Gadgetory

now there's all let's talk about the iPad Mini and the new IMAX and the new Mac this and that but hardly anybody talks about the humble max Mini or as I like to call it the perfect home theater PC we have one here and we are about to unbox it all right the Mac Mini is such an interesting little computer it has pretty good specs and a ton of storage and I assume that they're still making it to be kind of a home theater computer but meanwhile they're trying to sell you Apple TV boxes in fact look at how they highlight the connectivity on the box right off the bat they're like USB HDMI firewire Thunderbolt this thing it's meant to be plugged in empowering things let's get out of here ten little brick pretty heavy actually it's kind of funny it's the graveyard of lost connectors like they're still doing fire we're only on the Mac Mini killed it everywhere else oh look at this it's like a really big Apple TV so funny it's like a computer all right there we go simple sleep media receiver let's find out what we have in the box before we do our specs we've got our little instructional packet Deeley power this is really the power brick for this thing it's a little Wow I have to say that doesn't seem like it would be a huge feature but that's a huge feature there's no massive brick here that is contributing to a tidier home theater cabinet and I approved you've also got a dongle actually in HD looks like DVI to HDMI dongle which is pretty useful so clearly I mean as soon as you start taking this thing out of the box you get the idea that this is meant to be part of your home theater setup it's just so interesting that they don't talk about it they talk about Apple TV when this is so much more flexible all right on to the specs the Mac Mini comes in two versions there's a 2.5 gigahertz dual-core Intel Core i5 that starts at $599 or you can get a 2.3 gigahertz quad-core intel core i7 Ivy Bridge that one 799 it's configurable to up to 2.6 gigahertz by the way on that quad-core model it weighs 2.7 pounds it's about a inch and a half tall is seven point seven inches wide and deep so it's a little square the $5.99 model has 500 gigs of storage the $7.99 model actually has a built in terabyte it has integrated Intel graphics and four gigs of onboard memory that's configurable up to 16 gigs let's get to the ports there is Thunderbolt you have a firewire 800 port for USB 3 ports an HDMI port an SDXC card slot so you could offload your photos onto this device Gigabit Ethernet audio in and out and of course an IR receiver now one thing you'll note is that there is no optical drive on the Mac Mini Apple is expecting you to download or buy all of your movies and TV from most likely iTunes also note that it does not come with any input devices no keyboard or mouse so you're gonna have to bring your own wireless keyboard or Apple's $69 gesture accessory if you want to use the new OS 10 gestures now the lack of optical drive for me is the biggest knock on the Mac Mini as long as all your media is in the cloud then I guess you're okay with this but to be honest I was hoping to buy this and then have a blu-ray drive built-in so I could watch movies on a big cinema display and that could be a whole TV all on its own unfortunately I'm not going to be doing that but if you own all of your iTunes movies download from Amazon things like that this is a great web enabled fully functioning computer to make part of your home theater package check out our C net review on that and happy shopping