Some day, I hope we meet again.  Where you’re more sexier and smarter and I am older and wiser. The is always a time in peoples lives when you have to say goodbye to ones you love. This is one of those times, with myself saying adios to my beloved Mac Mini.

What we have today with the Mini is simply the most accessible Mac yet. $600 is a critical price point, but that’s only a third of the story. The second third is the remarkably friendly design of this computer. People don’t want big, noisy, power-hungry boxes, as Apple realized after shipping the notorious “wind-tunnel” Power Macs and early Xserves. Whether you’re in a home or office or server room, compact size, quiet operation and low power usage are all real benefits. And the Mac Mini excels in all those areas.

The good news is, the new Mac Mini is a worthy little beast. In spite of its seemingly wimpy 2.0GHz dual-core processor, it keeps up with most of the basic stuff you can throw at it. The internal redesign of the Mac Mini is really about coupling that Core 2 Duo with Nvidia integrated graphics, and I have to say, it seems like that worked out nicely. It’s the same GeForce 9400M chipset we see in the MacBook, the MacBook Pro and, not coincidentally, the new iMac, and when it comes to rendering 1080p movies and playing a little Quake 4 on a 24″ monitor, it gets the job done.

It gets the job done when there’s enough RAM, that is. That extra 1GB stick actually doubles the 9400M’s shared memory from 128MB to 256MB, and when you’re playing games, you’ll notice that in the textures and motion smoothness. It’s hard to tell from the shots below, but textures appearing in Quake 4 on the 2GB Mini were much closer to those on the new iMac, which is far more powerful with a 2.66GHz dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM.

I love this Mini and I hope its new owner does too.

Farewell!