I say this because in the same client's office (I'm their "Mac guy") we have a Mac Mini G4 1.25GHz machine that very nicely drives an Apple 23-inch display, happily running Quark 7 and a host of other apps. I had to pry it open with a crowbar to get the RAM in it...it may have a full Gig, if memory serves, which could account for some of the difference...but, still, that Mac Mini is a perfectly serviceable machine for office work.
Perhaps this is to be expected as the Mac OS and its applications once again goes through a processor-bridging period, but I'm curious since I haven't had much personal experience with Intel-chip machines -- is everyone living with some *bad* slowdowns and sluggish experiences on Intel-based Macs? Or are MacBooks and iMacs better than Mac Minis?
update: Over at Barefeats I came across a Mac Mini shootout that might explain some of what I was seeing -- it sounds like the graphics subsystem is pretty poor on the new Mini, including the fact that it uses system RAM (sometimes upwards of 80MB), which makes 512MB kinda anemic. Sigh.
3 comments:
We recently purchased two Mac Mini SingleCore machines, running MacOSX Tiger 10.4.6, and they both are running the very latest version of MS OFFICE.
Every time an old document is opened, or a new document is started (in WORD), it takes up to 5-10 seconds, with the spinning beachball. Even the pulldown menus take forever to come down, with a several second delay, and clicking on any menu item brings on the beachball with a several second delay. The entire program feels like its waist deep in molasses.. every function takes seemingly "forever", and any action seems to bring on the spinning beach ball for several seconds. There is also a 1-2 second delay between typing, and the subsequent appearance of text on the screen.
WORD often "forgets" that it has been opened documents before... on starting up WORD, it invariably spits out an error message implying that this is "the first time the app. has been opened", and it also "forgets" all the previously opened documents. ENTOURAGE also always loses its preferences.. and both it and EXCEL run even more sluggishly and molasses-like than WORD. The only screwup that hasnt happened is a kernel panic,,,yet. 
Here's the insane thing: the same symptoms are happening on the TWO identical MacMinis, each one has (512mB RAM), and running MS OFFICE. We now have a special case assigned with both Apple AND Microsoft tech support. Neither party is admitting that it is their hardware/software at fault here, both Apple and MS passing the buck to each other.
In desperation, we resurrected our old 400mHz G4 Cube yesterday running MacOS 9 and an ancient version of OFFICE.. and it runs like a dream in comparison.. snappy and steady, and it's allowing work to continue.
Has anyone had similar nightmares with these new Macs running MS OFFICE? We're so done with this.
All the hardware tests (RAM, CPU etc) check out fine.
We recently purchased two Mac Mini SingleCore machines, running MacOSX Tiger 10.4.6, and they both are running the very latest version of MS OFFICE.
Every time an old document is opened, or a new document is started (in WORD), it takes up to 5-10 seconds, with the spinning beachball. Even the pulldown menus take forever to come down, with a several second delay, and clicking on any menu item brings on the beachball with a several second delay. The entire program feels like its waist deep in molasses.. every function takes seemingly "forever", and any action seems to bring on the spinning beach ball for several seconds. There is also a 1-2 second delay between typing, and the subsequent appearance of text on the screen.
WORD often "forgets" that it has been opened documents before... on starting up WORD, it invariably spits out an error message implying that this is "the first time the app. has been opened", and it also "forgets" all the previously opened documents. ENTOURAGE also always loses its preferences.. and both it and EXCEL run even more sluggishly and molasses-like than WORD. The only screwup that hasnt happened is a kernel panic,,,yet. 
Here's the insane thing: the same symptoms are happening on the TWO identical MacMinis, each one has (512mB RAM), and running MS OFFICE. We now have a special case assigned with both Apple AND Microsoft tech support. Neither party is admitting that it is their hardware/software at fault here, both Apple and MS passing the buck to each other.
In desperation, we resurrected our old 400mHz G4 Cube yesterday running MacOS 9 and an ancient version of OFFICE.. and it runs like a dream in comparison.. snappy and steady, and it's allowing work to continue.
Has anyone had similar nightmares with these new Macs running MS OFFICE? We're so done with this.
All the hardware tests (RAM, CPU etc) check out fine. I've done some research, and I'm suspecting that 512 is not enough RAM to run Microsoft Office which is the ONLY program we're running on these machines. The paging between the RAM and the hard drive, running on Rosetta, and the fact that the graphics on the Mac Mini's eats into the main system RAM, is the problem. I'm hoping to send both these machines back or upgrade to a dual core with more RAM. I've been dealing with this for two months, and it's a total waste of my time. These were supposed to be working office machines. They are useless for work. I'm not sure what they're good for.
It's a crime to sell these things with 512MB of RAM. I have a coro solo mini which I purchased with 512MB, not because I thought it would be acceptable but because I wanted it to ship right away rather than having to be assembled. Anyway, just setting up my bare minimum workflow caused it to start swapping memory to disk on login. Basically I had filesharing, printer sharing, Quicksilver, SSH agent and maybe one or two other non-standard settings.
At this rate running any application will cause massive disk thrashing. Rosetta apps especially suffered because presumably part of the emulation layer is getting shuttled on and off disk. OS X has sophisticated virtual memory management, but when you're running this short-handed it just breaks down. Things like menus and basic effects start getting swapped out which leads to the kind of egregious performance highlighted above.
I dropped 2GB in this sucker and the difference is amazing. It actually feels comparable to my 1.67 Powerbook in Photoshop and Word, and noticably faster in several areas like javascript performance in Safari (Google maps are wayyy smoother for instance). What doesn't work so well are Carbon apps. I think because all Cocoa system calls are already compiled for Intel whereas Carbon is using a lot more emulation.
As for the graphics sucking, I have to disagree. Yeah, it's not gamer-level graphics. That said, it runs OS X eyecandy quite well, as well as any pre-Doom3 games.
Overall the new Minis are one of Apple's best values ever. I know you can build a bigger, louder, more powerful PC for the same price, but if you want a Mac for whatever reason, you can get quite decent performance for the same price as a PS3... just make sure to get at least 1GB of RAM.
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