Thanks for the info. The Mini was actually something I had considered for awhile. A friend has the 20″ iMac as well and I was thinking about playing around with it to get a feel for how operates.

As for the Mini as an HTPC, how much memory do you really need to play some DVD’s and record TV? Not much…I used to do it on a P3.

Not with that GPU it isn’t.

The dual core has the CPU to spare to fill in the gaps in OpenGL in software… but it’s only marginally faster than the Radeon 9200 when that kicks in, and on the single-core you’re going to be slower, and the Radeon 9200 was barely adequate to begin with. On top of the 64M lost to the GPU, the extra RAM to run Rosetta, and having to have all this extra graphics code… you need to up it to 1G or you’re going to swap like the devil. Some people I know who bought the base 512M core duo report they’re running Windows and Linux on them until the memory upgrades come in.

The old model with 512M is entirely usable. It’s what I’ve got, and I’m happy with it.

So… the iMac and Macbooks may be decent, but the new Mini is gonna go down as a Road Apple.

I hope you reconsider owning an Intel Mac in the future – I have the 20″ iMac CoreDuo and it was definiteley worth the cost – a Mac Mini is a great alternative to save $ and is going to make an awesome home theatre centerpiece.

In my testing XP running within parallels runs amazingly fast. I can even run 3d apps inside the virtual machine with very usable performance. I haven’t tried any 3d games (just the included 3d pinball which worked flawlessly), but my home design/landscape package that heavily uses 3d rendering runs beautifully. In fact, running XP within the VM is as fast as I have seen it run on any Pentium 4 machine natively.

Also notable if you’re looking to run Windows apps, the same machine dual booted to XP using Apple’s Boot Camp is even more amazing – the performance is outstanding and the drivers take full aadnvtage of DirectX for gaming.

I have finally consolidated down to one machine that runs all my apps!

Thanks for the link…but for those of us who will never own an Intel Mac, we are out of luck; the software you linked to is for Intel based macs only.

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/

It’s currently beta, so it’s a free download.

I used to deploy/test the drivers in Puma, Jaguar and Panther. Nowadays I test on Panther and Tiger. Sometimes I get beta/developer releases of upcoming versions of OS X and I go and test on those environments as well.

The installation procedure uses OS X’s Installer (made with PackageMaker).

Virtual machines targeted to PPC platforms that can run OS X versions running on PPC-only would be very much helpful.

Virtual machines targeted to Mac-Intels and PPC platforms running Universal Binaries would also be very much helpful.

I hope the move to intel will promt a release of VMwarwe for OS X

Would absolutely rock for development thats for sure.

I would of course be conserned that developers would consider not making graphically intensive programs for both systems but it would , i believe, pull people to mac fpr one and also make developers realise we want them to make their products for us too. Because we all want a system that just works not the buggy mess that is Windows.

[z]

I believe the biggest reason virtualization has become so popular is primarily due to the server consolidation and disaster recovery benefits.

Granted, many developers use it to test software (as do I), but the biggest impact is being felt in server rooms and data centers where there are huge benefits. At the risk of sounding like a commercial, I will say that we use the technology extensively at our company because it provides numerous benefits.

Not only can you consolidate servers and see real savings in space & power usage, but you get a laundry list of other benefits as well including:
– online and offline snapshots to simplify disaster recovery & backups
– extermely flexible networking with virtual switching, NAT, DHCP, etc.
– support for SANs & clusters & shared data access
– simple migrations from one hardware platform to another
– simple migrations from one host OS to another (linux–>linux or win and win–>linux or win) with only minor changes to a text file if even required
– simple cloning of systems

I could go on and on but the point is that I would love to experience all of these benefits running with the power of a dual-G5 or future Intel-based xServe! The platform is fantastic for everything we’ve thrown at it, but we could leverage it for so much more if multiple instances of OS X (or other OS’s) could run on it at the same time (virtualized so that performance is acceptable, as opposed to emulated, which is not). The power is there and in many cases not being tapped to it’s fullest potential, where running multiple OS’s would certainly be viable and maybe stretch the server’s legs a little bit more, too.

We run many production systems as VMs on Intel hardware and have directly benefitted from the ability to revert back to snapshots that reduced downtime from days or hours down to literally minutes. We have also consolidated numerous servers down to a fraction of the floor space while using fewer switch ports and less power.

So please VMWare – if you’re reading this – port your product to OS X, as our Mac workstations and servers coould do so much more!

Apparantly, they’re in talks with both VMWare and Apple. VMware is up for it, however its up to Apple since they own a key patent.

(just kidding)

I’d like VM Ware on OS X too. I’m going to be trying Virtual PC for the lower end stuff I’m doing…