Just before the weekend a smallish package arrived here. A Mac mini to replace my old G5 1.8 GHz tower, which is over three years old. I ordered the mini as I don’t need a new screen so an iMac would have been overkill, and I wanted a quiet computer – the G5 may not have been as noisy as the notorious G4 machines which were so loud that Apple was eventually forced to replaced the fans, but quiet it was not. Under the Mac mini you can see a LaCie 250 GB firewire/USB hard drive and hub (4 USB ports and 2 Firewire).

By the way, the LaCie drive is considerably quieter than the equivalent Iomega drive/hub, which does not have the spacers on each corner to raise the computer above the drive and allow the drive to stay cool. The fan on the Iomega drive fires up after about a minute of use and is noisy! (I’m speaking from experience, having originally ordered an Iomega drive with the Mac mini from Apple.)

You can see the difference in size to the old G5 in the photo below (No – the G5 did not stand on the desk when it was in use!) – processing power seems pretty similar for both machines, despite the mini having a dual processor core, but most of the software – apart from the operating system and Apple applications – is still Power PC software running under Rosetta (which emulates the Power PC on the Intel processors which the mini has). So far I am very pleased with the Mac mini, and once I have deleted the hard disk on the G5, I will probably sell it.