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