Power, Performance and Energy Efficiency Defines the Mac Mini
Gone are the days when a computer power is judge by the size of its case. Once upon a time when you need a powerful computer you would go out and buy the biggest mother board, a big case to fit it in and a big PSU (Power Supply Unit) to run it all; thankfully this is not the practice anymore. Thanks to Moors Law, Apple is able to give us a high performance computer in the form of the Mac Mini. Recently release the Mac Mini is able to give us the computing power that was once reserve for high end and high price computers/servers.
Offered in its trademark compact unibody (7.7inches x 1.4inches) pioneered by Apple, the Mac Mini comes in two flavours desktop and server. Added to this new model is a SD card slot and a HDMI port, which allows the Mac Mini to be connected directly to a HDTV so you can stream video from the internet or another device on the LAN, view photos or other media; this is in addition to the four USB ports. The power supply is internal eliminating the need for an external power adapter, reducing system volume and keeping cable cutter to a minimum.
The system according to Apple’s Philip Schiller is more energy efficient and should use a small percent of the energy used in the home. The Mac Mini said Apple reduces power consumption by an incredible 25 percent to less than 10W when idle, less than half the power required by competing systems. Mac Mini meets Energy Star 5.0 requirements and achieves EPEAT Gold status.*
As standard inside one of these sleek aluminium case is a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of Ram and a 320GB hard drive. Also for graphics hungry applications or games is the NVIDIA GeForce 320M integrated graphics processor. With 48 processing cores it is the fastest integrated graphics processor on the market today. You can buy one custom built with you own specification.
For software you get the latest version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, with iLife which contains a host of applications, such as iPhoto, to easily organize and manage photos, iMovie and GarageBand.
*see the apple website for more detail.