A few years ago, I bought one of the original Apple iMac G3s. I tried to love it, but I found the operating system too difficult to live with and eventually I sold it to my mate Stuart (after it had sat idle for a year or so).

Nowadays, Macs are based on standard PC hardware and BSD Unix, so I decided to get myself a Mac Mini for all my digital media work (the Intel Core Duo 1.66GHz model), although I do intend to dual boot OS X and Windows XP (mostly out of idle curiosity)… and one day I might manage to install Linux on it too.

Apple’s UK distribution centre is only about 25 miles away from my house and although there is no next day shipping option, the guys at the Apple Store told me that they would assign my order a priority for fast dispatch (hoping that it would arrive next day). Priority! Pah! No such thing; however was dispatched within 24 hours and the man from UPS delivered it yesterday afternoon (still a day before Apple’s official estimate, but I had really wanted to get my hands on it before the weekend). Unfortunately, work got in the way of me playing with my new toy and I couldn’t do anything with it until yesterday evening.

Once I’d opened the outer packaging, I just had to take a picture of it all still boxed up (when was the last time you saw any other PC arrive in such attractive packaging?) – according to the printing on the back of the box “your digital life starts here”.

Once unboxed, setting everything up was really simple – after just a few questions (language, country/region, keyboard layout and a few other options) I was up and running; however the OS X software update utility told me that there were 14 updates to apply.

It all looked simple enough, but the Mac kept losing its Ethernet connection each time I tried to download and install all of the available updates (not even caching them, so it had to start the entire list of downloads again each time). After various restarts (to kick the Ethernet connection back into life) and resorting to installing updates a few at a time I’ve nearly got it working. I’m trying hard to be objective about OS X (I will try and live with it for a while before I install Windows XP on the Mac) but this initial experience has soured things slightly.

Still, it is a very attractive PC, and once I’ve transferred the data from my old PC I will have liberated quite a lot of desk space. Just enough to fill with a nice widescreen LCD monitor I think…