David Flynn21 October 2009, 7:55 AM
While overshadowed by the new iMacs, the pint-sized Mac Mini enjoys a $200 price cut and also morphs into a Snow Leopard Server for small businesses.
It’s been a long time between updates for the Mac Mini, a product which Apple itself seems to often overlook.
And while there’s still no sign of this compact low-profile box becoming a bespoke home server, Apple has minted a server version aimed at small business market.
This new $1,399 Mac Mini comes with the Server edition of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and drops the slot-loading DVD drive (it’s now a $139 option in the form of the MacBook Air’s USB SuperDrive) in order to fit a pair of 500GB hard drives.
Back on the more conventional turf of home-based desktops, the familiar Mac Mini with the in-built slot drive gets a $200 price cut.
The entry-level model shifts from $1,049 down to $849, at the same time as the specs muscle up to a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo (previously 2GHz), 2GB of RAM (doubled from 1GB) and a 160GB hard drive (formerly 120GB).
A beefier build with a 2.53GHz CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive now sits at $1,099.