Apple ups Mac Mini spec, lowers price

Optical drives ditched

Apple has added Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 processors to its Mac Mini small form-factor desktop - and yanked the optical drives from the system.

The new model - which now comes in at £529, down from the £649 the previous version launched at - sports a 2.3GHz Core i5, 2GB of 1333MHz DDR 3 memory and 500GB of hard drive storage.

A 2.5GHz model with 4GB of Ram is also available, for £699. It has an AMD Radeon HD 6630M GPU with 256MB of GDDR 5 graphics Ram. The cheaper model makes do with Intel integrated graphics.

Both CPUs are dual-core jobs, but you can have a quad-core Core i7 running at 2GHz if you fancy the Mac Mini Server box. It has 4GB of memory and two 500GB 7200rpm hard drives.

It costs £849.

All three Minis come with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. They have a Thunderbolt port, and HDMI for TV connections. Bluetooth 4.0 is part of the package, as is 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi. ®