Our New Mac mini

Congrats on the purchase! I'm coveting a Macbook Pro (currently have a Titanium PowerBook), but I'm debating whether to be an early adopter or not. What do you advise? Is there any advantage to waiting until the summer with respect to ironing out any kinks? I'm not in an immediate rush to get it, but I'm just getting reallllllly impatient!

In my opinion, Intel is still considered a minion of the Dark Side of The Force (TM). Time will tell.

Porn home movies? Hmmm...

Whether to wait or not seems to be more a question of what you use the Mac for. If you depend on apps that require a lot of performance and are not yet native, you should wait until universal binaries are available.

I have a new Core Duo iMac. In my experience, if you use apps that do not require a lot of performance (I.E. word processing) or that do require heavy number crunching but are already native, there's no reason to wait. The new machines are very nice.

Thanks for the advice, Josh. I don't really use anything that demands universal applications (does porn count?), which would suggest that I should stop torturing myself and buy it now. However, I just wonder if it's better to wait until they find out what needs to be tweaked a little for the 2nd generation. Should I be the guinea pig or let someone else do it?

Well, Andrew, if porn is one of your core activities on the Mac, you might actually want to wait. Especially if you do a lot of video downloading. Right now Windows Media Player, VLC, and Mplayer aren't available in universal binary, which basically means they just don't work or don't work well, in my experience. That limits you to formats that Quicktime and the latest version of RealPlayer can play, and that's pretty limiting/frustrating.

If you do mostly web browsing, though, Safari is native and very quick and a wicked fast native build of firefox is also available although not officially released...

SO jealous.

Being a pure, innocent flower, I was merely joking about the porn of course...

Anyways, I do watch some sports video clips (butch, eh?) that are Windows Media Player supported. Tell me if I'm crackified or if I'm actually getting this right. I thought that Rosetta in the latest OS crossed the bridge between PowerPC and Intel chips and enabled most applications to function as they always have. I also thought that any native programs that come out will then be blazing fast. I guess that Windows Media Player is an unfortunate exception?

It sucks that you're having trouble with those other applications. I guess these are the kind of kinks that I was concerned about being ironed out prior to buying one of those beautiful machines of happiness...

Thanks for the feedback!

You're right, Andrew, Rosetta does allow you to run most PowerPC applications, and quite usably in most cases.

Cases where that's not true, though, include applications that interact closely with video, network, or other hardware-level resources. In many of those cases, PowerPC apps will launch but some aspect doesn't work properly. This is what I've found to be true of Windows Media Player (too slow), VLC, and Mplayer. The latter two just don't seem to work at all once they launch.

You're right, though, native apps are teh ROXXORS.

But you may be in for a bit of bad news regarding Windows Media Player. Microsoft has already announced they're not releasing a new version for the Mac, and that presumably means there won't be a native version, either. They said they are going to provide plugins that will permit .wmv playback on the Mac, but it's anyone's guess when or if that will come out. If/when it does, it'll probably be a Quicktime plugin or something else, perhaps in the form of a web browser plugin.

And yes, you are butch.

There already is a plugin for Quicktime that plays at least as much WMV as the Microsoft Player did. It's called flip4mac. I don't know if it's a universal binary yet, but it should be soon, I'm guessing.

Thanks for the tip, GoB, it sounds like a godsend.

However, it's not yet native and won't install. The good news is that the installer has obviously been updated to reflect the incompatibility and says, "Oh, no you don't, Mr. Man! This here's an Intel iMac, and this won't run on such a beast! Now Shoo!"

Or something like that. I take it as a sign that a native/universal version is in the works.