Simon Ridgway Photography

As a Mac user, I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing that Apple would design a smaller, more portable laptop (call it a netbook if you like) for working on the go. Something that would fit in a camera bag and be robust and easy to just whip out and quickly get online or check images out in the field.

Well, Apple have repeatedly said that they won’t do it. So, after waiting for this year’s WWDC and still no announcement, I decided to take matters into my own hands and go down the route of the “hackintosh” – a Windows machine, hacked to run Mac OS X.

My machine of choice was the Dell Mini 9 netbook. This is generally considered to be the most OSX compatible machine around and much work has been done by people way cleverer than me in order to get it all working as it should. I’m not going to go into the actual setup process, but will instead direct you to www.mydellmini.com where all the information you need is in the very friendly and knowledgable forums. All you need is a Mini 9 (preferably with a 16GB SSD or larger), an 8GB or larger USB stick and a full retail copy of Mac OSX Leopard.

The machine I ended up with was a Dell Mini 9 with 2GB RAM and a 32GB SSD. It also, crucially has a built in 3G data card. You just put your SIM card (any network) in the slot in the battery compartment and you’re online anywhere.

I’m really very pleased with the little machine. Its surprisingly responsive for general web browsing, email, and OS use. It has no moving parts (no spinning hard drive and no fan), its light, the screen is bright and sharp (but glossy) and the battery life seems pretty good so far at about 2-3 hours of real use with WiFi switched on. It even sleeps when you shut the lid, just like a Mac. I’ll go into more detail about its photo-related usefulness shortly.

Are there disadvantages? Of course. The main ones are the screen resolution and keyboard size. But these are pretty obviously going to be small on a laptop with a 9″ screen. The whole point of the machine is that its small and light, so these are compromises that must be made. To be honest, the keyboard is really not that bad once you get used to it (I’m typing out this article on it right now), but if you have fat fingers it may prove to be a problem.

The screen has a resolution of 1024×600. Now this is OK for most applications but there a few occasions where this can cause problems.

Here’s some screen shots of various apps, so you can get an idea of what it looks like in practice…

PhotoMechanic

PhotoMechanic runs fine and is actually quite snappy for browsing through images and viewing previews etc. There are a couple of dialog screens which are cut off at the bottom due to the lack of vertical screen resolution, but if you know the app well enough you can get around this with keyboard commands quite easily.

Photoshop

I’m still running Photoshop CS, so can’t vouch for later versions, but CS runs fine.

Aperture

Aperture v2 is my main workflow app on my Mac Pro workstation. I’ve installed it to the Mini, but don’t really use it much. It runs fine though.

Safari

Safari 4 is nice and snappy, I use a lot of web apps and these run well.

Transmit

For FTP, I use Panic’s Transmit app. No problems with this at all.

So, how does it fair for the day-to-day use that a photographer might want it for?

So far, as you can see from the above screenshots, I’ve managed to install Photoshop, Photo Mechanic, Aperture and Transmit – pretty much everything I need for portable computing.

I’ve also installed and have successfully used the Canon Utilities for shooting tethered. I’ve only tested this with a Canon 5D, but it works perfectly. There is a trick to this however. The Canon installation software complains that it cannot install the latest version of these utilities because it requires a screen resolution of 1024×768. Its easy to get around this limitation. Install the software on your main Mac and then just drag the application onto the Mini 9. It will then run with no problems at all.

So, I suppose the all-important question is this – how slow is the machine at processing images? Its no speed demon but I think its perfectly acceptable for a small number of images if you need to transmit something on deadline, review images with a client on location or use the internal drive as a backup location for dumping cards during a shoot. By my reckoning its about the same speed as my other laptop – a 1.5GHz 15″ Powerbook G4. So not too shabby!

I could do a whole set of timings for various operations, but instead I’ve done a couple of short videos, showing some typical workflows that a photographer might go through on location. Hopefully, this will give you an idea of what using this machine is like in real life – Not just specs and theory.

(hopefully there will be a couple of videos here soon, I’m having some problems successfully recording a good quality screencast with audio, but I’m working on it!)

Some random observations:

• BBC iPlayer works, but its not perfectly smooth, watchable in a pinch. Flash video is notoriously processor intensive.

• Playing a Video_TS file from a DVD off a USB stick or SD card works fine using VLC player.

• The machine gets quite hot when working hard, but then its got no fan, so its no surprise.

• The lack of fan means its got no moving parts. Its silent and you can pick it up and wave it about while its doing stuff! Or, more realistically, you can leave it sending/processing on the front seat of your car while your driving and not have to worry about bumps in the road!

• iTunes, Spotify, Tweetie, Front Row, Plex, VLC all work.

• I’ve successfully calibrated the screen using an X-Rite ColorMunki.

• The WiFi seems pretty sensitive and able to pick up surrounding hotspots without problems.

• iChat works fine with the built in webcam and microphone.

• There’s no way of knowing how strong a 3G signal the internal card is picking up. Connecting via the modem menu bar works fine (once the correct driver has been installed) but you don’t know if a signal is available or what speed its going to be until you try and connect.

This is never going to be your main computer. I treat it as a small, light, convenient machine and use it as such and it has become tremendously useful. I take it with me all the time to places where I wouldn’t take my Powerbook, either because of weight or size or fragility. I can fit this machine in a camera bag instead of carrying yet another separate laptop bag. And I don’t have to worry too much about how much it cost, or what data is stored on it, or what would happen if I lost it.

Now for the bad news – Dell have just discontinued the Mini 9! They’re still available in the Dell Outlet though, and there’s currently a good number available on ebay. So, if you’re interested, get your skates on!

The good news is that the clever people at www.mydellmini.com have already started getting OSX working on the Mini 10v…