Hackintosh Mini 9: A bit better than a late G4

I’ve now had enough time to come to an evaluation of my hackintosh. I used it exclusively for a month and upgraded it from 10.5.6 to 10.5.7. I’ve taken it through full charges battery charges by working at school with wifi. I’ve carried it around in my jacket pocket. My verdict is that it’s a hell of a value but it’s not going to replace my aging IBM ThinkPad X31. Instead it acts as a great supplement.

When I originally started hunting for netbooks I thought I would get a relatively large one with a ten inch screen and I’d wait until the dual core Atoms came out. The Atom dual core 1.6 GHz would easily outperform my ThinkPad’s 1.6 GHz Pentium M on Linux with a SMP kernel. Even Firefox is going multithreaded these days. I’d throw in 2 GB or more of RAM since DDR2 SODIMMs are cheaper than my ThinkPad’s DDR1 SODIMM and I’d wind up retiring my first and favourite laptop.

It didn’t work out that way. Dell’s Twitter feed let me know that they were dropping a $170 coupon on the Dell Mini 9. I knew that it was very compatable with OS X and playing with the operating system under VMWare had whet my appetite. I decided to compromise and go smaller, weaker and cheaper. It didn’t do what I originally wanted but still made itself very useful.

Build quality

There’s nothing flimsy about the netbook. The screen casing feels sturdy when I open and close it, there’s no obvious wear on the joint despite frequently opening and shutting it, the plastic is not separating anywhere. There’s only one tiny scratch on the edge when it was in my backpack and I was knocked off my longboard. (Yes, I was terrified for it, but it survived.) Keeping it in my inner jacket pocket along with keys has not harmed the finish. The black does easily smudge.

Performance

This was disappointing. Even under Windows XP it’s significantly slower than the 1.6 GHz Pentium M. Firefox tabs felt heavier, it switched between tasks more slowly, and was generally CPU bound. Under OS X things didn’t fare too much better. I ran Geekbench after a fresh boot. Nothing was loaded except the stock applications and QuickSilver. I received a score of 717, which puts it in the realm of the single core PowerBook 1.5 GHz G4.

Before that was the empirical test. I leant it to a friend of mine who concluded that it was similar in performance to his late model PowerBook G4. I suspect that this is due to the SSD and extra RAM. For day to day tasks it’s still workable. I was able to do my common browsing just fine, develop in vim, and watch standard definition downloaded television from both Hulu and BitTorrent. It struggled driving the external 1280×1024 screen with a maximized show, in flash the dropped frames were bad enough to make it unwatchable but under VLC it was tolerable.  Watching movies on the integrated monitor worked beautifully.

For developers who think that the Mini 9 is a cheap gateway into developing for Mac, I urge you to consider picking up a used first generation Intel PowerBook instead. The Core2Duo is much, much faster owing not just to the second core but out-of-order instructions. Struggling with Xcode on a netbook is not worth it. If you just want to use a Mac, this is a more accurate experience than running under VMWare with a bunch of kernel hacks.

Usability

I’m not a fan of the keyboard layout. The keys are large enough for me to touch type easily. I am grateful that the backspace key is reasonably sized, unlike on my ThinkPad,  but my model has the apostrophe/quotation mark key awkwardly placed. To the right of the space bar is the menu key, and to the right of that is the apostrophe/quotation mark key. You need to use the function key to get to keys I frequently use as a *NIX geek and programmer such as {, }, [, ], |, and \.

The new keyboard layout fixes the problem of the apostrophe key and some of the parenthesis. I’m not willing to plunk down the money on it yet, though, and prefer to cart around a five dollar USB keyboard if I think I’m going to be coding. I’ve learned to cope with the placement of the apostrophe when writing but I’m still very slow when using the other aforementioned keys due to having to hold down Fn.

Battery life

With wifi and bluetooth on using 10.5.6 I got an average of three hours, give or take twenty minutes. It was thoroughly disappointing at the time. The upgrade to 10.5.7 gave me an extra full hour so I can easily get three and a half hours, the best time I got was four hours and fifteen minutes. It’s still disappointing since other netbooks claim six and above hours battery life, but then I remember that OS X was not written with a netbook’s power profile in mind. I can always get a ludicrous 77Wh battery and skip the laptop/netbook stand if I need more juice, four hours is enough to get over the cruicial three hour lecture time at school.

OS X Compatability

As I mentioned earlier, there were no hacks needed to install 10.5.2. I just needed to install the bootloader. There were no hacks needed to upgrade to 10.5.6 using the combo upgrade. Almost everything works great, even the external VGA monitor works without a workaround, but hibernate still needs to be disabled and I can’t turn off bluetooth.

All of the function hotkeys save for the external monitor key work under OS X. The external monitor key results in a garbled screen, and it’s unnecessary since OS X automatically picks up the presence of a VGA monitor and enables it.

However, once I installed 10.5.7 I did need to do some mucking with DellEFI and reboot twice. The garbled screen and booting into safe mode would be enough to scare novices. It’s still a hacker’s toy and not a perfect clone you can give to your mother.

Last impressions

My hackintosh netbook wasn’t what I wanted it to be: It’s too small and too weak to be a replacement for my laptop, it’s battery life isn’t much hotter than my laptop, and it’s not the gateway into Macintosh shareware development that I thought it would be. The keyboard layout puts up a surprisingly big barrier to impromptu coding from the coffee shop. However, it is an incremental improvement over my laptop worth the $400 I spent, and it makes a very useful supplement. My laptop is always ready in my bag and my netbook is always ready in my jacket pocket.

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