ArsTechnica Reviews The Intel Mac Mini (Core Solo)

phaedo00 writes "Ars Technica has put together a review of the recently announced Intel-powered Mac mini. The model reviewed was the public's first look at a Core Solo desktop from Apple and the results are promising: 'Up until Apple's "fun" announcement on the last day of February, there was really no indication of how Apple's low-end Intel offerings would be presented. Now that Apple has disclosed the specification and price points for their entry-level machines, we can get a better idea of where Apple is trying to take their product line. For those people who might be unaware, two new Mac Mini models were released and by most accounts, the products have been well received aside from a few quibbles over specifications.'"

Comments

Graphics Irony

[kuwan]

My favorite is the stuff Apple used to say about integrated graphics cards back when the PPC Mini was shipping (From the Graphics page):

Go ahead, just try to play Halo on a budget PC. Most say they're good for 2D games only. That's because an "integrated Intel graphics" chip steals power from the CPU and siphons off memory from system-level RAM. You'd have to buy an extra card to get the graphics performance of Mac mini, and some cheaper PCs don't even have an open slot to let you add one.

Other than the graphics card it's got a nice amount of raw CPU power, especially if you get the dual-core version or upgrade the single-core version by replacing the processor. It'd be great to buy a bunch of these for an Xcode build farm. Of course Xcode doesn't yet support cross-architecture distributed builds, so you'd have to be using all-Intel Macs for it to work well. Hopefully Apple will fix this in the near future.