Thread: The smaLLest Mac ever

If ever you wanted to experience life on the other side of Windows and own a Mac, look nowhere else. Don't let its diminutive tiffin-box form factor fool you, or its paltry weight of 1.3 kg, the Mac mini is a powerful machine under the hood.

Apple has updated the Mac mini recently. Nothing much has changed on the outside-the aluminium shell with curved edges and Apple logo-but the innards have changed for good. There are two flavors of Mac mini available, with different specs, and we reviewed the high-end version. It comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2-GHz processor, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 320GB hard drive. There's an 8x slot-loading DVD writer and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics card with 256MB of DDR3 RAM thrown in as well. Connectivity is well looked after: Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 802.11n, Bluetooth, FireWire 800, allow speedy transfer of data. In terms of input-output ports, five USB ports, mini-DVI, VGA, and a mini-DisplayPort round things up on a pretty good system configuration.

Throughout our usage, the Mac mini performed up to expectations. Its onboard sound-yes, it has speakers too isn't great, but connect it to a pair of speakers and you're in business. Synthetic benchmarks saw a real boost in the graphics tests, compared to the older Mac Mini. Real-world testing while multitasking with several Microsoft Office tools, browsing the Web on Safari, and listening to music on iTunes was pretty smooth. No complaints here.

However, performance has never been its strongest point. The Apple experience is all about "it just works", and this machine lives up to the credo. The Mac mini instead focuses on being an affordable Mac with a decent set of features in a unique, tiny form factor.