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Super Ginormous

This is the personal site/blog/experiment of Chris Harrison, a web designer living, working and playing in Augusta, GA.

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04.20.2010

Leap

Last month I made the leap back to using a Mac. Since July 09, I’ve worked solely as a free­lancer and my trusty Dell lap­top has served me remark­ably well, but the time came for me to upgrade to some­thing more capa­ble. Budget-wise I was aim­ing to spend as lit­tle as pos­si­ble. That left me with only a a few choices:

  1. Get another PC. I toyed with the idea of get­ting a desk­top sim­ply because it’d be more upgrade­able down the road. I love my lap­top, though. Being tied to a desk isn’t ideal when you have to meet with clients or want to work some­place else from time to time. For $500-$1000 you can get some good lap­tops and/or desktops.
  2. Get a Mac. I was torn between get­ting a 13″ Mac­Book Pro, 24″ iMac or a Mac mini.
    1. A 13″ Mac­Book Pro would be a very capa­ble machine, able to run CS5 with­out issues. It could be hooked to an exter­nal mon­i­tor when needed. It’s super portable. The only down­side is that it’s a lit­tle on the small size. Work­ing on it for extended amounts of time, with­out an exter­nal mon­i­tor would prob­a­bly be a pain in the ass. Start­ing at $1199, the base model isn’t bad, but not quite what I was after.
    2. The 24″ iMac is fast, has a nice sized screen. Lots of great options. I loved that I’d be able to hook an exter­nal screen to it to dou­ble screen space. At $1199, the entry-level model is a great deal and I was seri­ously con­sid­er­ing it.
    3. The Mac mini is com­pact and decently pow­ered for its size. While it’s not portable like a MBP might be, it’s easy to trans­port. With its abil­ity to con­nect to mul­ti­ple screens sport­ing HDMI, VGA or DVI (via dis­play adapters), I was sold. The price helped as well. I bought the entry-level Mac mini for $579 retail with free ship­ping and no tax.

Get­ting used to Snow Leop­ard ver­sus sev­eral years in Vista and XP has been a bit of a chal­lenge, but not much. The Mac mini is quick, is able to do a lot with it’s seem­ingly unim­pres­sive hard­ware specs. All in all, I’m happy with the deci­sion to get it. Given the lim­ited bud­get, it was most def­i­nitely the right choice for me to make, but I could see myself going for either a MBP or an iMac the next time I need to upgrade.

Dual

The Setup

It han­dles two mon­i­tors flaw­lessly. It runs all of my appli­ca­tions with­out a prob­lem, even Cre­ative Suite 5. I’m extremely happy with my Mac mini and I can’t wait to build and cre­ate some awe­some stuff with it.

This item was posted by Chris Harrison.

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