After all the expectancy, and a degree of hype, the very latest offerings from Apple arrived in the United Kingdom this morning.

A handful of selected journalists were led to a briefing room above the computer maker's flagship Regent Street store in London to be shown first iPod Shuffle and Mac mini to arrive in Britain following their unveiling at the Macworld Exhibition in San Francisco earlier this week

And the thing that struck me on seeing the MP3 music player and desktop computer up close was just how small they really are.

The stripped down iPod, which sports simple, intuitive controls, really is no bigger than a packet of chewing gum and weighs next to nothing. Apple boasts that this means that it is remarkably portable. But it also means that the iPod Shuffle does not have that same gorgeously engineered feel shared by almost all of Apple's other gadgets.

This morning, Danika Cleary, the iPod product manager, made much of the "cultural significance" of the iPod, but its new incarnation does not feel iconic. It is too lightweight for that – it weighs about the same as a car key. In fact, it feels like it could have been made to be disposable.

But with a price tag of £99 for the 1GB model which holds around 240 tracks, the Shuffle is not a gadget you will want to mislay.

Indeed, the price tag may just be the source of another gripe from Apple's loyal British aficionados. In the UK, the 512MB version will retail for £69. That is around 30 per cent more than in the United States, where the same player will cost $99, or £53.

Apple, when questioned on the price discrepancy, argued that the headline $99 price does not include American taxes and that the real difference works out at around £6. But that is still around 10 per cent more than the American price. "Well," said the man from Apple. "We think that's fair."

With the Mac mini, the implicit promise, again, is that good things come in small packages. For your money you get a shiny white box - 5cm tall and 16cm square. You could fit 18 of them in a standard PC tower, Apple says. Basics such as a mouse, keyboard and monitor are not included. Apple says it has just lowered its accessory prices to reflect this.

As with the Shuffle, the presentation patter that accompanied the unveiling of the first Mac mini in the UK was littered with "Apple-speak" – lots of "cools" and "awesomes" and variants thereof ("like totally"). But really it's the money that is supposed to do the talking where their latest desktop computer is concerned.

The most basic version, equipped with a 1.25GHz processor and 40Gb memory, costs £339; its more powerful 1.42Ghz, 80GB, brother, will retail at £399.

Again there's a price discrepancy with the US - where the models are priced at $499 (£267) and $599. But the real comparison for Britons will be with similarly priced computers from other makers.

Times Online this week visited the Dell headquarters in Austin, Texas, and was there when Apple officially announced the launch of the mini. The Dell executives we spoke to insisted they were unperturbed by the thought of an Apple Macintosh computer aimed at the masses and designed to tempt away their customers.

"When you look at it, we offer the same specification machine, with all the essentials – like a monitor, mouse and keyboard – for the same sort of money," said one.

Of course Dell would say that.

But Apple is taking a calculated gamble in entering the lower end of the PC market. Up against makers such as Dell and Hewlett Packard, the market leader in the United States, Apple is relying on the cachet of its brand to entice consumers to go shopping for four individual pieces of computer kit instead of picking up an all-in-one package. At the same time, it is risking its reputation by moving down-market.

Apple will be banking that many people looking to buy a new computer will have a perfectly serviceable mouse, monitor and keyboard at home still - the ones that came with their old machine.

It is a move calculated at exploiting the "halo effect" that many in marketing believe that the iPod has delivered: the Mac mini offers potential iPod customers a budget-priced entry level computer on which to download, store and manage their chosen music, with no worries about incompatibility.

Key to Apple's grand strategy is the successful dissemination of its own Mac OS software. Steve Jobs, Apple's co-founder and chief executive, wants to take on Bill Gates's Microsoft in the operating system stakes. The mini, which Mr Jobs has called "the most important Mac ever", has been designed with this in mind.

Will Apple pull it off? Well, judging from recent results – a 500 per cent rise in iPod sales in the latest quarter, for instance – you would not bet against it.

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