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Mac mini Dissection
xbasque writes "Smash has a video showing the technique for cracking open a Mac mini safely. Upgrade the RAM and hard drive yourself and save a bundle (ain't that the point of the mini?)" And if you don't plan to take one apart yourself,
parvenu74 points out the pictures of exploratory Mac mini surgery on mini-itx.com, writing "From a post: 'The board itself is slightly smaller than Mini-ITX at about 160mm square by our estimations, and includes Ethernet, Modem, DVI/VGA, 2 x USB, Firewire and Audio connectors (sadly not optical).'"
Let's hope it's not hosted on a dissected mac mini. Unless it's overclocked. Then it's OK.
To put one of these babies in my car.
Then put some wicked cool Red LED Lights in the front of the car, and whenever the car talks to me, the red lights act like a visualizer of sorts. Knight Rider here I come!
I don't understand how the MAC-mini works. If it's so small, how does it keep the rain out?
So would a Cray. If you made a really big robot.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
Can I guess Smash's method of opening the case or should I RTFA?
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Nevertheless, I do wonder if there's some sort of sticker or seal on the inside to let Apple know you've opened the case.
In my experience with PC repair, you can usually tell by how thoroughly the person who brought it in denies having opened the case, which is always in proportion to how broken it is.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
Really big robots are the best kind, especially when they turn against their creators, as robots inevitably do.
[evil]
... I can imagine the expressions on their face when they see the all the pieces laying there on the table ...
Dissecting a MiniMac is sort of like ripping the limbs off of your kid sister's Barbie dolls and glueing them back onto your GI Joe action figures
[/evil]
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
From the FA:
the rounded corners should help cramming it into unusual places
I know I'm going to regret asking, but just what are the usual "unusual places"?
$399 Dell PC: "No Wireless"
$499 Minimac: "AirPort Extreme- and Bluetooth-ready"
So.... that'd be the "no wireless" option for the minimac too?
The revolution will not be televised. It won't be on a friggin blog either
you know the X stands for 10 right? What you want me to say Windows XP eXPerience too? Or Kernel 2.6 version 2.6.4mk1
mac mini wins because it has no free agp slot, no free pci slots, no free hd slots, no free ddr slots
The EMS USB2 adapter will add two slots for DDR to any machine with USB ports.
You can build two stinking x86 computers
You said it yourself. You could build two x86 computers, which will stink compared to the Mac mini.
It had to be said...
The Mac mini HAS a traditional v.92 modem. Go here, and look right next to the ethernet port.
I'm actually considering getting one of these (If enough suckers^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wpeople sign up with my sig!). I normally hate Macs, but since I've wanted just an extra machine to store stuff and occasionally mess around with, this suits my needs perfectly, plus it hides well, and It's cheap!
Ah crap, I said I hate Macs... there goes my karma!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Well, I guess it's about that time. We're coming up on another release of Mac OS X, so it's time to blow the dust off the old "here's the difference between the name and the version number" lecture.
...there are like six point two billion people on this planet. You're the only one left who doesn't get this.
Frankly, after the sheer number of recitations this particular lesson got back in the roll-up to Panther in 2003, I'm kind of amazed that there's anybody left who doesn't understand this oh-so-simple concept. But apparently there's always another idiot out there, so here we go again.
The name of the software is "Mac OS X." That's its name. It's pronounced "Mac OS Ten," because we all learned back in elementary school that the Romans used letters instead of numbers. Remember how they made us do arithmetic, how we all learned that L + L = C and M + M = MM and all that? You thought that was just useless make-work, but no! It was, in fact, vitally important for your future understanding of product names. Well the future is now, friends. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
In addition to a name, the software has a version number. That version number, as of tonight, is 10.3.7. Every time Apple releases another version of the software, the version number changes. Sometimes the changes are small, from 10.3.6 to 10.3.7. Sometimes they're big, like from 10.2 to 10.3.
So there are two parts, okay? There's the name -- Mac OS X --and the version number. Two separate things.
So when you wrote, "X.4," you were demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between a name and a number. You were, in short, being an idiot.
