A couple of months ago I had a nice surprise.

As previously mentioned I’m technically reviewing the multimobile development book and as a large section of the first book involves iPhone development I’d need access to a Mac to review and comment. Whilst using a mac elsewhere I didn’t have one at home and thought it was time I dived in.

I placed my order for a mac mini and upgraded to 4gb RAM as I knew VMware for my windows fix would be called for.

During my wait for the custom build to be completed the nice surprise turned up in the form of an email from Apple saying that as I was waiting for my old style mac mini that they where going to upgrade me to a new model free of charge! Bonus!

3.6cm high and 19.7 cm square this thing is small. The shell of the mac is complete aluminium meaning it feels robust, is light and looks lovely.

Gigabit ethernet, firewire 800, 4 USB ports, SD card reader and an HDMI port are a few of the connectors that adorn the back plate. It’s also got built in Wireless N.

Over the last two months the Mac is now our main home machine. So much so that in a recent clear out the PC has gone into the loft. I used to use the PC for gaming but now the Xbox does that so for day to day internet, email and simple photo and video editing and organisation the Mac is awesome.

The Mac feels more powerful that it’s diminutive size should hold, apps are snappy even when I’m running a Windows 7 VMware instance, XCode, Interface builder, iTunes, Firefox and Tweetdeck. Although I’m sure this is helped out by the rather expensive 4Gb upgrade option (which I’d highly recommend)

I’m still in the relatively early days of getting used to learning short cut keys (which are excellently implemented throughout all the Mac’s software) and adjusting to Fn keys and the one that gets me the most…. the minimise and close buttons being on the other side of the window!

I know that people have complaints about the price of the new model, and I don’t think I’d be sitting here with one if I’d seen the current new model price. It’s a tad overpriced for me, considering you then will want to add 2Gb.

Overall, it’s a typical high quality Apple experience that you have to pay for.