Okay, so we're all rooting for the Mac mini to send Apple's share of the PC market rocketing into the stratosphere, thus toppling the Windows hegemony and ushering in a new Golden Age of Personal Computing That Doesn't Make You Want To Shoot Yourself. But tell the truth-- haven't you also been waiting to see what its first major quality control issue would be? Because let's face it: in recent years, Apple's first models off the assembly lines often possess some pretty funky flaws. Remember the enclosure "cracks" and phantom sleep problems of the G4 Cube? Or the display problems that kept cropping up in early eMacs? Or that weird "static" bug that afflicted the first iPod minis? Well, it took a while, but it looks as though the Mac mini's first major design flaw has come to light, and it just might be a doozy.

Check it out: faithful viewer Bob Estes pointed us toward a thread over in Apple's support discussions which features several Mac mini owners complaining that when they connect a VGA monitor to their minis via the included DVI-VGA adapter, the video output is "very dark." Apparently this phenomenon is particularly noticeable to people who have connected their minis to an existing monitor that's shared with a Wintel via a KVM switch, since they can switch back and forth between both computers and confirm that the Mac's output looks-- and it physically pains us to say this-- a lot worse than the Windows output. (Ugh. Now we need about a dozen showers.) "Whites look gray, it's just dark and not pleasing to the eye"-- and when Wintel users say something looks bad, that can't be a good sign.

So what's up with this? Well, according to MacInTouch, the German magazine C't noticed during its testing of the Mac mini's VGA output that "the peak voltage measurements stayed below 530 mV and therefore outside of the VESA norm." Basically, the mini just isn't pumping out enough ooomph to generate a decent picture (especially at higher resolutions) on a lot of cheaper analog monitors-- which are exactly the sort of monitors that lots of the mini's target market plan to use with them. After all, reusing existing input devices and displays was sort of the point, right?

We can't say if the low-voltage VGA problem exists on all minis or just an unlucky few, nor can we predict whether enough users will be using VGA instead of DVI to irritate vast swaths of the switcher population and send 'em all switching right back. But we're going to go out on a limb and say that it's probably not a good thing that some of these switchers' first impression of the Mac platform is that its output looks substantially worse than what they're used to seeing on their Wintels. If it is a fundamental mini design flaw, here's hoping that Apple fixes the problem and gets "revision B" models on shelves in a hurry-- and if the company really wants to keep some switchers from the Wintel camp (and create more with favorable word of mouth), it'll even dip into that $6.45 billion in cash and pay whatever it takes to make existing minis spit out video that looks good next to what's coming out of those Wintels. You know, the way the universe intended.