Mac mini (Mid 2007)

Refreshed alongside the aluminum iMac in August 2007, the Mid 2007 Mac mini kept its compact white-and-silver enclosure unchanged from the original 2005 design but modernized what mattered most: it moved from Core Duo to Core 2 Duo processors at 1.83GHz and 2.0GHz, added 802.11n Wi-Fi for significantly faster wireless networking, and bumped the standard RAM configuration, keeping the little desktop relevant against a fast-moving market. It remained, as always, the budget entry point into the Mac ecosystem, aimed squarely at Windows switchers who already owned a monitor, keyboard, and mouse and wanted the cheapest possible way to try OS X, as well as home theater PC enthusiasts drawn to its small footprint and (with Front Row and the included remote) living-room-friendly software. The Core 2 Duo upgrade was a meaningful, if unglamorous, improvement: 64-bit computing support extended the machine's practical lifespan considerably compared to the previous Core Duo mini, and combined with 802.11n it made the mini noticeably more capable for streaming media and general use than its immediate predecessor. Critics, as usual with the mini line, dinged it for using older integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics carried over from the previous generation and for a price point that, once you added Apple's keyboard, mouse, and display, could approach that of a far more powerful iMac, a persistent value critique of the entire mini lineup. Still, for its specific niche, a cheap, quiet, small Mac to pair with existing peripherals, it remained essentially unrivaled in the market since no PC maker offered anything comparably small and polished running a full desktop OS. This generation is a relatively minor, workmanlike entry in Mac mini history, most notable for quietly carrying the enclosure design forward one more generation before Apple's more significant unibody aluminum mini redesign arrived in early 2009, but it played its role well: keeping the cheapest Mac reasonably current for the growing base of switchers Apple was courting hard in the mid-2000s.