Cini, Richard wrote:
Yep,
personally I'd only buy a Mac mini if it was 10-20% bigger and came
with some real ports - say serial, parallel, and SCSI.
Doesn't that essentially get you a VIA EPIA motherboard (except for the
SCSI)? Only problem there is that it doesn't run OSX.
I'd like to try OSX, and suspect I'd quite like it - after all it's Unix, with
a GUI on top by people who probably know more about the game than anyone else,
and supposedly the integration between the two is very good.
On my PC at home, although I have "legacy"
ports on my Shuttle XPC, I don't
use them. I have a USB scanner and color printer. The laser printer is
attached to the network though a Netgear print server. The DV_cam connects
through FireWire and I use a card reader for the Memory Sticks from my Sony
camera. I have a 56k modem, but it's internal. I don't really have any
daily-use peripherals that use legacy ports. If I need, I have several other
machines that I could use.
My desktop machine uses SCSI for connection to the DAT drive, CD burner,
'backup' hard disk (when it's plugged in) and for archive of vintage disks,
all up on top of the desk - plus DVDROM, CDROM and hard disks internally are
all SCSI. Oh, and the SCSI scanner on the rare occasions that I use it.
Parallel's used for the printer and for occasional futzing around with
homebrew projects.
Serial's used for my EPROM/PAL programmer, console for various machines when
needed, and file transfer to/from vintage machines. If I ever need to hook up
a modem, that'd be serial too (I don't like cards sitting in machines doing
nothing 99% of the time!)
If I were to replace that with a big tower Mac of some kind, all I'd gain was
the ability to run OSX, but wouldn't save any space. If I were to use a Mac
mini, I couldn't do half the stuff that I do with the current desktop PC :)
(I don't dispute that there's a huge market for them from people who just want
a machine for everyday office-type apps. Just wish there was a version with
more connectivity for us hacker types! :)
I personally have not had a problem with USB but maybe
I'm not looking hard
enough :-)
It never seems to do things quite as well as native ports - e.g. I could add
various USB-to-whatever adapters, but they'd likely be flaky and not
particularly efficient.
Seems fine for digital cameras and webcams and portable storage devices. (I do
use USB on my main PC for the digital camera connection)
Oddly enough, scanners don't seem to have progressed at all though despite a
switch from paralle/SCSI to USB. The mechanism's still the same speed as ever;
I can only assume because they're still limited by data transfer rate to the host.
Seems like some marketing type once said "hey, lets have a common bus for
every external device, even though they all do different things and run at
different speeds", and somehow it became reality. Nobody learned from the SCSI
years (where it typically becomes a disaster if connecting anything other than
a storage device :)
cheers
Jules