Review Miscellaneous
Mini Mac and Front Row: Better than a mini PC?

At this time, mini PC’s are starting to make a big comeback with makers like Asus and its Eee Box B202 and MSI with their WindBOX ! A silent media centre worthy of its name has a place in your lounge room, linking the computer to your television or stereo system making it possible to play your multimedia content (video, audio, photos) from the local computer or from your home network. All of this can be controlled with a simple remote… The Apple mini Mac coupled with its Front Row graphical interface is a product with a vision. Is it simple to deploy, easier to use and better suited than the mini PC’s? The answer is in this review.

Tags : mac mini, mini pc

Mini Mac and Front Row: Better than a mini PC?

March 11th, 2009 - 04:09 am ET by
  1. 1 - Introduction
  2. 2 - Step 1: Connect your Mac mini to its peripherals
  3. 3 - Step 2: Configure the Front Row media center
  4. 4 - Step 3: Browsing in Front Row
  5. 5 - Conclusion

gallery3img2006022816 x 16 x 5 cm, an elegant and discreet small box
For those that don’t yet know, the Mini Mac is a “real Mac” with the Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 operating system like the iMac and Mac Pro. This is a small case that is 16 cm long and wide, while being 5cm high. At the moment, the mini computer market is “exploding”, with the buyer who wants to have a media centre in their lounge room asking themselves whether they should get a mini PC or a well equipped mini Mac?

A small configuration or sufficiently powered?
From a hardware point of view, two configurations are offered. One with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor at 1.83 GHz or 2.0 GHz. With this you have the choice of an 80, 120 or 160 GB hard drive and between 1 and 2 GB of DDR2 memory. The graphics controller is an Intel GMA950 with 64 Mb of SDRAM DDR2 shared memory, which isn’t overly powerful, so you can give up any ideas of playing evolved 3D games. It is however more than sufficient for use as a media centre. This gallery4img20060228means you can view films, browse through your audio files, view photo slideshows and listen to your podcasts and audio books…

The screen, keyboard and mouse all come as optional extras, but the “Apple Remote” is provided in the basic version for $730 The software component includes Mac OS X, the iLife ‘08 suite (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, GarageBand) and the Front Row graphical interface which is what particularly interests us.

An office computer or a home media computer? Both!
Classically, you would connect a flat screen monitor, a keyboard and a mouse, possibly a printer and an ADSL/cable modem which is all driven by Leopard.

BlueAppleMore original here is that you connect your television and stereo system, and this is the use that today interests us. Here, everything is driven by Front Row running as an additional layer. The application also displays internal content (hard drive or double layer DVD drive), external devices (iPod, memory stick) and remote connections. In this third case, the internet connection is made by an Ethernet cable or WiFi (AirPort Extreme is integrated). You can in either case browse through multimedia stored on shared folders thanks to the help of Bonjour (PC, Mac, Linux) or connect to a file server (NAS).

We will present this device to you from the Apple range, with this media centre allowing you to browse through your library with the help of the remote control, which means in the long run you can possibly replace the DVD/DivX player that is currently connected to your TV.


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