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).'"

Comments

Re:A buttload of Money

[TheKidWho]

or if you like OS X.

or if you want a silent computer that doesnt overheat.

for a good cheap comp though, nforce3 + athlon + ram + HD + cd/dvd + case probablly might end up coming out to around $500. But the computer definetly wont be the size of the mac mini, or as quiet.

That little WiFi board connector

[Mercano]

Is the slot for the WiFi\Bluetooth card any sort of standard connector? Apple carges $75 for 802.11* ($125 for 802 and Bluetooth), which seems sorta pricy, unless, of course, you need to get an Apple specifc part, at which point it is just a ripoff.

Yeah, you probably could just hook up a USB 802 adapter, but then you loose some "look how small it is" points.

Re:A buttload of Money

[MoneyT]

Untill you get to thinking about the slots and what you need them for. Example, my PC sitting here has 5 PCI slots and 1 AGP slot.

The AGP slot is occupied by a video card, which I just recently replaced for the first time in 5 years. On the mac mini, that's already built onto the board with an ATI chipset.

1 PCI slot is used by my Soudblaster card, which I just recently upgraded, again for the first time in 5 years, and that was because the card never worked right in the first place and this happened to be the time I was upgrading things. On the mac mini, this is built into the system

1 PCI slot is occupied by an ethernet card, un upgraded in 5 years. Gigabit is built into the mac mini

1 slot contains a USB/Firewire card, again, un upgraded, and built into the mac mini.

The other two slots remain unused, and for the forseeable future, I have no use for them. In the end, they're actualy a waste.

So when I look at the mac mini, it has everything I would use PCI/AGP slots for built in.

So then the question becomes well what if you want to upgrade?

Well, when I did my mass upgrade for the first time in 5 years (until now, I had only added RAM), I bought a new motherboard, a new processor, new graphics card, new soundcard and new RAM. My total cost came out to about $600 after rebates.

After reflecting on this, it occurs to me, that if a mac mini suits my needs, by the time I would decide to upgrade it, I might as well just buy a new one for $500.

In fact, for the first time, my computer would actualy be a disposable product. Something that I could (theoreticaly) just discard and buy a new one when it no longer served my needs, and it would be roughly price equivilant to upgrading the system.

So in the end, having PCI slots and an accessable case on the mac mini would seem to be more of a waste than a benefit.

Of course, you can always argue that hard core gamers and power users have other things and upgrade more frequently, but I argue that no hardcore gamer/power user is buying a $500 computer.

Re:A buttload of Money

[Leo McGarry]

Here's a crazy, mixed-up suggestion.

Howzabout you buy a computer instead of hand-carving your own microchips?

People love to talk about how you can build a top-flight desktop computer for $3.25 plus two subway tokens and some kind of weird-ass coin that you dug out of your sofa that's got "Røølï" written on it, but what they curiously omit is the fact that if you took all the time you'd spend gathering parts and assembling them and worked a minimum-wage job at some fast food place instead, you'd earn hundreds of dollars. So the real cost of this "It's Shake-n-Bake, and I helped!" special is, in fact, several times higher than the sum of the price tags on the hundreds of inscrutable parts that went into it.

People who say "I can build that for less" are either not bothering to account for their time or just flat-out lying, because the plain truth of the matter is that if they could, somebody already would have, and you'd be able to just go out to a 7-11 and buy the damn thing for half off with the purchase of a medium or large fountain drink.

Re:HDD Q

[GreatDrok]

You know, I am sitting here using my Apple iBook G4 933Mhz and wondering why people get so wound up about the 'lack' of power in the new Mac mini. The only thing I would do is upgrade the RAM as I did with this iBook (added 512MB for £75 from crucial) which makes the machine nice and snappy. Other than that, the G4 is a great processor because it runs cool (my iBook is currently running at about 40 degrees Celsius and the fan doesn't kick in until it hits 75 so it is virtually silent. Same will be true of the Mac mini. Compare that to a typical cheap PC. Also, my iBook has the same graphics capabilities and a slower CPU than the mini but it is able to play UT2004 at 1024x768 surprisingly well, better than the Geforce4MX my PC came with.

All things considered, the Mac mini will be a great machine to use and own. Mac OS X works smoothly even on a sub 1Ghz G4 so the mini is going to be ample. More to the point, where my XP Pro box with Athlon XP 2200+ and 512MB of RAM quite often feels slow and bogged down the iBook multitasks much better. I doubt that the slow hard drive in the Mac mini is going to be that big an issue either. Just do yourself a favour if you buy one, get the cheapest and stick some Crucial RAM in it (512MB is the sweet spot). I would get a Mac keyboard but use a standard 3 button scroll wheel mouse and put a good quality 17" LCD on there. That is going to get you a really nice Mac for budget PC money and it will run OS X, something I think is worth a great deal.

Re:A buttload of Money

[Phroggy]

The mac mini is a "decent" game system.

Sorry, you're wrong here - Macs are just not gaming machines, unfortunately. Many games are never ported to the Mac platform (e.g. Halflife), most are ported months or years after the initial x86 release, new games require faster Macs than what us mortals can afford, and old games aren't Mac OS X native so they run (poorly) under emulation.

And I say this as a long-time Mac lover, typing this on my iBook G4 which I love dearly, but on which Warcraft 3 is slow, UT runs in Classic (which doesn't seem to support multiple mouse buttons), Quake 3 also runs in Classic because the native port is even worse, and the UT2k4 demo doesn't even render the title screen correctly. Granted, this machine is nearly a year old now; perhaps a Mac mini would fare better with newer games (and the Classic issue should now be moot). Even still, Counterstrike isn't going to happen. I've been using Macs seriously since System 6, but I can't recommend them as a gaming platform until more game developers take the platform seriously, doing side-by-side development and releasing dual-platform hybrid CDs (a few do this already, of course).