The new Unibody Mac Mini is here! But is it worth it?

features_hero_20100615First, lets start by making it clear that the Mac Mini has been one of Apple’s greatest ideas.  When the first Mini came out you could buy it for $499.99 and it came with a 1.25GHz G4 CPU W/ 512MB ram, a 40GB hard drive as well as a CD/DVD combo drive.

Ever since it’s inception we have seen the Mini’s price, and feature list get bigger. Today with Apple’s announcement of the new Unibody Mini we also see, yet again, another bump in price. This time all the way up to $699. In my opinion this is a big blow to the target market of the Mac Mini. The idea of  “value” is now somewhat lost in this $699 product.

But lets get down to what really matters, is the new Mac Mini really worth $699?

The stock CPU is a 2.4GHz (up from 2.26GHz) Core 2 Duo. This CPU, tied with the integrated NVIDIA  GeForce 320M GPU actually make for a decently capable machine. (We watched a 1080p video clip with a bitrate of 7.5Mbps and CPU usage stayed below 10%). It’s no HD authoring studio or extreme gaming machine but you will find it has more then enough power to tackle your HD video editing as well as fly through almost any game you can throw at it. The new SD card reader and included HDMI port really go along ways in adding value to the Mini, especially in it’s common role as a home media device.

To continue on it comes with a 320GB (for $699 we really should be seeing 500GB as stock) hard drive, 2GB of DDR3 RAM (up to a total of 8GB) and all the while sucking down less than 85 watts of power.

The standard lists of ports and connectivity options stay basically the same, except for the nice inclusion of an SD card reader.

  • One FireWire 800 portspecs_ports_20100615
  • Four USB 2.0 ports
  • SD Card Reader
  • 802.11 a/b/g/n
  • Bluetooth 2.1+
  • DisplayPort (DVI and VGA compatible through use of adapters)
  • HDMI port (Apple throws in a HDMI to DVI cable free of charge)

It’s clear Apple is looking to remove the value label from the Mac Mini and make it more of a true desktop replacement. If it came stock with 4GBs of memory and 500GB hard drive, we could definitely see this mini gaining popularity, but lets face it, at the end of the day 2GBs of memory and 320GBs of drive space simply isn’t enough to make it a good deal.


This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 15th, 2010 at 10:27 am and is filed under Apple, Featured, Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.