(You’re a special kind of crazy rich if you’re buying a $599 mini to plug into a $999 Apple Thunderbolt display.) The mini is also famously Apple’s only computer with an HDMI port - Apple knows some people use the mini as an HTPC, and the mini’s Display preference pane has a special underscan control to make connecting to a TV easier. Most notably, the four USB ports and single FireWire 800 port have been joined by a Thunderbolt port, which offers the promise of significantly higher-performing peripherals in the future, although very few are available now. Now that the optical drive has been excised, there’s very little else to see: the front has a white power LED and an IR port for the Apple remote, and the back holds the same generous array of ports as the previous mini. (You can of course configure any mini with two drives out of the gate, but what’s the fun in that?)
#Mac mini server mid 2011 install#
That’s doubly unfortunate, since the mini can actually hold two hard drives but the standard consumer configurations only come with one - it would be nice to pop open the cover and install a second drive without having to do major surgery. Unfortunately, only the RAM is designed to be swapped out, and getting at the drive bays is much harder. (Bluetooth and the other Wi-Fi antenna are located on the plastic back panel.) That bottom panel of course also doubles as the machine’s main access door: a quick quarter turn and you’re staring at the RAM slots. But it’s still very much a desktop computer, no matter how small it is: it actually rests a few millimeters off the ground on that round black panel, both for airflow and so Wi-Fi signals can reach one of the two antennas concealed within the base. It’s still one of the most beautiful PCs ever made everyone who sees it wants to pick it up and handle it, for some reason. There’s not much to say here, since the Mini remains outwardly unchanged.
#Mac mini server mid 2011 full#
In all, the mini’s finally been given some serious muscle to go with its sleek looks - but is it enough? Read on for the full review. And in a move that you probably saw coming a mile away, not one of these machines has an optical drive of any kind anymore - there’s just a plain slab of aluminum up front. There’s also a $799 model that bumps the processor up to a 2.5GHz Core i5 and adds in a discrete AMD Radeon HD 6630M GPU, and a new server configuration with dual 500GB drives and a 2GHz quad-core Core i7 for $999. Well, thank heavens for processor bumps, because that’s all gone away: the new base Mini features a 2.3GHz dual-core Core i5 and a newly-lowered $599 base price. The only problem was that the mini has traditionally offered fairly poor performance for the money: although it was given a strikingly beautiful case refresh last year, the internals were left to stagnate with a 2008-vintage Core 2 Duo processor, and the base price went up to $699. People love the damn thing - it’s one of the smallest and most power-efficient compact PCs available. (Quick: where are the minis located in your local Apple store?) No matter: we’ve seen minis used as everything from high-load-bearing servers to HTPCs to just plain old desktop machines.
The Mac mini has long been the lovably lost scamp of the the Mac family, produced and sold with as seemingly little fanfare as possible.
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