I’ve always had a soft-spot for the Mac Mini. I’ve always liked the diminutive form factor, and in fact, if it were up to me, the updated Mac Pro would basically be a slightly larger Mac Mini with space for a couple of internal drives and perhaps a way for end-users to change processors, memory and video cards.

But here’s an interesting thing about the Mac Mini.

The base price of a 4-core Mac Mini is around $800. Throw in about $200 for a good monitor and keyboard and for $1k you have a very nice little computer with a 3.6ghz quad-core computer with 8gb memory and a 128gb of (SSD) storage.

But unlike previous models of the Mac Mini, there are a number of ways you can upgrade the processor, memory and storage. Toss in a 3.2GHz 6-core i7 processor, 64gb of memory, and a 2Tb SSD drive with an upgraded Ethernet connector, and now you’re rounding the corner of $4,200.

I understand why Apple doesn’t want to report numbers anymore. Because the number of Mac Minis Apple sells doesn’t really tell the story of how much money is making.

Further, the numbers tells us where Apple may be going when they finally upgrade the Mac Pro.

My guess: Apple will have an upgrade path for a Mac Pro that nearly crosses the $10k line, but will be quite a powerful little box.