Slash your way inside Apple's Mac Mini You can break into Apple's new Mac mini, but it's nerve-wracking. However, if you do, you can up its storage capacity to one terabyte. On Wednesday, the folks at Mac repair-shop and parts-supplier iFixit tore a new 20-inch iMac into pieces. Today, they did the same with the new Mac mini. Popping open a Mac mini for the first …
Erm, the caption under the picture quite clearly states that the original Mac Mini is on the bottom (and is easily verified with the discovery of the modem jack on the bottom unit) while the paragraph directly under that picture states that the original Mac Mini is at the *top* of the picture ... unless you are trying to state that a picture that could contain an original Mac Mini is at the top of the page?
I've serviced G4 and first generation Intel Mac mini's and really don't see why cracking them open is considered such a big deal. Whenever I carried out RAM and HDD replacements I actually thought the G4's were laid out really well given the size constraints. My only gripe was the location of the PRAM battery required the removal of the internal frame, but how often is that an issue?
The Intel mini's aren't so easy to work on, with some fiddly cables to disconnect, but you can still be in and out in under 10 minutes, no problem. Sounds like El Reg needs to grow a pair. ;-)
Paris, because she knows a thing or two about cojones and rapid entry.
Remember the ORIGINAL Mac?
That was WAY easier to dismantle. All you needed was nerves of steel, a 12" steel rule, and...
Er, maybe those with a nervous disposition should stop reading....
A 4lb club hammer.
Start with the case standing normally. Place one long edge of the ruler in the groove on the top of the case between the font and back case components, pressing against the back case, at roughly 45 degrees.
Smack the other edge of the ruler briskly with the hammer. Repeat, if necessary (IE. if its a 'virgin' case) each side, then back to the top. Never had to 'ease' the case this way more than four times - previously opened cases often came open after the first blow...
Seriously. It worked. Never broke one doing it either. Bloody dangerous things to work inside though. Made those 'toxic waste' iMacs look like child's play!
Ah! Them were the days!
Giant techno-bollocks assist with cooling, rather like real bollocks. Early computers of the mini-tower formfactor didn't have the cooling problems modern computers have. All they needed was a couple of big noisy fans, they didn't even bother with heat sinks. Now big noisy computers were good enough for my father, and his father, and his fathers father, so they are good enough for the likes of you and me.
I'll have none of this new fangled technology and modern thinking in my computers, if it doesn't look like it was put together in a car factory by panel betters in the 1980's then it can't possibly be a computer.
While I'm at it why won't they let me keep my dot matrix printer, it wasn't that noisy when you wore the ear defenders and at least no one could run off with my Car phone, not without clapsing at the end of the street under the weight of it's lead acid battery.
Ah well, then you should be aware that they're outside the body for temperature regulation.
The box wouldn't be so small with the supply in but the overall package would be better. After all they never photograph it with the supply in shot do they? Although you can't run it without one.
Heck, you could go the whole hog and have separate cdrom and hard drive there too after all, they're hot and have electrical fields too.. The cd/dvd/whatever especially gets relatively little use and could be kept in a draw making it even smaller.
I guess my point is that the diddy box on the end of the lumpy cable laden chain of boxes isn't the only thing of relevance.
Yeah well, you know, those "real computer users" just prefer to have a big honkin' case with all the hot stuff inside and plenty of air vents and droning fans and stuff. Personally, the less noise emanates from my computer the better.
Oh and what is the general story value here? You need a putty knife to open a mini, it's never been different. If you lack the balls, have your dealer do the upgrade. Might be a little more expensive but you won't get shafted the same way as when having Apple do it.
The first time I opened my G4 Mini (to upgrade the RAM) I used a putty knife as recommended, and found it to be difficult and fiddly. The second time (to replace a head hard drive) I found that simply using a nice stiff bench knife (also known as a dough knife, pastry scraper, and a bunch of other things - basically that large flat kitchen utensil used to lift up chopped ingredients) works exceptionally well.
I also found that standing it on the front of the case instead of the top helped immensely - that way I could use gravity to my advantage instead of having to fight against it.
Power supply outside is a great feature (they charge an extra £100 for it on a shuttle)
Apart from saving on a fan it makes it a lot quicker and easier to get to market if you don't have to meet mutually incompatible electrical safety regs from 50 different countries.
The real question is why don't Shuttle/Asus/Dell do one of these for $300 ?
