If you’re in the market for a new compact Mac at a price well below $1,000, Apple’s brand-new Mac Mini is, well, your only option. The good news is the 2011 model starts at $599, with $799 and $999 models also on offer. And all sport powerful Intel second-generation “Sandy Bridge”  processors. The bad news? Apple’s nixed the optical drive, so we hope you don’t want to watch any DVDs on your Mac. And it certainly makes installing legacy software that didn’t come from Apple’s App Store a bit more difficult.

And while you can technically use an old pair of USB peripherals you probably have lying around with the Mini, in order to get the most out of the pre-installed Lion OS (OSX 10.7), specifically its iPad-like gesture controls, you’ll need an Apple Magic Trackpad, a $69 added expense we wish were included in the box. We have a  lot more to say about the 2011 Mac Mini, including how it stacks up against the iMac and brand-new Macbook Air, so be sure to check out our full review.

Here are some highlights of our review of the Mac Mini (2.3GHz Core i5, 2011 Version):

“The 2.3GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 CPU inside the $599 model we tested helped the system to feel quite snappy in anecdotal testing. And in our CPU-centric Cinebench test, which stresses all of a computer’s processing cores to measure raw CPU performance, the 2011 Mac Mini’s score of 8,741 was a fair bit ahead of last year’s Mini, which came in at 5,072.”

“If you’re  looking for a budget-friendly Apple computer experience, the Mac Mini’s  price may look awfully appealing, but first factor in the  added cost  of the peripherals needed to get the most from the latest version of OS  X, as well as the extra RAM you’ll want if you do heavy  Web browsing.”

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