Straight from China, my "overnight" shipping worked out to about 52 hours, but hey.. I have travelled to China and it took me nearly that long to make the trip "door to door!"
Anyway, I thought I'd give my first impressions about how this thing would go in a car and note some things that aren't visible in the photos or specs that will be of interest to people doing installations.
1) Power Supply: The power supply has a 10 pin connector that is symmetrical ie you can plug it in upside down and it's the same. This means that there are at most 4 voltages from the PSU, but I haven't been able to get my multimeter to it to see for sure. The pins and power brick are really pretty small for 85W so it's still likely that it's a single voltage source (here's hoping)
2) Cooling: The mini runs cool and quiet. The bottom gets pretty warm. Air comes into the case from vents around the entire perimeter of the bottom of the case and is exhausted from the back vents by a fan. I can't tell if it's a variable speed fan though since it's so quiet. I would assume that it probably is variable speed. Owing to the airflow, it might be kind of difficult to run this thing in an enclosed space. I don't really see how you could easily pipe cool air into the vents. It will probably have to stay oriented upright instead of on its side to have proper airflow. I plan to see if thermographiX supports its thermal sensors and do some tests in various orientations to know for sure.
To run in a hot car, the thing really might need a fan upgrade. Hopefully some nice disassembly photos will surface soon without me having to rip mine totally apart to see if the fan is something standard... One could always enclose the space around the rear exhaust and duct it to an external exhaust fan that would basically vacuum air through the case..
3) Physical: The computer and case feel extremely solid and sturdy. I have a friend whose father equates quality with density, and this is a product he would immediately buy. It's very small and it weighs a lot. Even though I have seen photos of the inside of the lid, it really looks and feels like it was milled out of a solid aluminum block. Although it's proabaly a bit delicate to open up, I would not be scared of making the attempt. I would be scared to open an iPod and people do that without damaging them, so this ought to be a walk in the park. The base is a solid 5.5" square 3/16" thick rubber pad. For mounting, this will mean that you can probably cinch a strap down over the top, make some stops to keep it from sliding backwards, and the rubber pad will hold it in place pretty well.
4) Power management: Pushing the power button on the mac mini simply suspends the machine without a prompt or anything. This is a bit different than the behavior for most of other macs. Some will trigger a shutdown; others will show a window prompting the user for shutdown/suspend/etc. Pushing the button when the computer is asleep will re-awaken it. Apple really is pretty inconsistent with their power button behaviors across their lines, so this is kind of a stroke of luck for the car pc enthusiast. It appears there is a normal 2 pin header on the motherboard for the power switch, so if this also turns out to be true, a normal PC shutdown controller like the ITPS or a single-voltage OPUS PSU (if they decide to make one) will be ideal for use with the mac mini without needing any special modification.
5) Misc: The DVI->VGA adaptor is awesome. It has these little thumbwheel screws on the side. It beats the hell out of the little 3" pigtail used on the powerbooks. Someone put a lot of thought and effort into this little insignificant part. If the whole computer business flops for Apple, they ought to start making DVI to VGA adaptors!
The only thing I had trouble with doing is getting the thing to run a 16:9 resolution for a gateway plasma display. This probably won't be a big deal for car users as everyone is generally running 800x600, but may bug those diehards who want to get the magical 800x480 resolution on their xenarcs or lilliputs. There is a program I used called switchresX to get some more resolutions, but I also found that you may be able to get the same result by running "defaults write Preferences NSEnableShowAllDisplayModes YES" in a terminal window
I will try to answer any questions about it that I can, but my excitement to get the new toy is short lived, as I've currently sent it out of town for a few days.. It's new job is to run the plasma monitor for the tradeshow booth, and there is a show next week...
) is fully compatible with the 18.5V 4.6A power requirement of the Mac Mini. It is currently in beta testing. I picked my mini up about 1 hour ago. Will report what I find about power sequencing.
Linear Mode
