I bought myself a Mac Mini the other week just so I could refresh my dreadfully obsolete Apple knowledge (last time I touched a Mac was probably in 1990). I literally asked the first salesman who made eye contact with me to show me the cheapest computer in the store. Maybe that’s where I went wrong.
I got it home and played around with it. I even made it my daily use machine. It worked fine for checking email and surfing the web. I missed being able to play Windows Media file formats (apparently, there’s no WMA or WMV codec available for MacIntel machines yet, but there’s one available for PowerPC-based machines).
Overall, I think the experience has been mostly acceptable, but certainly not amazing. When I first got it home, the Front Row[tm] remote had a dead battery. That was a shitty out-of-box experience. I get asked to install component updates all the time, and may of them require reboots. I always heard that only Windows had problems like that. I changed my password at the command prompt, and it turns out there are some components that still prompt me for my old one. Overall, it’s not the unbelievably smooth, completely defect-free experience that I was always told to expect.
And the ultimate offense? After having it for less than a month, it died. I came home from work one day and it was shut off. I have tried turning it back on to no avail. I’ll be taking it back to the Apple Store to see how service works. I hope I have better luck with that than with the rest of the "seamless user experience" that I have yet to discover.
Perhaps I’m just not smart enough to use an Apple The Way That Jobs Intended[tm].