Rarely does a product come out that redefines the category, or makes you fall in love from the first sight. Maybe not surprisingly, but for me multiple such products were produced by Apple.
I’m not even talking about moving to the M1 processors. I’ve bought that MacBook Air and loved it to bits, but it was still the old design, only now it was fast as hell and the battery life was more than amazing.
For me, the first such device was the iPhone 4. It was the first Apple presentation I watched and when Steve Jobs showed it and explained I immediately fell in love with a design and Retina display. This new display changed the standard for phones and later all other screens.
Then came the iPhone X. I remember as I got it and took it out of the box, my wife, watching me, smiled and said, “we don’t experience such genuine love of technology, everything mostly is taken for granted”. I loved that phone.
More recently, it was the new iPad Pro with M4. It’s so thin and the display is just gorgeous. When I watch some high-quality content, it feels like I’m holding the movie or the TV show in my hands. Sure, there’s always room to grow (meaning to shrink, of course), but occasionally, I just hold it in my hands and look at how thin it is.
And now, during the week of Mac announcements, it was introduced. The new Mac mini. It is stunning. It just looks like a perfect computer. I know there are Raspberry Pis and Intel NUCs which are smaller or whatever. But the Mac mini looks so sleek, it feels just perfect. I wasn’t planing on buying one, but loved looking at it.
On Friday, November 8th, I went to the store to buy a USB-C Magic Trackpad, since it was day one of sales in our country. And just asked if they had the base Mac mini (I actually looked at availability on their website and knew they didn’t, but wanted to ask regardless). As it turned out, they actually had one in the back, and it was the first time in my experience and in the experience of the store employee that they’ve had a mistake on the website. She went to check and came back with the box in hand. I couldn’t say no. How anyone could?
So now, I’m the proud owner of this perfect computer. I have a couple of ideas how to use it, mostly headless, but I just can’t put it in the attic to connect to the router directly for better performance, I want to keep it on my desk. I mean, just look at this combo. Mac mini – the perfect computer.
