Mac mini 2010 review

Apple’s Mac mini was always the compact computer with a few frustrations. Perfectly scaled for doing duty as your HTPC, the absence of a native HDMI port meant hooking the Mac mini up in your living room was never quite as easy as we’d like to expect from Apple. Now, with a slick unibody refresh, more media-friendly specs and a reworked I/O selection, the new Mac mini looks set to take on SFF PCs for the home entertainment crown. Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.

At first glance you could be mistaken for thinking the new Mac mini looks pretty much the same as its predecessor; in fact there are plenty of differences. Rather than the plastic shell of before, Apple have switched to CNC machined aluminum like their unibody MacBook Pro notebooks. It’s also lower and wider than the computer it replaces, but by shifting the power supply brick internally the overall footprint is less. Bar the Apple logo on the top and the slot-loading DVD drive up front, the unibody shell is clean and clear; all of the ports are at the back.

It’s the port selection that marks the new Mac mini’s other great departure: Apple has finally dropped the DVI socket and replaced it with an HDMI output (alongside the existing Mini DisplayPort). You lose a USB 2.0 in the process – it’s down to four – but also get an SD/SDHC/SDXC card slot along with the FireWire 800, gigabit ethernet and audio in/out (which double as both analog and digital). Inside there’s WiFi a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1+EDR as standard.

In one fell swoop, Apple has given home entertainment users a super-straightforward machine that takes seconds to set up. Plug in the power cord, hook up via HDMI to your HDTV (the connection carries audio as well as video), and pair a Bluetooth keyboard/mouse set – not included, and of course you can use USB 2.0 peripherals too, though the Mac mini obviously works great out of the box with Apple’s own keyboard and mouse – and you’re ready to go. Not only does this new model use 25-percent less power than its predecessor (about as much in normal use as a regular lightbulb, in fact), it’s also incredibly quiet: 14dBa at idle means it’s likely to be overwhelmed by background noise in all but the most mausoleum-like of environments, and even when active we could hardly hear it running.

That’s a surprise, given Apple hasn’t really stinted on the specifications. Standard is a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU with 3MB L2 cache and 1066MHz frontside bus, paired with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard-drive; options include a 2.66GHz CPU, up to 8GB of RAM and up to 500GB storage. Incidentally, the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server – which replaces the optical drive with a second hard-drive – comes as standard with the 2.66GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM, along with two 500GB 7200-rpm hard drives built in.

We ran Geekbench on the Mac mini, a synthetic test that measures processor and memory performance. Altogether, it scored 3550, around 100 points less than the similar architecture and processor in the current-generation 13-inch MacBook Pro (which, it’s worth remembering, starts at $1,199). That’s respectable for a small-form-factor desktop, and well in excess of what we’ve seen from Atom-based nettops.

Graphics on both models are courtesy of NVIDIA’s GeForce 320M, which shares 256MB of the main memory. That means it’s unlikely to be a gamers’ dream machine, but can still pump out up to 2560 x 1600 resolution over Mini DisplayPort or 1920 x 1200 via HDMI (an HDMI to DVI adapter is included in the box, or you can buy a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter separately). Still, it happily crunched through the test video files we processed in iMovie – part of the included iLife suite Apple preload, as well as iPhoto, GarageBand and other apps – though took a little longer than the heftier CPU/GPU combos in the MacBook Pro line.