OK, so I’ve been busy over the last few months. Technology never stops evolving, and we must do what we can to keep up.
A month ago, I took a dive – bought a second-hand Mac Mini as our home entertainment center. It came with the prerequisites:
- Silent and unobtrusive
- Runs Boxee and other media centers seamlessly
- Provides a remote control that simply works
- Powerful enough to handle Internet video from various sources like Hulu and Netflix
- Digital video and audio outputs!
Simple as it seems, the other contenders were pretty far off. Some of these included:
- Windows laptops – not many come with a remote control. Boxee was nice-to-have – there are decent alternatives in Windows-land. Also, the cheaper laptops lack digital video outputs.
- Apple TV was almost there, but lacked the computing power to playback Netflix streams.
So I have it set up as my Music server (40GB of MP3s) and Videos live in a portable HDD or streamed live from the Internet.
But what really struck me was it’s speed. I wanted to try out encoding DVDs with the Mac – it blew away my Dell D620 running Windows XP by almost 2x. I was stunned – I thought my Dell was relatively fast.
I don’t have the full hands-on experience yet with Mac OS X, but I can now understand the premium that Apple commands over Windows. In fact, I am even evaluating if a Mac platform might suit my needs (having a Unix-based kernel brings back fond memories)… Ah, but am I cool enough to be a Mac user?
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