Apple ups Mac Mini spec, lowers price
Optical drives ditched
Apple has added Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 processors to its Mac Mini small form-factor desktop - and yanked the optical drives from the system.
The new model - which now comes in at £529, down from the £649 the previous version launched at - sports a 2.3GHz Core i5, 2GB of 1333MHz DDR 3 memory and 500GB of hard drive storage.
A 2.5GHz model with 4GB of Ram is also available, for £699. It has an AMD Radeon HD 6630M GPU with 256MB of GDDR 5 graphics Ram. The cheaper model makes do with Intel integrated graphics.
Both CPUs are dual-core jobs, but you can have a quad-core Core i7 running at 2GHz if you fancy the Mac Mini Server box. It has 4GB of memory and two 500GB 7200rpm hard drives.
It costs £849.
All three Minis come with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. They have a Thunderbolt port, and HDMI for TV connections. Bluetooth 4.0 is part of the package, as is 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi. ®
COMMENTS
As always, show me this equivalent PC at lower price.
Last time AOpen made a McMini copy, it was same price, lower specced, worse design. Several other efforts stranded.
So show this comparative but superior or cheaper machine or shut up.
Or alternatively...
Leave OSX 10.7 Lion on it and have a BETTER one.
Errrm, and then some...
"Still I think it's a good price for what is essentially a 13.3" Macbook pro without the keyboard. touchpad or screen."
--> also lacking battery, most of the chassis, the optical drive, the webcam and probably some more things I haven't thought of yet.
The price is so so, you pay extra for the tiny size.
I laughed when I read it had no optical storage.
Ever depend on the Internet for installs? Ever have Internet go down in the middle of something when you find you need to install another tool? Internet dependence of computers can cause all kinds of end user problems. Then there's the whole point that optical storage is not subject to accidental magnetic erasure of data. I have lots of data and programs on DVD. I install the most of it from optical disks. Then there's magnetic storage drive mechanical failure, loss of data to this is real and optical disks are the solution. In the end it's, "no optical drive no sale."
Well best of luck to the Jobs and crew but no sale. I suppose the fanboys will not care though...
Optical drives
"but lacks the optical drive found in the desktop models". Not any more.
I think they should have continued to offer an option of an integrated optical drive. A computer system isn't complete without such a drive. Lion may be coming in via the internet, but a lot of software still doesn't. Adding an external drive makes the system not as mini, but I guess it's another high-priced accessory they can sell.
Apple do like to use video connectors that need adaptors, don't they? They had mini DVI, then mini DisplayPort, now Thunderbolt, but I guess that means more high-priced accessories they can sell.
