Like clowns piling out of the other kind of Mini, you’ll be similarly surprised at how much Apple has managed to squeeze into the Mac mini.

The mini is sold sans keyboard, mouse or display, although they can be purchased separately, of course. The idea is that the Mac mini will appeal to users (preferably Windows users) who already have at least one PC in the house, and they can use the peripherals from that and just hook them up to the Mac mini. This is a nice piece of marketing work, although the reality is many ex-Windows users will need to buy at least one peripheral to work with the mini as most keyboards and mice from a couple of years ago still use the old PS/2 connector.

Even so, you can pick up the base model Mac mini, and buy a USB keyboard and mouse if necessary, and still have enough change from $1000 for a good meal.

The exterior of the unit is fairly Spartan – unobtrusive seems to have been the aesthetic mantra in the mini’s design. There’s only a slot for the optical drive at the front, the various ports at the back, and the tiniest of lights at the front to indicate when it’s powered up. The ports include two USB 2.0, a FireWire, Ethernet, 56K modem, DVI (with included VGA adapter), audio out and power.

There are no user serviceable parts in the Mac mini, so there’s no easy way to open the unit. In fact, you need a sharpened putty knife to get it open, and even then it’s a fiddly task. If you do want to have new hardware installed, you need to take it back to an Apple store and have a technician do it for you.

While there are a lot of ports, equip yourself with a USB hub as you'll lose both USB ports above with a keyboard and mouse, leaving just the FireWire.

Inside the case is a fairly sparse spec to match the exterior. You only get the basics in the mini – enough to run OS X and the included iLife ’05 with a fair amount of chugging. At the heart of the system is a 1.25GHz or 1.42GHz G4 processor backed up by 256MB of DDR333 RAM, although the frontside bus speed is only 166MHz, so the extra DDR bandwidth goes unused. We’d also strongly suggest an upgrade to 512MB of RAM (+$120) or even 1GB (+$520).

Storage is handled by a 40GB or 80GB 2.5in notebook hard drive, spinning at 4200rpm, which is substantially slower than the 7200rpm found in most desktop drives. You also have a choice of a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, or Apple’s SuperDrive with DVD+/-RW and CD-RW.

If you want Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, that’ll also cost you extra, at +$79 and +$119 respectively.

Like all Macs, the Mac mini comes with OS X and the excellent iLife ’05 suite, which would be worth a few hundred bucks alone if you were to hunt down decent Windows equivalents.

The Mac mini in its basic form (1.25GHz G4 and 40GB hard drive) is quite affordable at $799, and is reasonably capable as a basic home system that is used mainly for web browsing and storing your music and photos. For any more strenuous tasks, like iMovie or GarageBand, we’d suggest the 1.42GHz with 80GB drive version with at least 512MB of RAM. If you add wireless to this, the price nears the $1200 mark, and the value proposition starts to slip away.

There are some interesting possibilities for the Mac mini though, and the net has been flooded with enthusiasts doing everything from overclocking them, to making the mini the hub of a media centre, to installing them in cars. There’s also talk of a currently unused daughterboard in the mini that seems to be geared as another external port, with FireWire and power, so Apple may have more features yet to come.