I actually bought these for myself but still xmas gifts in my mind!
I got myself the 2012 Mac Mini and the Thunderbolt monitor.
I always wanted a real mac and a hackintosh at the same time.
This Mac Mini is a good performer, but its a one-off purchase that I will never repeat.
I have replaced the internal HDD with a Sandisk Extreme 240Gb SSD, so its super fast and totally quiet - the maglev fan works very well and very quiet. It has exactly the right balance of connectors that I wanted and it is super cute sat underneath the monitor. My only negative about it is the fact there is no discreet graphics chip, just the HD4000. The HD4000 works just fine and drives the Thunderbolt monitor with ease, so overall a very good combination.
The monitor is a super piece of kit; and it needs to be for the price. But as we all know, you do pay a lot for the design and aesthetics of Apple kit, and this is no exception. The screen image is crisp as is normally the case for IPS panels, nice and even, and there is no monitor 'noise' which you do get with some IPS displays.
I have a couple of USB3 external drives which I have taken into use for storing backups of my stuff and they work flawlessly and at good speeds too!
Together with my existing keyboard (Logitech K750 - Mac Version), its a very nice setup and visually very appealing.
From the library of programs that I use, it runs every one of them with aplomb; no slow downs, crashes, spinning wheels or anything of that nature.
So in summary, a very nice setup that was expensive but does the job perfectly and is a joy to work with
The hackintosh that will eventually complement it will take some time to complete as Im waiting to see if anyone comes out with a mini-itx motherboard that has a thunderbolt connector. The only potential one so far is one of the Intel NUC boards, but Ive decided against that one.
In the meantime though, Im happy to work solely with the real Apple kit I now have.