Apple - Exploring the innards of a Mac Mini

I have always been allured by Apple products - more for their aesthetic beauty than for their function - be it iPhone, iMac,  iPod, iNano et al. Yes, Apple products usually cost the bomb to buy compared to similar products from contenders and we ordinary users may as well stay away from them if we do not want to splurge on gadgets. However, all things said and done, Apple products do appeal to most people's sense of beauty and they are getting popular as days go by.


One Apple product which has especially caught my fancy is the Apple Mini. It is small enough to fit into the palm of your hand, is compact, has almost all interfaces you might expect in a full blown PC, can be connected to non-Apple hardware peripherals such as keyboard, mice, monitor etc, and more importantly - it is priced in the same range as a PC which makes it quite affordable.

If you are curious what a Mac Mini looks within its Aluminium casing, your wish has been granted. Macminicolo.net who provide Mac Mini servers for hire have put together a photo op of the unveiling of the Apple Mac Mini. They unwrap the Apple Mac Mini from its package and then in a step by step manner, show you the hardware that powers this aesthetic beauty. Check out the article.

Now if you are wondering whether you can install Linux on an Apple Mac Mini, yes you can. Find out how you can install Linux on a Mac Mini.

However, anytime you ask me, I will opt for a PC over an Apple Mac for sure. But that is just me saying it.

I will leave you pondering over the following picture of a server farm run entirely using Apple Mac Minis'. (Image courtesy: Macminicolo.net)

Apple Open Sources Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch

Apple has again jumped on to the open source bandwagon by releasing the code for its Grand Central Dispatch technology.

Grand Central Dispatch takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central Dispatch also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.


Apple Insider writes :

The user-space implementation of the Grand Central Dispatch services API, called libdispatch, has been delivered as its own open source project, joining with other components that are part of projects Apple has already designated as open, including the kernel components in the Darwin OS XNU kernel and the blocks runtime that is part of the LLVM project.

A few other Apple related open source projects that come to mind are Webkit and CUPS, just to name a few.