My HTPC experiments started about three years ago when I decided to replace my noisy, clunky, home-built PC with a sexy little Mac mini. It was a September 2006 model with a gigabyte of RAM and a 1.83GHz Core Duo (T2400). I promptly stuck it on my computer desk in the spare bedroom (aka the study or computer room), and left it there for well over a year. What a ridiculous waste of a great piece of kit! I subsequently hit on the idea of getting my audio and video content from the Mac mini on to my living room TV somehow, and spent many hours investigating streaming solutions, old XBoxes, Apple TVs, slingboxes and squeezeboxes, before having a eureka moment... all I had to do was pick my mac mini up and stick it to the side of my TV! What a revelation! My spare bedroom became a spare bedroom again, and I got my wish of video and audio content from my computer right there on my living room screen!
Since then, I haven't looked back, and I haven't had a separate, traditional computer in my house. My trusty Mac mini has stood proudly by my TV set right up until it took early retirement last night, when I replaced it with a younger, faster model.
So why a Mac mini and not an Apple TV or similar? Well, the issue with buying into the Apple brand is the risk of... how to put it nicely... having your user experience controlled by Cupertino. I'm a tinkerer, I like to get a piece of kit in and see what I can do with it. An Apple TV is just too... appliancey. It's too pared down, too locked down, and too limiting. I wasn't sure exactly how slick the software solutions would prove to be, I wasn't even completely sure what I wanted to do with it, so instead of going the appliance-trying-to-be-a-PC route with the likes of the Xbox, Apple TV, and their ilk, I rather went for a PC-pretending-to-be-an-appliance: all the power of a full operating system in a aesthetically pleasing and above all quiet package.
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