Mac mini updated with HDMI, aluminum unibody, and SD card reader
Would you look at that, some love for the seemingly abandoned desktop crowd.
Apple has today unveiled a freshly redesigned Mac mini, which benefits from
a unibody aluminum exterior and more grunt under the hood. Prices start rolling
at $699, where you'll get a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of RAM, and a 320GB hard
drive. HDMI-out is finally included, along with an SD card reader, 802.11n
wireless, a Mini DisplayPort jack, and what Apple claims is a doubling of
graphics performance thanks to an NVIDIA GeForce 320M chip inside. Then again,
when you double a little, you still end up with not much. The newly polished
nettop is a minimalist 1.4 inches tall, but manages to fit all the power
circuitry inside, which means (yay!) there'll be no power brick to spoil
your hipster desk space.
Don't fret if you were looking to drop the optical drive, Apple retains the
config option that allows you to add in a second HDD in lieu of its DVD burner.
You can grab two 500GB plate spinners, Snow Leopard Server (we thought Apple
only had one OS version?), 4GB of RAM, and a 2.66GHz Intel chip for $999.
Finally, the new enclosures will come with user-accessible memory slots
courtesy of a removable panel at the bottom of the case. Neat that the
designers didn't take the unibody idea too literally.
Apple's MobileMe Mail gets a refresh for some reason
You still using (and paying $99 a year) MobileMe? So you haven't been lured away by
Google's or Microsoft's free offerings then? Ok, then you'll probably notice that
MobileMe looks a bit different today. Pictured above is the new MobileMe application
switcher that now requires two clicks to do what previously took one (i.e., switch
MobileMe applications). Looks pretty though. Mail is the biggest change with new
widescreen (pictured above) and compact views, rules, single-click archiving, a
formatting toolbar, and SSL all introduced in the beta last month. Huzzah?
P.S. Sadly, that's a screengrab from our actual MobileMe account. Somebody please
remind us why we still pay for this?
Microsoft confirms: $199 new Xbox 360 coming soon, as well as
Kinect bundles
Well, none of this will come as a big surprise here, but it's always nice to
hear it straight from an official source. Microsoft has confirmed that a $199
version of new Xbox 360 will be coming in the fall to replace the now-$149 Arcade,
which is no longer in production. In addition, the company's also spilled a few
more beans -- Kinect will be available as a bundle with the new Xbox 360, and
though there isn't any official pricing information on that one just yet, we've
seen some telltale evidence on that front which would lead us to believe it'll
run somewhere in the neighborhood of $399 for an Elite and $299 for the Arcade.
So now you know.