WIRED:BURIED IN the news from Apple this week – a fancy mouse, an upgraded new desktop Mac – was a peculiar beast. Apple sells a headless (monitor and keyboard- less) Mac model called the Mac Mini.

When it was launched in 2005, the Mac Mini was originally pitched as a cheaper Apple model for those who already had keyboards and monitors from their errant, sinful years as PC users. This week, though, it got a strangely souped-up brother: the Mac Mini server.

For a pricey €950, you get the same system, but with the usually vital DVD drive ripped out and a second 500GB hard-drive added in its place. Oh, and a copy of “Mac OS X Server”, Apple’s less-known variant of its Mac OS X operating system.

What’s going on here? Why would someone buy a Mac that’s deliberately cheap and cut down, only to pay over the odds for an extra drive? And why would you pay to have OS X Server on it – an operating system that’s primarily engineered to run on Apple’s most expensive, souped-up server systems (which start at €2,900)?

I have to say that I think that this is one of the few times when Apple has followed what it has seen its customers do with its hardware, instead of dictating to them what they should be doing.

When the first Mac Mini came out, I bought one – and promptly sat it under my wardrobe, unconnected to either monitor or keyboard. I even stripped the OS X software from it and installed the free operating system, Debian. And it’s run like that ever since, for four years, without complaint.

That’s not to say it’s lying there idle. In fact, it hosts my personal website, handles my e-mail, manages my media collection and runs my home’s sound system. It’s probably the busiest and most dependable piece of hardware I own.

At the time, it felt pretty perverse, buying a Mac, intended as a shiny slick consumer item, and turning it into a dusty, hidden, grindingly functional web server. Not quite as perverse as my friend who bought one and then stuck it in a server room – the gleaming, air- conditioned, super-connected professional hostelries for computers that host large websites. For all I know, his is still running there too, sat crammed between the rest of the hulking behemoths of computer power.

But the original Mac Mini actually had rather good specs for life as a menial server. It used Apple’s old processors, the PowerPC series, which meant that it didn’t draw much power compared to a desktop PC. That meant I could keep it running all the time without running up much of a electricity bill. It was also designed to work without a fan – good for running in a server room and good for running 24/7 under a desk in your bedroom, too.

I’ve always felt that there was a need for a device like this – a machine that runs all the time and handles most of your data storage and sharing needs. Most wired homes have one already that could do the job: the DSL or cable or Wi-Fi router that connects your computer to your internet. Unfortunately, nobody seems to have really exploited this market.

For those of us who do run a server at home, we’ve had to take what is sold on the consumer market and re-purpose it for our own needs. Geeks will frequently buy one of those off-the-shelf routers and jimmy them to run a generic Linux system. That lets you take what is a single-purpose, sub-€100 piece of electronics and turn it into a general purpose internet server.

For something fancier, we take equipment like the old Mac Mini and re-engineer that. I even know someone who has taken Apple’s ultra-cheap – and profoundly limited – Apple TV machine (intended only as a glorified digital video recorder) and turned that into a server. You take what you can get and turn it into what you need. This new Mac Mini Server, however, is something different. For one thing, and I’m not sure this works in Apple’s favour, it is far more expensive. Its function as a server though is far more official and is supported, than our previous cobbled-together versions. People may well wish to pay more for that.

Apple hardware also has a way of legitimising the cheaper, more generic, versions of the same niche device. It took Apple’s offering of the (overpriced) Airport to make people realise that Wi-Fi was a mature technology, creating a market for far cheaper Wi-Fi routers for the rest of us to buy.

The Mac Mini Server is certainly not the first low-powered, compact, fanless home server. Asus, makers of the hit Eee PC netbook, have already attempted to create this market with their EeeBox system.

The EeeBox tops out in the €400s, half the price of the Mac Mini Server; earlier versions start at even less. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Apple’s fancy hyping of their boutique home servers that kick-starts a revolution in this lower-priced home server market, too.