Sweet mother of Cupertino. Above is the new Mac mini. Looks pretty much the same as the exquisitely redesigned Mac mini that Apple released in the summer of 2010, but this new-new mini 1) has jettisoned that hilarious moldering antiquity that was the CD/DVD drive, 2) runs the newly-minted leonine OS X 10.7, and 3) unholy gobsmacking miracle of transdenominational miracles, is finally the same price here in Canada as it is in the States.

My circa-2008 Mac mini — at which I am typing right now, a computer that to my ongoing astonishment is still working fine, spookily reliable, a pleasant example of the Last Year’s Model (plus two) ethic — cannot wait to be replaced by this object. This disappearing thing.

So the new-new mini is slimmer, sleeker, quieter, cooler, whiter, greener, blanker, and bleaker. More minimalist, more miniature, less there. A vanishing ice cap. An eroded stone. Something or other melting, thawing, resolving into a dew, etc., etc. Like all of Apple’s hardware, each newer model fills less space, is less solid, approaching insubstantiality, fading from view — like clouds, like air, like poor Steve Jobs’s body, like us poor users’ minds. I appreciate that when Jobs was explaining iCloud, he said they’re demoting the Mac to just be a device … I know the feeling.