Apple Mac mini Review (Mid 2010)

Final Words

The role of the Mac mini has changed dramatically over the past five years. What once was a way for Apple to tempt users into trying OS X is now a fairly expensive, niche Mac. As an HTPC the new Mac mini is great. It works just as well as any of the ION boxes we've reviewed while using less power and offering better performance. The only problem, outside of lacking Blu-ray support, is that it is a very expensive HTPC without offering the higher end HTPC features (e.g. TrueHD/DTS-HD MA bitstreaming). The $699 price tag makes the mini an expensive standalone HTPC, you either need to really be in love with the styling or have an additional use for the machine in order to get your money's worth. That being said, on the used market down the road, these things might not be too bad.

The design of the new Mac mini is very nice. While it's miles ahead of anything else I've used that's similar in size, the impact is somehow less pronounced. Five years ago getting any manufacutrer to make a stylish box the size of the mini was difficult. These days we have things like the Zotac ZBOX or even the Dell Zino HD. They aren't quite as stylish or as well thought out as the mini, but they aren't that far off. The mini just isn't as revolutionary as it once was, which does dampen some of the excitement. That being said, it's still impressive - there's just more competition out now.

Power consumption of the new Mac mini is excellent. You get better-than-ION power characteristics but without sacrificing CPU performance. The Mac mini idles below 10W and full load isn't much higher at 30W. Typical power usage for the whole system is usually less than 20W. Apple achieved this through a combination of OS optimizations and careful hardware selection.

By using notebook components the Mac mini manages to fit in a very compact chassis, which creates one issue: HDD performance. The system ships with a 2.5" 5400RPM notebook drive and only 2GB of memory. Swapping to disk isn't uncommon if you're running an application with a large enough footprint, or if you've got several applications loaded at once. For $699 Apple really should outfit the Mac mini with 4GB of memory, and eventually I'd still like to see SSDs top to bottom in all Macs.

Overall system performance is sufficient for most entry level users. While the new Mac mini is fast enough to replace an aging Power Mac G5, don't expect a performance boost if you're upgrading from anything in the past couple of years.

The pricing is by far the biggest issue here. Even with an upgrade to 4GB, the Mac mini is still the cheapest way to legally get a machine with OS X. Although the mini is fast enough, I would've liked to have a Core i5 in there instead of the aging Core 2 Duo. Apple insists on putting more dollars towards GPUs than traditional PC vendors, presumably for some major application rollout in the coming years with hefty GPU requirements. With no DMI/QPI enabled NVIDIA chipsets, Apple is either going to have to increase the physical size of many of its products to transition to newer Intel CPUs with 3rd party GPUs or live with Intel/AMD integrated graphics going forward. I'm very curious to see how this plays out over the next 12 - 18 months.