A H2G2 moment

I was really impressed with the specs and price of the Mac mini when it was launched last week. I've ordered one for testing duties and to use as a render box and watch the odd film on. I've been speculating along with a lot of other Mac users (and a lot of PC users who will soon be Mac users) about some of the other things the Mac mini might be able to do apart from sit next to a PC and emit RDF waves to convert hardened Windows users. Some of the ideas have already been discussed on various forums, such as building a small and cheap supercomputer using Mac minis. While the 100baseT ethernet and 4200rpm laptop type hard drive would limit the effect of a cluster, I'm guessing that a small cluster of them could still be quite effective, especially as the external PSU means you can easily keep the PSU in a separate area for heat dissipation.

The major potential with the mini for developers though is in its capability as a cheap add on render box. Much like the Amiga won awards back in the 90s as a Mac add on (when used as a Lightwave renderer), the Mac mini gives you an inexpensive way of adding a G4's processing power to XCode, Logic Pro, Cinema 4D or any other apps that let you use network nodes. Even though the ethernet on it isn't gigabit, we've found that running a G4 under 100baseT as a node for Logic or XCode does take some CPU load off the main Mac and speed things up. If you're a developer playing with XGrid, the Mac mini looks like being a really cost effective way of building up your grid and testing your clustered apps.

If you're using software like Apple's Remote Desktop 2 or open source ones like VNC, you can run the Mac mini (or stack of them) headless and just use them remotely to run extra tasks, which you can do even when they're running as network nodes for other apps.

I expect we'll soon see other elements designed around the mini. My guess is that the first will be a FireWire/USB2 hard drive that is the same shape as the Mac mini and sits underneath it. More radically, I'm expecting someone will try and do a 6" LCD to fit on top and battery pack to sit underneath to give you a portable video rig similar to the ones used by video documentary teams for quickly previewing their work and like the various screen and battery kits you can buy for the Nintendo GameCube.

There's also been a lot of talk of using the Mac mini as a PVR. Elgato and ATI's new EyeTV Wonder collaboration might work on the Mac mini. Most of the debate is on whether the Mac mini will be fast enough to do the compression on the fly for TV recording. In theory it should be able to cope (although I'd probably stick 512mb of memory in it) as I've done similar recording with G3 iBooks at slower clock speeds, but we're not talking HDTV here Wink

What it will be good at though is sitting on your TV to play movies that you've previously made in iMovie or from DVD. As it's only a single monitor connection to the TV and you can use a bluetooth mini keyboard and mouse to remote control it, it's easy to just pick up a Mac mini and plonk it on your TV.

The big thing that hit me about the Mac mini was something I thought of last night though. In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adam's was very clever at introducing some seemingly random concept in one book and then hitting you with a surprise relevance of it in a later book, such as why the bowl of petunia's said "Oh no not again!". I was looking at my G4 Cube, stalwart of many games projects and still used as a server, XCode network node and test machine. I've steadfastly refused to put a CPU upgrade in my Cube as I didn't want to ruin its silent running style. Then I realised what the dimensions of the Mac mini really mean, and why it's subtly rounded...

The Mac mini fits *exactly* in the air space under the Cube!

You can sit a Mac mini underneath a Cube and not ruin the Cube's artistic style (other than it not looking like it's floating anymore), but have a much faster Mac running underneath it. I probably wouldn't recommend running the Cube at the same time though, as Angel there isn't room for any cables connecting to it and (b) with the air intake blocked underneath it would overheat.

There has been a few suggestions that the Mac mini's case design didn't have any of Jonathan Ive's influence on it, but the fact that it seems to be designed to fit into the base of a Cube seems to confirm that the hand of Ive is in the design somewhere Smile