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Strengths: Incredibly flexible, intuitive, elegantly powerful operating system. Included Software does everything: I'm composing music, making movies on DVDs. Reads & writes all my Excel and Word documents.
Weaknesses: I've had it for only three weeks, but I can't think of any weaknesses.
Summary: {Another thought — a post-script placed here at the top — after my first stab at sharing my impressions with you:
_____ The hardware inside this Macintosh Mini apparently are better than the published specifications on the box it came in: 1.5 GHz, not 1.42 GHz is the speed of the CPU; the hard drive speed is 5400 rpm; the DVD drive specifications list Dual Layer; the video RAM is 64 MB.}
This computer is such a wonderful combination of good things:
a handsome, compact package which works wonders right out of the box with the included software, and the most powerful, flexible, elegant operating system that I've ever seen after many years working with Windows on PCs.
Right out of the box I've been able to manipulate and to manage music, photos, movie snippets from my still camera, my CD collection, databases and spreadsheets (both new and old), word-processing documents read from and written back to Windows PC compatible CDs and drives, the list goes on. . .
The included software items Garage Band, iMovie, iPhoto, and iDVD seem like virtual production studio for beginners right out the box. I've made movies (of the poor cats) by stitching together snippets of video from my still camera, including some sequences produced with what iMovie calls the "Ken Burns effect" (panning across or around a still photo for dramatic effect as we've seen in those PBS documentaries).
The included AppleWorks produces spreadsheets, databases, drawings, paint documents, and more — in an assortment of foreign formats.
Speaking of foreign formats! An integral part of Macintosh OS 10.4.3 is something called Dashboard: press its icon in the Dock (wherever you choose to place it or not), and presto! — there I have the time, temperature, weather conditions and five-day forecast for several cities anywhere in the world all at once; a graph displaying the price behavior of any of several markets (the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed today at 10882, and the pattern looks like it's poised to move up sharply if it just goes a little bit higher from here); I have on my screen a window which translates back and forth among 13 languages ("Lisa" in Russian means "Fox"), along with a garden-variety thesaurus and English dictionary, a calendar, as many clocks as one wants, a simple calculator. Lots of other of these "Widgets" are available online.
Among the biggest treat is my newly found immunity (it seems) from virus attacks on the Internet! Amazing. Its included browser (Safari) and mail client ("Mail") are fast, effective, and flexible, too.
This whole package is simply wonderful.
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