I had a generation 1 iBook (a tangerine one, with the curvy case) and THAT was a bitch to open.
When its warranty expired I cracked it open to upgrade the appallingly tiny hard drive and, though I was impressed with its clever trapeze-like structure that avoided baning things while it was carried around with the handle, I was *not* impressed that I had to remove every damn component to get down to the hard disk.
When I dissected it down to there, I took the drive out, and found it was 9.5 millimetres tall, while the replacement drives I could find were 10.5 mm tall. This sucked so massively that it took me over a month to gather the mental wherewithal to reassemble the damn thing. Then, when I finally did, I plugged it in and the battery charging light didn't turn on. I was, to say the least, monumentally sad.
So I went off and crashed out for the night, figuring my computer was dead; and then in the morning, with a heavy heart, pressed the power button to confirm it was, in fact, deceased.
It bonged and started up! The only part that didn't work was the charging indicator light. I have never been happier with a malfunctioning conputer in my life.
They don't make one for $300 because you pay $500. Also, Tsi Ming and Ling Pi from the assembly line say they actually get a bowl of rice a day plus chicken feet on Sundays at current prices and that they would be most unhappy if that was cut back to just half a bowl & chicken feet only on holidays, even if it meant that you could save three or four days worth of minimum wage on your computer.
So you're impressed that they managed to put a barely useful computer into a box that size? Really? Every laptop on the market manages a similar feat, and many of those are a whole lot better designed than that thing.
Did you ever see a Vaio UX1XN?!? It's a quarter of the size, and that includes a keyboard and display. OK calling that a keyboard is a stretch, but it's still better than most smartphones at least ;)
Have done it myself. Pop the base off, undo a few screws and it's sorted, as far as RAM goes.
No way in hell would I attempt that 1TB upgrade though, there are too many things that could go wrong when you start having to solder wires to things, and hand-craft your own custom molex connectors.
I bought the mini last year because it was cheap, small, and pretty much silent compared to my "old dinosaur" PC with the vacuum cleaner fans and cranky hard drive.
This year though... mac mini's gone up by £100, not good when you also factor in the fact that, over the last year, big PC companies have finally started to realise that it might be a good idea to design something that isn't a variation on the "great big heavy noisy black box" theme.
@ Martin - Dell's studio hybrid is cheaper, with a slightly better spec, and then there's this little beauty from ASUS:
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/03/02/asus_eee_box_206
Lots of good stuff floating around these days. :)
...all you need is a little experience. I have lost count of the number of (cheap) plastic things that I have levered and popped open, often in spite of the fact that there were no serviceable parts (user- or otherwise) inside, or screws outside. If I had to get the top off a Mac Mini, knowing that there were no vulnerable parts waiting to be gouged (and that the case wouldn't split) would be *all* of the battle.
Cojones be damned!
Upgraded my Core 2 doodah Mini a few weeks back and it was easy-peasy. And the antenna reconnect turned out to be simpler than it looked, thanks to a pair of tweezers and my new varifocals. As for buying a PC, those things seem to run something called Windows and we wouldn't want that kind of dross on any serious computer. Nasty old business!
External power supplies are no problem. My Mini runs a 24-inch HP monitor very successfully, and while it's true that I'd prefer it to have better graphics - onboard stuff is a cop-out, I'll grant you - the Mini works superbly well and looks a treat. I'm aware that culturally challenged people who run enormous PCs with blue lights, water-cooling and more storage space than ASDA so they can play WoW and download pron to their little hearts' content, don't understand anything about aesthetics, or indeed operating systems, but (and I speak as a reformed PC user here) Apple continually raises the bar that all you drones and your squalid peecees scramble to keep up with every year.
I don't buy computers so I can take them apart, like I don't service my own car - if we were meant to do that, God wouldn't have given us mechanics - but even I discovered that breaking open the Mac Mini is a doddle. So there!
The bug, cos I ain't never 'ad one.
>Power supply outside is a great feature (they charge an extra £100 for it on a shuttle)
Charging for something does not in itself make it great.
>Apart from saving on a fan it makes it a lot quicker and easier to get to market if you don't
>have to meet mutually incompatible electrical safety regs from 50 different countries.
Well, one's the testicular reason and the other is a manufacturing benefit not a
specific improvement to the device from the consumer perspective.
BTW You can get fanless supplies.
