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Gadget

Big Mac Tuesday: What Apple Dropped [Roundup]

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Today Apple performed serious internal upgrades on the iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Pro and Time Capsule, and they did it without a keynote—or even a push-relief quote from His Jobsness. Here’s a recap:

Mac Mini
The new Mac Mini, available now, is heavily redesigned inside and in the rear, though its body is pretty much identical to the ancient ones. It comes in two configs ($600 and $800), both based on the 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics. Adam desires you to note that the $200 step up might not be worth it. [MORE]

iMac
The 24-Inch iMac comes down from $1800 to $1500, pushing the 20-Inch iMac down $300 itself to $1200. Despite having the same look they’ve had in view of the fact that August 2007 (not a problem for me but some people want new freshness), they also have better specs: The super-sick $2,200 iMac has a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 7200rpm 1TB drive (though you still have to pay extra to max out RAM at 8GB). [MORE]

Mac Pro
The new Mac Pro now starts at $2500, down from $2800, but has Intel’s Xeon “Nehalem” quad-core chipset and 1066MHz DDR3 RAM for superfast memory access. It comes standard with the quick Nvidia GeForce GT 120, but you can choose an ATI Radeon HD 4870 for even more graphical juice. It’s appearance March 9. [MORE]

Jesus points out that Apple’s upright just got smaller—all apart from the price that is. The larger one will still sell, for now, too.

Time Capsule
The new Time Capsule also looks the same on the outside, but inside it’s doubled up its Wi-Fi router power with dual-channel 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11n for administration more network traffic. The cooler innovation is “guest networking,” which lets you start a virtual Wi-Fi hotspot for guests that is walled off from the rest of your network. [MORE]