I told you 2 days ago that the new MacBook Airs have better performance than the MacBook Pros from 2010 and now we have a benchmarking and for the new Mac Minis. Apple chose to implement the new Intel i5 and Intel i7 processors built on the Sandy Bridge platform and looking at the graph above you will notice how much the change matters. In practice, the $599 model of the Mac Mini has 50% better performance than the "top" model from 2010, and if we look at the $799 model released this year, we notice that the performance is 2 times better than the 2010 model of the same category.
Besides the normal differences compared to the old versions, we notice that between the 2 Mac Minis released this year there is a huge difference in terms of performance. The $2011 799 Mac Mini is 50% faster than the $2011 599 Mac Mini, and that should make it clear to anyone that paying $200 more for the $799 Mac Mini is definitely worth it. If we look at the old Mac Mini models, we notice that the differences between the models released in the same year are insignificant, so this year Apple tried to launch products as powerful as possible.
You will notice the performance difference between the models released this year only in applications that require the processor intensively, so in the daily use of Mac OS X you should not notice too big differences.
