Apple's littlest Mac is now even smaller but more compelling. The Mac Mini, which has maintained the same design since its release in 2005, is now thinner while made out of a solid unibody aluminum frame. Sporting faster processors, an HDMI port, an SDCard slot and twice the graphics performance of the previous model it also has a higher price tag starting at $749.00.
“The sleek, aluminum Mac mini packs great features, versatility and value into an elegant, amazingly compact design,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With twice the graphics performance, HDMI support and industry-leading energy efficiency, customers are going to love the new Mac mini.”
Created with the unibody construction process pioneered by Apple, the new Mac mini features a compact aluminum enclosure just 7.7 inches square and 1.4 inches thin. A new integrated power supply eliminates the need for an external power adapter, reducing overall system volume by 20 percent and keeping cable clutter to a minimum. A removable panel underneath provides quick access for memory expansion.
According to Apple, the Mac mini is incredibly versatile, effortlessly connecting to existing peripherals such as mice, keyboards and digital displays, while the new HDMI output connects Mac mini to an HDTV and the new SD card slot enables easy transfer of photos and videos from a digital camera.
What many home theatre and digital media buffs are wondering is if this Mac mini will replace the oddly positioned AppleTV as a set top box solution. A number of users are already running hacked Mac minis as their digital home theatre servers.
With this revision, Apple has solved one of the fundamental problems with the original Mac mini, the difficulty of opening it up for upgrades. The previous model was notoriously difficult to open, requiring a sharp putty knife to be jammed between aluminum and plastic parts in order to pry open the enclosure. The new Mac mini has a simple rubber bottom that can be easily opened for RAM and hard drive upgrades.
The new Mac mini includes the NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor found in its Macbook Pro line which delivers up to twice the graphics performance of its predecessor, making Mac mini ideal for graphics intensive applications or visually rich games. Mac mini comes standard with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 320GB hard and 2GB of RAM another version designed without an optical drive offers dual 500GB hard drives, a 2.66 Core 2 Duo processor and Apple's Snow Leopard Server OS.
