We haven’t had quite a day with our new bestest friend, the Intel Mac mini, and Scott and Derik have already weighed in. Two things grabbed me about the little fellow, one positive and one negative.
First, the…less-than-stellar. Instead of the usual ATI or nVidia card we’ve got an integrated Intel graphics chipset, the GMA950. As some enterprising person discovered, even Apple integrated chipset in the original Mac mini description, though, since the Intel switch, I’ve become accustomed to the fact that we’ve always been at war with Eurasia. A quick Googling turned up this ExtremeTech review from last May. There are two salient points to take away from that review: 1) High-end 3D gaming on the Mac mini is not likely to be a pleasant experience and 2) “Intel has built in a video engine with full hardware motion compensation, MPEG2 hardware decode, subpicture support (e.g., for closed captions), and dynamic de-interlacing.” If indeed Apple has leveraged this capability, it’s another point in favor of the Mac mini as media center. And anyway, the Mac mini has never really been targeted at the gaming crowd, who are unlikely to give up their PCs and consoles anyway.
And now for the good: given that the graphics chipset uses the system RAM for its memory, at least Apple has made it easier to upgrade the Mac mini by providing two RAM slots instead of the original one. Hey, every little bit helps.
