The little engine that could
By Lawrence I. Charters
October 24, 2008
The Mac mini may be one of the most misunderstood pieces of technology around. People assume that, because of the size, it lacks any kind of pizazz. But a Mac mini is the sports car of the computer world: a huge amount of horsepower, but easy to park.
You can hook it up to any kind of VGA monitor, hook it up to any kind of USB keyboard or mouse, add in a FireWire drive or three, and this little box, the size of five CD jewel boxes stacked on top of each other, turns into a powerful, full-featured Apache Web server, or file server, or media server (my personal use), or Frankenmac (for conducting bizarre experiments in Unix scripting or other alarming things).
The mini takes up less room than a laptop, but can do everything the big boys do, including run Windows, if you insist. The base model comes with a 1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1 gigabyte of RAM, an 80 gigabyte hard drive, and a combo (CD and DVD) optical drive. And you get WiFi and Bluetooth, too.
Update
This particular device, in Apple’s oddly generic identification scheme, is a “Mac mini (mid 2007)” and, while it was a nice machine, it could never be upgraded beyond Mac OS X 10.7.5. It was followed by the Mac mini (early 2009), the Mac mini (late 2009), the Mac mini (Mac OS X Server, late 2009), the Mac mini (mid 2010), the Mac mini Server (mid 2010), the Mac mini (mid 2011), the Mac mini Server (mid 2011), the Mac mini (late 2012), the Mac mini Server (late 2012), and the Mac mini (late 2014).
It would be nice if Apple came up with a new model in the same general form factor, only with far more processing power and expansion capability.