Dell Mini 9 - The finest netbook on the planet.

Hey dudes-

Over the past month or so I've been following the Hackintosh scene ever since the Mini 9's hardware similarities with the Mac Mini started picking up steam on the blogosphere. Gizmodo posted an article a while ago about installing OSX on the Mini 9, which I kind of wrote off since I didn't know how a 1.6ghz Intel Atom (which is essentially a souped up Pentium M) could be at all usable...

Then I saw this video by Andy Ihnatko - http://vimeo.com/3630135

If you don't know who is he, he writes for the Chicago Sun Times as a tech journalist. He's basically the Chicago version of David Pogue and is pretty much the sole reason why I buy the newspaper. His blog is worth following if you've never seen his columns.

In the video, Andy spends ten minutes going over all the ins and outs of the Mini 9 running OSX. Look at how well it runs. It's downright amazing. All of the hardware works out of the box. WiFi even worked as OSX was installing, allowing me to pull all my Mobile Me information down right in the OSX install. Camera works, bluetooth works, sound works, even sleep works complete with the pulsing sleep light.

I got mine on Monday, and I couldn't be happier. I have a 2009 MacBook Pro I use as my main computer which I usually leave hooked up to my 30" LCD and a plethora of other USB/Firewire devices... I picked up the Mini 9 to just have something I could grab to go to meetings where I wouldn't normally bother packing up all my MacBook junk and it's already come in pretty handy.

Anyway, to get one of these rolling with OSX you need:

-Dell Mini 9 (ONLY the 9 will work this well with OSX, the 10 and larger models will not have complete compatibility.)
-16GB SSD (You can install with an 8GB SSD, but it involves a lot of screwing around to get OSX packed down in to it.)
-Legit copy of OSX (Amazon has the Apple Box Set right now for $130 that includes iLife and iWork- A pretty killer deal.)
-Two flash drives, 8GB+ and 64MB+ (Can pick these up from NewEgg for less than $30.)
-The ability to read and follow simple instructions.

So after buying all this I was at a little over $400 out the door for a completely functional OSX netbook. The keyboard and trackpad take some getting used to, but overall I really would encourage anyone who is looking for a netbook to check out the Mini 9.

It's too bad Apple doesn't offer something comparable, I'd much rather bought it from them than Dell.

 

Probably pretty terrible without a USB keyboard especially considering that this is the default keyboard layout with important Objective-C punctuation bound to function key combos-



Not to mention the size of the keyboard-

 

I really, really doubt Apple is going to release a complete laptop for less than the price of the Mac Mini. As it stands, a Mini 9 with a 16GB SSD and 2GB of RAM if you wait for the right coupon codes and sales to line up sells for less than $250 shipped. OSX license is another $100 on top of that. (Or less if you have extra leftover family back licenses.)

I kind of think Apple's answer to the netbook platform is the MacBook Air, which completely misses the point that the reason these computers are cool is because they're $200. Of course, anything is possible, but just looking at how Apple historically has priced things, any Apple tablet or netbook is going to be $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

 

Oh man, not by a long shot. It's closer to a really low-end Mac Mini inside of a Dell shell. It uses a Intel GMA950 chipset, which is why everything is so compatible. Outside of that, the screen is really low resolution (1024x600) and the processor is pretty underpowered for anything outside of Safari/Mail/Adium and similar tasks.

The screen size is the biggest issue when it comes to running a lot of Apple apps. 1024x768 is the lowest resolution OSX is designed for, all the newer iLife apps really don't work too well on the small screen and I really doubt Garageband would work too well with the slow and small SSD they come with.

I bought mine to have a tiny machine to use SSH, IRC, IM's, email, and web browsing... For these things it works great. Like Andy says in the video, if you need a Mac, you need to buy a Mac. If you want a neat little toy computer, the Mini 9 is perfect.

When I bought mine Dell was running a special where the base model was $199 and came loaded with Ubuntu instead of Windows.

 

If you are looking to develop an App, I'd buy a Mac Mini to actually have a real Apple computer. Like the video says, the only guarantee you have with third party hardware running OSX is that it will run what it's running today. There's no telling if 10.6 will completely break the EFI hacks, if future Apple software will work, or anything like that. If you're going to jump through all the hoops to get accepted to sell things on iTunes, it's silly to not spend another couple hundred bucks and have a real mac with a real hard drive that has a warranty with service and support.

Furthermore, hardware will not be your limiting factor in building an app if you know nothing about programming.

 

WoW on my Dell Mini 9 via WiFi using the install on my MacBook Pro filmed in real time-



Kind of amazed that it works.

 

The thing with this is I haven't seen anyone who has one in their hands running OSX, have you? I mean yeah, it should be the same hardware, but Dell's return policy is a bitch. I've been really reluctant to suggest people order the Vostro until I see someone with photos of it running OSX or someone that I trust confirming the install process is identical.