Mac Mini with PC mouse, keyboard etc.

My sister bought herself a Mac Mini this year, and I was able to use it for about a week. What can I say, it truly was a plug-and-play set up, I just connected it to the monitor, keyboard and mouse, powered on, and after a couple minutes of setting up Mac OS X it was ready to use. It's a very nice machine, powerful enough for making music.

Hi Eric.

I have a Mac mini (1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo) at home that I use as a media hub connected to a 37" HD monitor and surround sound receiver. Though I currently use an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse with it, when I was testing out a Windows XP installation on the Mac mini, I used a cheap Memorex USB PC keyboard and a Logitec USB mouse that came off of an older PC I had laying around. That keyboard and mouse worked in Mac OS X just as well as they did in Windows XP. Most of the proprietary media keys on the Memorex keyboard didn't do anything in Mac OS X (except for the volume buttons), but all the other keys worked as expected. The Windows key acted as the Mac OS X Command (old Apple) key. In general, this is what you should expect of USB keyboards and mice as they all use the industry standard HID (Human Interface Device) hardware standard. Special buttons and keys will be the only things that may not work.

By the way, if you're about to get a Mini, I'd suggest you go for the most recent model. Not only it has Core 2 Duo which is 64 bit, but also has iLife '08 bundled - you will surely be interested in GarageBand 4 at least. Or, perhaps you will want to wait until the OS X Leopard release - it is just a month away.