inside Mac mini

DJ-S1DJ-S1 Registered Users Posts: 2,303 Major grins
edited April 1, 2005 in The Big Picture
I spent about 10 minutes taking apart a Mac mini the other day. It's pretty cool, very tightly packed. Looks like they used a lot of cell phone style shielding to pass emissions. There are several areas where there is shielding that is obviously hand-packed, which leads me to surmise that they had a little trouble passing the tests. That's certainly not unusual.

It snaps together with a bunch of plastic snaps in the white outer skin. To open it, you just flip it over and slip some very thin metal between the outer plastic and the bottom pan. Putty knives would work; I used metal scales. The snaps are on the front and the 2 sides, none on the rear edge. If you are gentle you won't leave any marks.

Once the cover is removed, the RAM is pretty easy to get at although one of the ejectors can't move far enough to release fully. It hits one of the rear shields, but you can still wiggle the RAM out. Looks like a standard laptop size hard drive, so I guess you could upgrade that pretty easily as well, except that it is mounted with the optical drive on a separate bracket and then they are both connected to a rear riser card. I didn't look that closely but I would assume that any most any laptop drive would work in there.

Anyway, it was pretty neat. The Apple design team is very talented, that's for sure. If you buy one and you're curious, have a crack at it. Don't know if it voids your warranty though.:uhoh
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