Finally, the Mac Mini, much loved, but always rumored to be due for retirement, got some love today too. The new entry-level Mini still sells for $599 and sports a new 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip, an Nvidia Geforce 9400M graphics card and a 160-gigabyte hard drive. A second model priced at $799 boosts the performance on the Intel chip to 2.53 GHz and the hard drive space to 320 GB.
As many probably already know, it turns out that many Mac Mini owners use their machines as inexpensive servers. Seeing an opportunity Apples Xserve professional server line starts at $2,999 Apple has launched a Mac Mini server for $999. The target Schiller says is small businesses for whom an XServe would be too expensive, as well as enthusiast consumers looking for an inexpensive, small-footprint media server server to share files around the house. The server has the same dimensions as the traditional Mac Mini, and supports storage capacity as high as One terabyte, but lacks an optical drive. It ships with a server version of Apples Snow Leopard operating system.