Now, before you get all whiney and complain that my harsh words have made your vagina hurt, let me reassure you: I empathize, I really do. Apple is the one to blame here. It's their fault for creating such a skull-twistingly confusing product with a number in its name, and a Roman numeral at that. What, are we all speaking Latin again? Are we all sitting around going "Quo vadimus?" at each other? Just who the hell do Apple think they are, making things all hard like that? Arrogant little pricks.
However, in Apple's defense
So, just in the future, you might want to think about extracting your head from your rectum and getting with the program, huh, chief?
There's a good boy.
Shitty Mobo... shitty HD... really, really shitty case... no firewire... no modem... you need a case fan... and OOPS, no power supply.
Good luck running Windows and/or Linux on that thing. Most PC's need electricity.
That system, with a good $40 power supply and a copy of Windows XP (not the home crapola... actual XP), will cost you well over $600.
Then again, this is Slashdot, so let's pretend it's a Linux-only box (while installing a stolen copy of Windows from the office on the second partition), and say it's a mere $458 plus shipping for that steaming brown clumpy nutty pile of moist crap.
I think I'll stick with the mini, thanks.
Sure I would waste 7 hours finding my parts, coming home putting them together etc... but ITS FUN!!! and a learning experience.
If you want to be a dull dumb boy and just BUY everything in this world, do it, become a robot consumer slave where in your view, NO ONE should have any skills apart from the job you do and be 100% a clueless idiot for anything else.
Dude, people love to spend 5 hours preparing a super uber dinner too, sure they could work for 5 hrs, then go to a resteraunt and get the same, but why?? To support your macro economic consumer engine? So more people spend and buy , more money rotates and makes more taxes? Screw the banking money elite system, do it your self, reduce the govts taxes, become a better person for it.
Simply 'outsourcing' everything might create more jobs, but you become a duller useless human being.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Why should he not?
Linux rocks. Mac Mini rocks. The two together obviously rock twice as hard.
Are you seriously suggesting that nobody could possibly prefer Linux once they've used MacOS X? Think again, buddy.
...a higher wattage CPU...
/. here so why do you use wattage? Of course you mean power
consumption. To any half clued techie, Wattage sounds just as silly
as Ampereage, Faradage, Ohmage and Voltage. (current, capacitance,
resistance and potential)
We're om
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Just outta curiousity, was there *any* left over screws?
Dosen't matter how many things I've taken apart, there always seems to be atleast one extra screw!
/. is good for you.
Obviously you slept through the lesson in 4th grade where they taught Roman Hexadecimal Numerals.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Wow!
I didn't know Cartman was a Mac-version naming snob!
He even posts on slashdot!
.
"You have liberated me from thought."
we all learned back in elementary school that the Romans used letters instead of numbers
And they had no zero. That's why when the Romans wanted to get some math done, they kidnapped an Arab.
Or at least, that's what my high school calc teacher told me.
I was pretty disappointed that it didn't come with a 16 port 232 serial card myself. I mean, come on Apple, you didn't even include and 8" floppy - who's gonna buy one of these?
That was classic intercourse!
It's VERY important that those of you who need PCI slots and super fast processors DO NOT BUY a mac mini.
You are ABSOLUTELY right. The DELLs come WITH PCI slots, a SUPER FAST intel processor, and BEST OF ALL.....WINDOWS!!!
If you start MESING WITH WINTEL SUCCESS by thinking of trying a mac now you will only DELAY the arrival of MY mac-mini which I will be ordering soon.
It is OBVIOUS that any computer that doesn't sound like a 707 when you turn it on is NO COMPUTER at all.
There is CLEARLY NO VALUE in reducing the size and audible noise of a PC. In fact, if anything, telling the world you have a little cabinet is BAD BAD BAD!!!
The mac-mini is NOT for you. Please continue to purchase DELLs and whatnot so you have something to show off to your friends while you drone on about expandability, oh, and stop picking your nose.
Actually the lack of Firewire 800 is a deal-breaker for me. Without it, there is no way to get any kind of high-speed mass storage connected to the thing. It uses a laptop-grade (ie; slow) HD and has no gigabit for connecting to a shared RAID.
"Leave the strategizing to those of us with planet-sized brains." -Tycho