OMG they killed mini!

For friends and family of the most affordable Mac, this new version offers a terrible shock. It’s one of those Doctor Who moments when a friend turns around and… they’re a Cyberman.

Previously in the four-year history of the unibody Mac mini, its base was a black plastic disc with indents for your thumbs. Twisting this off revealed the inner workings. The RAM was right there, with a diagram to help you swap modules, so you could upgrade the memory at any time, rather than pay Apple’s extortionate prices for extra RAM when buying your Mac. If you were more ambitious, after removing a few more components the main logic board slid right out, revealing the power supply and drives.

14 million 745 thousand 600 pixels

Apple’s brand new Retina 5K display shows seven times more detail than 1080p HD, and nearly three times more than a 15in Retina MacBook Pro. And it comes with a free iMac.

It’s true: when you look at the prices emerging for other makers’ 5K monitors, they’re similar to what Apple is charging for the new 5K iMac. That’s not to say it’s cheap; but its apparent £550 premium over the basic 27in model is only £240 once you adjust all the specifications to match (even then, the 5K has a slightly faster CPU).

And when you see this screen, £240 is suddenly not going to seem like a lot of money. The obvious question about the Retina display, with its fourfold increase in pixel count, is: can you tell the difference? We saw it for the first time, at Apple’s invitation, in the new conferencing annexe to the Apple Store on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, which is as good a place as any to see a thing but offered no previous Macs to compare with. Even so: yes, we could see the difference. Such a huge display with such a complete absence of pixellation is quite something to behold.