Whilst I’m still waiting for my Mac mini to ship (and yes I’m miffed that people that ordered with expected ship dates mid-February have already got theirs), here’s a couple of quotes I found on the Apple Discussions:

• “I was concerned by remarks on lack of ram and a slow laptop HD – but don’t be discouraged, this machine is very fast even with 256mb ram! It devours 125mb photoshop files like nothing I have ever used before. I was very close to buying a dell about 3 weeks ago. And put my plans on pause when I heard about the 500 dollar mac… There is nothing more suprising than opening ps7 with the mini and crunching a 12×12 500dpi cmyk file with no hesitation and no disk chatter at all. I can’t stress this point enough. I was floored by its power.”

• “Okay, sold my 1500 euro’s worth PC to buy a Mini Mac 1.42Ghz/512mb RAM/80gb hdd/No bt or air modules w/apple Keyboard+Mouse & Eizo L568 high-end monitor. I got to say, i have never seen a computer that is usable straight off the box, with only a few questions. I installed all my pre-bought programs such as Photoshop CS/Illustrator/Maya/Final Cut Pro/Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro/iWork/iLife05.
  
  I installed them ALL in a ROW!!! just in about 1 hour, with my PC the same operation would of taken more than 3 hours for sure, i am also amazed by the speed the programs open. Its amazing.
  
  Photoshop CS performance: The program itself opens up 5-10secs faster than in my XP 3000+/512mb PC configuration.
  
  All under 20mb files open and work flawlessly, over that value i would recommend a fast FireWire HDD as a scratch disk for photoshop due the slowness of Mini’s HD is seen in only heavy files. The GUI and windows appear and work faster than i have “EVER” seen, but then again this is the first mac i have seen yet.
  
  Maya: Works great, even Mini has the bare minimum frame buffer 32mb, its alot faster than 3DS MAX in a fast PC. Render times are amazingly fast, makes me think im on a cluster.”