The Mac mini has long been the lovably lost scamp of the the Mac family, produced and sold with as seemingly little fanfare as possible. (Quick: where are the minis located in your local Apple store?) No matter: we’ve seen minis used as everything from high-load-bearing servers to HTPCs to just plain old desktop machines. People love the damn thing — it’s one of the smallest and most power-efficient compact PCs available. The only problem was that the mini has traditionally offered fairly poor performance for the money: although it was given a strikingly beautiful case refresh last year, the internals were left to stagnate with a 2008-vintage Core 2 Duo processor, and the base price went up to $699.