September 22, 2026

The mac mini arrives

3 PM and I have the box in my hand. Passed over to me by the UPS driver.

The box contained the mini, a power cord, and just a bit of paper in cute circular things. The direct me here for setup info:

My new ASUS monitor has a pain in the ass interface with a variety of buttons. It turns out the thing on the far right is a joystick. I use it to change from HDMI to USB-C and I see the signal from the mini. It asks me about some energy saving mode. I say NO. I am on to the Mac setup. 
It asks for language -- English, location USA.
It asks about transfering data -- I say setup as new.
It asks about wifi networks .. I find my network cable and plug it in.
It has an option for "other network options", I select it
 and it seems to be bypassing the network setup
Now it wants an account and password to setup.
I tell it to use account name "tom" and W**** password.
Now it wants my apple account info
	tom@m  R*****
I agree to their terms and conditions
It offers me iCloud keychain -- I say later.
Now I get to choose a look -- I select dark
I enable location services.
I agree to share all analytics
It offers me "screen time" management -- I say later
I agree to share iCloud analytics
It offers me FileVault (encryption) -- I say no
I say I am cool with downloading and installing updates.
I get a big welcome screen that says "get started" at the bottom.
Many of these things can be changed later via settings menus/dialogs.

It tries to launch the "Keyboard setup assistant" which tells me it cannot recognize my Keychron Q8. I exit this and seem to be up and running.

The big gear at bottom right is "settings" which tells me that I have 55 days to set up AppleCare. It also says I have a software update available. The update is MacOS 27.0.

I click on the add applecare button. It offers me Applecare+ for this device only $3.99 per month.

I launch Safari and it works, so it must have gotten an IP via dhcp from my network.

Terminal and bash

There may be other ways, but: 
Open Finder -- go to Applications, Utilities, double click on Terminal.
This runs zsh, but you can type "bash" for a one time thing, or do this: 
chsh -s /bin/bash

Poke around

I type "ruby" and it works (I get 2.6.10). This is /usr/bin/ruby, as I discover by typing "which ruby". There is also python3. Vim is 9.1. I type "cc" and get a message about setting up Xcode.

The mouse wheel works upside down. In settings you can turn off natural scrolling to fix this.

ssh works and lets me log in to cholla.

df and mount show me a disk setup I don't yet understand.

Developer tools

A popup says "cc" requires developer tools, would you want to install them now? I say yes.

That update

I tell it to "do it now" (at 5:30 PM). I says I am running 27.0 and the update is 27.0 -- but it must be a 27-update of some sort. This took less than 5 minutes.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!