Without going into ridiculous amounts of detail, Apple has today announced a range of product line refreshes for the iMac, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini. The general theme of the refresh has been to migrate all of these lines up to the latest and greatest offerings in processors, RAM (DDR3 as far as the eye can see), hard drive space, and video. The iMac got the most significant update with 24″ displays across the line and the reintroduction of the US$1,199 model still sporting the seriously roomy 20″ display. RAM for all of the 24″ models has been bumped to 4GB standard. Storage for the 24″ models is 640GB to 1TB. All of the models, however, offer 802.11N, Gigabit Ethernet, integrated iSight, and Mini DisplayPort jacks. Aside from the 20″ entry-level model, video gets bumped to a choice of NVIDIA’s GeForce 9400M, the faster GeForce GT 120, or an ATI Radeon HD 4850, while the 20″ gets the 9400M.

The Mac Pro and Mac Mini lines get the least interesting updates. For the Mac Pro’s there are bumps in memory, storage, and video, the latter being NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics boards at all model levels. CPU updates are the highlight of the Mac Pro upgrades, though. The now lower cost entry level model, priced at US$2,499, sports Intel’s newest Nahalem Quad-core wafer running at 2.66GHz. What Apple should dub the “Ass Kicker Deluxe”, the 8-core model, gets two of the Nahalem’s, all for US$3,299. For the Mac Minis, the bumps are for newer processors, the most recent Core 2 Duo, and more storage space for prices starting at US$599. The new 2.0GHz C2D chips are much faster and more efficient than the previous 2.33GHz models, as well. 

Probably the single largest aspect of this sweeping upgrade is what didn’t come to the party: FireWire 400. As of all desktop models its clear that Apple has ditched FireWire 400, instead opting to only support FireWire 800. All new systems, however, have loads of USB 2.0 ports.

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