good too, but the DVD player doesn't have a very good de-interlacing algorithm. My Mini is being watched on a 43" Samsung DLP at 1280x720. Beautiful display for the compy :)Eug - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Apple has just dropped pricing on some of the BTO options:BlueTooth/Airport Express combo now $99.
1 GB RAM now $325.
80 GB hard drive upgrade now $50.
And now the SuperDrive option is 8X. Cool. :)
pbrice68 - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Just a quick FYI:TextEdit does open MicroSoft Word documents. Obviously, it doesn't support all of Word's features, but it will open and display the text and try to maintain all of the formatting.
Although you went over a great deal in iPhoto, you really didn't mention it's built in slideshow features, professionally printed books, and the ability to purchase prints directly from the application. The books really need to be seen to appreciate them.
Doormat - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
#26: the mini takes a regular DIMM, not an SO-DIMM. 1GB PC2700 DIMM is under $200. Plus the putty knife you'll need to open and install it.And I was planning on getting one until I read that they had problems at 19x12. As someone who is going to hook this to a HDTV at 1920x1080, this is disappointing news. Maybe next years refresh with a 9600+ with 64MB framebuffer will do the trick.
barnett25 - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
First I want to say that I loved the article. With that out of the way I have to ask, when you said that Pages exports well to html, what were you smoking? I just recieved iWork yesterday, I bought it becuase Pages seemed like an easy way to make good looking webpages. I saw the family newsletter template and knew my mom would love to have a webpage based around that. But try saving just the template, with no editing, to html. You get a big mess. Pages was not ready to be shipped. It's export to .doc format is messed up with the supplied templates too, but I can understand that being due to Word's lack of refinment and features. I do like pages, but it seems to only be good if you are either printing, exporting to pdf, or simply saving as a pages file. For any other kind of exporting it's next to worthless. (By the way, if you go to Apple discussions you will see dozens of people with similar compaints to mine.)jasonsRX7 - Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - link
Apple today lowered some of the prices on the BTO Mac Minis at the Apple store.http://www.macnn.com/articles/05/01/25/lower.mac.m...