My MacMini arrived yesterday and I was playing the better part of the evening and a small part of the night (yawn) with it.

First impressions:

• It’s small
• It’s quiet (unless it get’s really busy, at which point the fan kicks in – and that’s one noisy fan)
• Setup was very, very painless. I let my wife do it, and she went through the whole experience in a couple of minutes.
• the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is immensely high
• the kids loved the included games (which led to tears when it was bed-time)
• connecting to sauron was a breeze
• iTunes was about 5 times faster re-importing my 12000 tracks on a Samba fileserver, than the Windows version on my Dell Laptop
• Connecting my iPod just worked – now I have to redo my smart playlists
• Fast User Switching (or whatever it’s called on OS X) works very well
• Installing / Deinstalling Software is easy
• a 1024*768, 15″ screen is just a tad too small. A 17″ wide screen would be nice – why doesn’t Apple have one?
• the “dead-slow”, “braindead”, “old piece of junk” graphic in the Mac Mini is absolutely fast enough
• Amazing that the whole thing cost just 20 swiss francs more, than my 30GB iPod about a year ago
• OS X is – just nice
• thanks to byteborg, rsz and vowe for initial support

Open Questions: feel free to comment, I haven’t done much research on those yet

• How do I automatically reconnect to a Samba Share (which has my music on it) and is configured to allow guest access (i.e. no password). So far I always have to reconnect by hand
• Can I install the Mac Lotus Notes client once and have a separate data directory for my wife and me, and will this work with fast user switching?
• Can I use the microphone in iSight for Skype? (That might be the way to go, instead of buying a USB headset)

I have the feeling, that this is not going to be the last MacMini (or Apple computer) I will be buying.