The Apple Mac mini has huge potential, but to date, that potential has not been realised.
It's the cheapest way to buy a Mac but it isn't powerful enough to appeal to switchers, and it's been shamefully under-exploited as a media centre.
This new release does little to change the situation, but at least it offers an incremental increase in power. We reviewed the higher end Mac mini, boasting a 2.53GHz processor and 4GB of RAM.
In our thorough benchmarking tests, Cinebench's video rendering ran 17.9% faster than a 2.0GHz Mac mini from early 2009, but iTunes encoded our test CD in 473 seconds, which is disappointing as it's almost exactly the same speed, and most new Macs manage it in under 360 seconds.
Doom 3 ran at 41.6 frames per second, which is also almost unchanged.
Same price
Thankfully, however, there's been no price increase since the previous release either. A lot of people use Mac minis as servers, so Apple has also released a new version specifically for this purpose.
The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server is based on the high-end mini, but the optical drive has been replaced with a second hard drive. Both drives are 500GB, giving you 1TB of storage in total.
Snow Leopard Server Edition is pre-installed and the full package costs £799, which is very good value for money considering the server OS costs £399 when bought separately.
This standard Mac mini looks expensive in comparrison. Perhaps the next release of the Mac mini will bring us a Media Centre Edition, with HDMI output and an optional Blu-ray drive?
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stivell82
December 4th 2009
1. You've reviewed the mini in terms of what you want it to be, not the purpose under which it's actually marketed - a small Mac desktop.
Also: umm, doesn't the mini support HDCP through its Mini DVI and Mini DisplayPort outputs? It doesn't need HDMI at all. You can just plug in an adapter. It only 'needs' HDMI if you want to use it as a media centre, and that's not what Apple sells it as.
It markets the mini as a desktop computer, not an under-the-TV media box, but if you do your research a little more thoroughly, you'll find that you can use it in the way you want. Minus the Blu-ray bit, of course. If that's really the sort of setup you want, buy a PS3 at less than half the price.
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