RE: “A mac pro is just too expensive. There is no reason why I need all 8 cores churning away performing some super number crunching. A mac mini running a dual core processor is plenty for desktop computing. People don’t need to have a personal super computer. Besides a mac mini is about 1/5th the cost.”

The first major difference between the two machines isn’t just computing power. Graphics power is significantly less with the Mac Mini, since it uses the 64MB (shared) Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics chip and shares system RAM for use by that chip. If you’re into gaming at all, and you don’t want to shell out the cash for a Mac Pro, getting an iMac with dedicated video RAM is a better option.