i’ve had my mac mini back for close to a week now and so far so good. the apple store repair person said bad ram and possibly a bad logic board, which they replaced, were responsible for the troubles. i thought the hard disk was messed up since the i was unable to boot up from the drive and data was missing. i did a little goolgling on the matter and learned that bad ram can lead to drive problems, so i hope they were right. i must say that apple handled this wonderfully the whole way through and got the repair done fairly quickly, even though i took it on a friday night and thanksgiving/black friday was on the following thursday/friday.

so other than that, the mac mini has been a kick ass computer. small as a portable drive, powerful as huge desktop computer. space is limited in my studio, where the mini lives, so i fully appreciate it’s size to power ratio. this makes me think; whenever i may upgrade our main studio computer, a g4 tower running protools 24, i may get a mac mini. suppose i do this in two years; the minis by then will be perhaps twice as powerful as my current mini. if and when that happens, i’ll get a few more cubic feet of space back in here.

no, i didn’t make a blues song with my new computer. we’ll actually i did sort of. on the latest song we’re recording, i turned the mac mini into a virtual minimoog synthesizer and recorded what i was playing manually via a usb keyboard right into protools. but what i’m really talking about here is how this new computer, which i’ve had just 4 weeks, is already in the shop getting repaired. the hard drive is bad. even the repair person at the apple store seemed really surprised that this would happen on such a new machine.

so i’m back to using old and slow computers in the meantime. at least i can still do basic stuff, like web and email. but no more minimoog in the meantime. i seem to have bad luck when getting computers. the ibook that i’m writing from right now smells like bad body odor because apple used crappy plastic back back in the day.