Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Maybe my expectations were too high, but I'm having a tough time loving this Mac Mini. OS X? Sure, can't get enough of it - but either by design or malfunction my Mac Mini is just not performing as it should when compared to other Macs I've owned. The biggest...and maybe only problem (I haven't fully diagnosed it yet) is the lack of RAM. Apple ships the base model Mini with 2gb of RAM, which from my past experiences should have been fine. My old, poor, overheating, since deceased Intel iMac had 2gb of memory and worked fine. The difference between this Mini and that iMac was 10.7. Lion apparently takes a lot more RAM so whereas I routinely had over a gig of free memory on the iMac, my Mini is currently cruising at 500mb of space to spare under normal use. But that's not all, since the video card uses some of that RAM, I only have about 250mb of available memory. This is the fastest processor I've ever used and it's getting soundly beaten by my old HP laptop running a 1.3ghz Core Duo 2 chip and 4gb of RAM. I can't listen to music on iTunes or Rdio without the sound skipping whenever I load a particularly complex webpage. I don't even want to talk about my experiences with photo editing or trying to run a virtual OS. Of course the answer is more RAM, which I've ordered. However, when you consider how cheap RAM is, there no excuse for Apple to not include at least 4gb. Other computer makers ship sub-$500 desktops out with upwards of 6gb, yet Apple deliberately forces customers to pay for an upgrade to their brand new computer. Back in 2001 I bought a white iBook G3 at the cusp of Apple's conversion from OS 9 to OS X. While it shipped with OS X, the hardware was pure OS 9 and it showed in its lagging performance, particularly with the video card and display. I think Apple did something similar here, shipping a desktop that doesn't have the specs to run it's most current operating system. You expect something like this from a Packard Bell or eMachines, not Apple. EDIT: After installing an extra 4gb of RAM (bringing it to 5gb), the Mini runs like it should have. Upon installing the memory, the Mac went from using 1.4 gb of RAM after a reboot to using 1.8 gb. This means the operating system in resting mode needs more memory than is available on the stock Mini. So I'll keep my review at 2 stars since Apple is selling a brand new computer that can't properly run it's newest operating system due to a lack of resources.