The fact is that all the components aren't in the box.
My telly seems to cope with the power supply inside, would you want a separate power brick for your telly? The dvd player? the hifi? All of a sudden you have lots of power bricks next to each other that are each hoping to use ambient cooling.
It does make the box small and pretty, and it might be less so with an inbuilt supply.
First, there is no regulation. There is simply keeping the heat of the power supply away from the sensitive guts of the computer. My body doesn't lower my testicles away from my body to prevent my body from getting too hot.
Second, I don't buy this whole "that's why they are outside the body" argument. What better regulation of temperature could there be besides actually having them INSIDE the body??? A standard 98.6f 24 hours a day. You're telling me in millions of years of evolution it was easier to develop a varying size scrotum to keep sperm a "good" temperature than it was to just make sperm that enjoy 98.6??? Sorry, it makes no sense.
You could view it as keeping the sensitive guts of the computer away from the heat of the power supply..
I agree on the evolution argument. Cooling is the reason that's always reeled out for the dangling, but evolution doesn't work with "reasons" as such.
@Barry Lane
Does your 24 inch HP monitor have an external PSU?
...because they cool my PC, sucking hot air out, not all the way around. The PSU is pretty much the main way to cool the PC, anyway, in case any other fan collapses.
I hate those dangling cables, with weights hanging on them (they look like Argentinian boliadeiras), they look like they are specific designed to be such tripping hazards. Not to mention adding to cable clutter.
Plus I hate 'fat' cell phone battery chargers, you need tons of eletrical outlets if you want to charge 2 things like that at the same time.
My 2.1 subwoofer system also has external power supply, but it serves a noble purpose of non-interference, but it adds to cable clutter on the back of my PC.
However, my dad's ginormous COF 300 Watt - RMS amplifier has it built inside the case (hence the ginourmous) so all the mains plugs fit tightly together with the DVD / Telly / Cable set-top-box. Even the back-panel on the media shelf looks clean and orderly, thanks to no-dangling-psu, and all the cables neatly tied together. Talk about aesthetics now!
The only cables dangling loose there are the oldish non-coaxial twisted speakers cables, for obvious reasons.
If your PSU is running hot (internal or external) its cos the cowboy who built the system underspecced it.
If your fans are running noisy its cos you have too many/too small/too fast. You also probably don't have proper fan control and replaced the intel stock fan with something called Pro or IceAge cos it looked cool.
It's obvious why the device is hard to open and has an external power supply.
It's made from laptop components.
That's also why it's the price that it is and why it's difficult to open.
Get used to it or stop crying.
If your big gripe is that the power supply is external then please go out and kick yourself in the knackers. If something goes wrong with it, you can easily replace the power supply. There are still the same number of cables, just one of them has a small brick on it. Considering how much smaller a Mac Mini is compared to a desktop PC, you've still gained space.
...and btw, last time I looked the power came from an electricity substation. It wasn't even generated there. Next people will be complaining that there isn't an electric generator built into their computers too and that it's hanging somewhere outside the box like some kind of bollock. I've got a new name for these fools - Teste-tards.
Natural selection (one facet of evolution) work with reasons, provided that they are reasons why one feature remains or is modified within a population. Unfortunately many adaptations happened so far back that it's difficult to make a suggestion on what selective pressure may have been present.
Add to natural selection the idea of genetic drift and the fact that genes that currently are not under selective pressure are subject to random fluctuation and perhaps you get a fuller picture for why some features may have appeared even without selection.
As it turns out, in the case of descended testicles it may have been an early mammalian, or pre-mammalian trait that is actually being deselected across the branches of the mammal family tree. See http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9892556
>It's obvious why the device is hard to open and has an external power supply.
>It's made from laptop components.
Err no, it's because the supply won't fit in the box, it's pretty obvious that if you made the box bigger you could put the supply in it.
>That's also why it's the price that it is and why it's difficult to open.
>Get used to it or stop crying.
>If something goes wrong with it, you can easily replace the power supply.
So what if something goes wrong with the hard drive for instance?
I always believed that the reason why testicles were on the outside was that the optimum temperature to keep stored wrigglers was a few degrees below body heat.
This is normally quoted as the reason why you should bin the Y-fronts or briefs for boxers if you are trying to procreate. Apparently, higher temperatures make male gametes lazy, like Paris on a sunbed, so they don't move as fast.
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