By David Hewson

What’s small, apparently cheap, and designed to give Bill Gates the heebie-jeebies? It’s the Mac mini, a complete personal computer with the Apple logo on the side, crammed inside a package that will take up no more room on your desk than a couple of paperbacks.

Aimed at Mac fans and those fleeing the virus-ridden, buggy world of Windows, the mini is coming to a store near you, and costs only £340 for the starter model and £400 for its superior big brother. Being an Apple, it brings a much-reduced threat from viruses, ease of use, the promise of reliable, quiet computing, and Apple’s supposed cool. But what’s it like as a computer? Actually, this is a great little product, provided you understand its limitations and aren’t fooled into thinking this is a bargain.

Don’t even consider the cheaper model: its 256MB of Ram is grossly inadequate. The £400 version is the starting point, and with no keyboard, no mouse and not much in the way of software, your investment is unlikely to end there. You might pay £90 for Apple’s wireless keyboard and mouse, which will work with the mini’s built-in Bluetooth. The mouse is a one-click affair, though, with no scroll wheel, and could drive converts from Windows crazy. I prefer Microsoft’s £65 Optical Elite wireless desktop. You also need to check whether your other existing hardware is Mac-compatible, because that cannot be taken for granted, and the 80GB hard disk in the £400 mini will soon fill up if you are recording video.

In addition, budget to add some real software to the mini’s basic offerings. Apple’s browser and e-mail client are pretty anaemic and ought to be replaced by the free Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client (www.mozilla.org). For an office package, you can’t beat Microsoft Mac Office 2004 (about £100 for the student and teachers’ edition), which includes Mac versions of Word and Excel that are, in some respects, superior to their Windows cousins.

Regardless of software, a computer stands or falls on performance. While this isn’t a fast machine, it’s no slouch. In tests based on heavy editing work in Adobe’s Photo Elements 3, I compared the 1.42GHz mini with a 1.6GHz Windows notebook and a 2.5GHz dual-processor G5 Mac desktop. The G5 performed transformations to pictures in a flash, the notebook wasn’t far behind and the mini came last, but not by much. What the mini won’t handle is very heavy work, so, if your ambitions run high, look at more expensive models.

Pint-size Windows computers have been around for some time, but have never really gone mainstream, even though they offer good value. The sleek, DVD-style Aries Media Essential, for example, costs £499 at www.savastore.com, but includes an analogue television tuner, a more powerful graphics card, a keyboard, a mouse and XP’s media edition, which effectively gives you a personal video recorder. This is a lot of kit for only about £30 more than the mini and a keyboard.

That said, if Windows’ viruses and glitches are driving you nuts, this is a great and reasonably inexpensive way to test the Mac waters.

david.hewson@sunday-times.co.uk