Apple's Mac® Mini (On Demand)

OK, the reason I am doing this review was on special request from someone (you know who you are).  Make sure you really gonna buy this baby after making me write this review. So here goes, the new Mac® mini. Apple® had finally unveiled the all new redesigned Mac® mini with lots of upgrades. It has twice the graphics performance compared to the previous model, a new HDMI port and a new SD card slot, all in an amazingly compact aluminum enclosure. They even claimed that the new Mac® mini is the world's most energy efficient desktop. It's not available yet in Malaysia, so you can either get it over at US and willing to fork out USD699 which come with Mac OS® X, iLife® or USD999 for Mac OS X Snow Leopard® Server.

"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." Or that is what they always say. But you need to see and try it out for yourself to really feel it. 

Let's get down and dirty now with this new baby. It's a unibody construction process pioneered by Apple themselves. The new Mac® Mini is so compact that it's just 7.7 inches square and 1.4 inches thin (thick). The new Mac® Mini also comes with an integrated power supply which eliminates the need for an external power adapter. This reduces the overall system volume by 20%. As you can see from above picture, the bottom part of the Mac® Mini has an easy access to the memory expansion. As usual Mac® Mini is able to connect to the existing peripherals i.e keyboards, digital display and even your magic mouse. 

Did I mentioned that the new Mac® Mini also comes with a new HDMI output which can be connected to a HDTV. Finally a new SD card slot also makes life easy for users to transfer of photos and videos from their digital camera.

The new Mac® Mini is powered by the fastest integrated graphic processor in the market today. With it's 48 core processing, the NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics processor 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 for USD699.

The basic unit of the new Mac® Mini comes with:-

2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 3MB of shared L2 cache;
2GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM, expandable up to 8GB;
a slot-load 8X SuperDrive® (DVD+/-R DL/DVD+/-RW/CD-RW) optical drive;
320GB Serial ATA hard drive running at 5400 rpm;
NVIDIA GeForce 320M integrated graphics;
AirPort Extreme® 802.11n wireless networking and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR;
Gigabit Ethernet;
4 x USB 2.0 ports;
SD card slot;
one FireWire® 800 port;
one HDMI port and one Mini DisplayPort;
HDMI to DVI video adapter;
combined optical digital audio input/audio line in (minijack); and
combined optical digital audio output/headphone out (minijack).

Build-to-order options and accessories include up to 8GB 1066 MHz DDR3 SDRAM, 500GB hard drive running at 5400 rpm, Apple Remote, Aperture™ 3, Final Cut® Express 4, Logic® Express, iWork® (pre-installed), Apple Wireless Keyboard, Magic Mouse, Apple 24 inch LED Cinema Display and the AppleCare® Protection Plan.