Finally, the spotlight goes back to the adorable Apple Mac Mini, and this time, it gets no less than red carpet treatment. Apple endows it with a full aluminum unibody which we all come to know and love from the first Mac Book Pros that came with this. They've also taken out that annoying power brick and stuffed inside the box, leaving only the power cable that needs to be plugged into the rear and into the wall socket. And they've added a pluggable hole underneath to finally make its innards easier to access - at least when it comes to the memory.
The list of updates don't stop there. There's a pair of HDMI and Mini DisplayPorts at the rear along with quad USB ports, a Firewier 800 port, and a built-in SD card, too. It comes with a choice of Intel's Core 2 Duo CPU running at 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz, 2GB 1066MHz SODIMM DDR3 memory (yep, and it doesn't come with a Core i3 or i5 either), NVIDIA's 320M sharing 256MB of video memory along with the main memory banks - which Apple says is twice as fast compared to the GeForce 9400M that the previous Mac Mini had, and the usual built-in Airport Extreme 802.11N, Bluetooth 2.1, and Gigabit ethernet. There are 2 SODIMM slots for a maximum of 8GB inside. Hard disk space comes at a choice between 320GB and 500GB.
Price starts at US $699, and there's also a special version that comes with the OSX Snow Leopard Server software that costs US $999. Not bad for a server box that supposedly consumes only 10 watts when left idle.