As this little trend of reviews of a recent Apple purchases is moving on I thought i would review the mac mini. I will start with the packaging, I was pleasantly surprised by the packaging and the very high quality when you look at the inside of the box you see a lot of time has gone into designing the way every thing goes into that little box, so I would have to give Apple top marks for there packaging its simply far better than any other pc manufacturer I have ever purchased from. On to the actual mac mini, I purchased the base system the specs are as follows 1.83GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor with 2Mb of shared L2 Cache1Gb of PC5300 667MHz DDR2 memory Intel GMA950 GPU 80 Gb Hard drive Slot loading combo drive1 Fire Wire 400 port4 USB ports DVI output10/100/1000 Gigabit Ethernet portAudio in and out portsAirport Extreme WiFi 802.11gBluetooth with EDR ( enhanced data rate ) I Decided on this system because i was totally new to the macintosh and was not 100 percent sure i would work well with it. ascetically the mac mini is great looking little machine and its hard to believe that they fit so much into such a small case, styling wise i’am a big fan of the way Apple make there products look clean and fresh. Back of the mac has so many ports it is so tightly it can be a little hard to somethings in and out if you swap usb devices a lot you may struggle. This brings me on to one thing about the mac i had more of usb ports, For me four is not enough i ended up buying a external usb powered hub to give me some extra usb ports, As I consider my self a bit of a power user i often use a lot of different usb devices. I was again surprised that the mac mini would power a 23 inch monitor, I have it set up on my 22 inch acer p223w at a resolution of 1680 x 1050 and it looks fantastic and with spaces activated i can optimise a massive amount of screen real estate. The internal speaker of the mac mini is rather weak but most will have there computer set up with some generic speakers. The Wifi strength is also very impressive to i have not dropped the connection since i set it up. One of the big sealing points of the mini for me was the virtually silent computing experience, I have it sat about two feet away and cant here a thing which is a big change from most of the other pc’s I have owned. The one thing that makes the mac mini great is the operating system I honestly believe this little machine my make me leave the windows world for the foreseeable future. So if your a windows user wanting to try something new the mac mini is the cheapest way to try a macintosh and another good thing is if you don’t like mac osx macintosh’s generally hold there value more then any other type of computer so you could always sell it and make most of your money back.