At Apple's media event in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday, CEO Tim Cook rolled out, among other highly anticipated products, an updated version of Apple’s smallest Mac desktop computer – the Mac Mini.

Starting at $599, the revamped Mac Mini, which is currently available for purchase on the Apple website, features a 2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor that delivers unprecedented speed and performance, thanks to the addition of Turbo Boost 2.0, Hyper-Threading, and an integrated memory controller. Giving the mini additional power is 6MB of L3 cache. There's also a server edition for $999 that has a pair of 1 TB hard drives, which ships today as well.

Mac mini also has two 1TB 5400-rpm hard drives built in, so users can host wikis and websites, back up the data they need, and store just about anything.

flash storage which is available in either one or two 256GB solid-state drives allows this configuration to perform up to twice as fast as the previous generation’s flash storage and nearly five times as fast as the standard hard drive.

In addition, Mac mini with OS X Server lets you add an unlimited number of Mac and PC users without per-user licensing fees.

The last update to this Apple product came in July 2011, when it received second-generation Intel Core i5 and Core i7 CPU updates and a Thunderbolt port. It lost its SuperDrive DVD burner -- which has not returned -- but did retain the HDMI port.

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