Along with the roar of Lion and the new MacBook Air, Apple released a new, souped up Mac mini today. The new Mac mini, starting at $599, comes standard with a 500 GB hard drive, faster processors, faster graphics, and Thunderbolt.
In addition to a new Mac mini and the MacBook Airs, Apple also released the new Thunderbolt Display, which can handle resolution up to 2560 by 1440 pixels.
Seriously.
Apple calls the new Mac mini "a real overachiever," and they are not fooling. The latest dual-core Intel Core i5 processors come standard on the new Mac mini, with the option for 2.3GHz or 2.5GHz. You can also upgrade it to a more powerful 2.7GHz Intel Core i7.
According to Apple, the new Mac mini delivers twice the power to graphics-intensive apps and a fierce gaming experience. The 2.5GHz Mac mini features a discrete AMD Radeon HD graphics processor with 256MB of GDDR5 memory. The Intel HD Graphics processor in the 2.3GHz Mac mini even delivers plenty of power for managing big iPhoto libraries and making HD movies on iMovie.
Thunderbolt is what really brings the Mac mini up to the plate against the big boys. Thunderbolt features two 10-Gbps channels for data transfer; according to Apple, that’s up to twelve times faster than FireWire and up to twenty times faster than USB. Faster than fast, yes, but Thunderbolt also delivers awesome expansion potential. You can daisy-chain as many as six Thunderbolt peripherals, including the new Apple Thunderbolt Display. Oh, and since Thunderbolt is built on DisplayPort tech, your Mini DisplayPort devices can plug right in, too.
And for your non-Thunderbolt stuff, new Mac mini sports an HDMI port, an SDXC card slot, four USB 2.0 ports, a Firewire 800 port, a Gigabit Ethernet port, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.
Whew. And let's not lose sight of the fact that all of this comes packaged in a sleek seamless unibody enclosure carved from a single, solid block of aluminum. Because at only one and half inches tall, you could lose sight of it really quickly.
So, about that Thunderbolt Display: we want. Badly. It's $999 for a 27-inch LCD display with built-in Thunderbolt port, and it smokes at 2560x1440 pixels and 16.7 million colors. It's also got three powered USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a Thunderbolt port, and a Kensington security slot. And of course there's also a built-in Facetime HD camera with mic.
A busy day for Cupertino, no doubt, but the new Mac mini and the Thunderbolt display are certainly worthy of their own headline.
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dbiker
July 20, 2011 at 8:33am
If you use the thunderbolt port to connect to your monitor, how exactly do you chain to another thunderbolt device? I suppose the monitor has to be at the end of the chain, requiring all other devices to have 2 thunderbolt ports. How do you chain two monitors? The new Apple display has only one thunderbolt port ...
fox72
July 20, 2011 at 7:49am
The standard hard drive is a 500GB 5400rpm model, not flash as stated. Upgrades to a 256GB SSD are available though.
