Apple quietly unveiled a new Mac mini with a new design, twice the graphics performances, HDMI out and an SD card slot. Very similar to the Apple TV, this could easily have been Apple's refresh of the much embattled product.
“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.”
The new Mac mini features a unibody aluminum enclosure measuring 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. 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.
Mac mini comes with the NVIDIA GeForces 320M integrated graphics processor, delivering twice the performance as its predecessor.
With the choice of a 2.4GHz or a 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3MB of on-chip shared L2 cache and a 1066MHz frontside bus, it can support up to 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM.
Able to install up to a 520GB SSD drive for blazing fast storage, the Mac Mini does not come with a Blu Ray ready drive.
Starting at $749.00, the Mac mini Snow Leopard Server, sporting a dual 500GB HDD, 4GB of memory starts at $1,099.00
Mac mini is available for the base price of $699 (£649) featuring a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.
I am still looking forward to replacing my IBM blade server hardware with a Mac Mini solution. I am confident this will be a very good bare metal hypervisor platform.
