Apple Intel Core Duo Mac Mini review

We reviewed the original Mac Mini back in May last year and we loved it. It was stylish, quiet and the smallest mainstream PC we'd ever seen. Well, Apple's at it again - the old Mini has been replaced by a range of brand new models.

At first glance, the Mini looks exactly the same - it's the same size and its operating system is still Mac OS X. Like the Intel MacBook Pro we reviewed last month, however, it now has an Intel processor.

Benchmark performance

Apple sent us the £599 model, which has a 1.66GHz Core Duo processor, 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk. We couldn't run our standard benchmarks under the Mac operating system - they only work in Windows. Our best benchmark of performance under the Mac OS was to compare the new Intel Macs to the older Macs based on PowerPC processors. The Mac Mini ran our Photoshop image-rendering test in 1 minute 25 seconds, compared with 1 minute 15 seconds for a G4, and 41 seconds for a G5. The Intel system is slower, but it only costs £599, whereas a G5 cost almost £2,000 when it first came out, while the G4 costs well over a grand.

Once we'd finished testing the Mac OS, we used Apple's Bootcamp software to install Windows XP (see next month for a step-by-step walkthrough of installing Windows on a Mac) - it notched up a respectable 91% in our standard 2D benchmarks. This is good - if you install Windows on the Mini, it will run any software you care to install. On the other hand, the Sony laptop that won our PC group test last month had the same processor and the same amount of RAM and scored 108% in our benchmarks. This is down to the Mini's sluggish 4200rpm hard drive. Forget playing 3D games - the Mini didn't have the muscle to run our 3D test.

OS X on the Mac Mini looks exactly the same, but it's been completely rewritten to run on the Intel processor. Only programs specifically written for this version of OS X will run natively - all other Mac software has to be run in an emulator called Rosetta. As you'd expect, running an emulation of the old Mac OS as well as the program in question slows the Mini down a little, but not as much as you might think. Native applications should be quite a bit faster than older programs running under Rosetta.

The rest of the specification is a marked improvement on the old PowerPC-based Mini. There are four USB2 ports for connecting a range of peripherals, whereas before there were only two. Digital audio is now a built-in feature, with both in and out ports. The optical drive is a DVDRW drive, so you can read and write DVD discs as well as CDs. Connectivity options are also impressive, with built-in wireless 802.11g and Bluetooth. As well as the wireless options, the Mac Mini has an Gigabit Ethernet connection for speedy wired communications across a network.

Supplied extras

The Mini is also supplied with a remote control, so you can use the Front Row software. This is a Media Center-type application that lets you quickly access your pictures, music and videos. There's no TV tuner supplied, but it does mean you can use the Mini as a hub for most of your music, videos and photos. Apart from Front Row, there's very little bundled software and the only application that stands out is iLife 06 - an impressive set of video editing, DVD creation, photo cataloguing and music-making tools.

The Mini looks lovely and for the money, it performs well when compared with older Macs. Compared with an equivalent laptop or Mini-PC however, it's expensive for what it is. You'll spend at least another £200 bringing it in line with these. That adds up to an imposing price tag for something that was launched as a budget product.