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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).'"
It would make a good brain for a robot
Does anyone have pictures of the actual insides of a mac mini, instead of just a motherboard? I'd like to see how the parts fit in together, and how the cooling works.
Is there an actual audio in on the board? Cause there's no socket for it. Apparently this is because there are superior USB devices that work with GarageBand so no-one would use an audio in jack if there was one. What I wanna know is what's the best way to use this as a PVR? Are there USB tv tuners? How about USB high definition receivers?
How we know is more important than what we know.
So does the Mac Mini use a laptop hard drive or what? It doesn't say anything about the HDD on that page nor the pages that I looked at on the day of the announcement. It would make sense, seeing how the Mac Mini is basically an iBook in a box, but it would kill performance.
http://www.mini-itx.com/news/98490587/
On the same site..... WAAAAAAAY cooler, or hotter, depending.
I had this video for awhile because I am training to be a Apple Portable / Desktop Tech, If you purchuse the $299 Apple Service Training you get this and any other Take apart video for free. THe person that leaked this could be in some serious trouble..
keanmarine.com
No, There is just one asshole and he works in Europe Support. it seems that apple service state side and here in europe are two different beasts.
i bought my power book in the US but live right now in europe. I sent it in for the know problem of white spots on the display. There was some shipping damage and ES (euro support) refused to take any responsibility for it and refused fix anything stating - paraphrasing - give us $900 or we won't fix it, because the damage was not listed in the original service request. but when i got back to the states, thety fixed it no questions asked.
I was talking to customer service in Ireland complaining about the level of service i was receiving. I had the guy on the phone tell me that he had head the words extortion and blackmail used a lot by people refering to the kind of support from ES.
Form you own conclusion!
Nevertheless, I do wonder if there's some sort of sticker or seal on the inside to let Apple know you've opened the case.
:)
Yeah, 'cause the apple repair technicians are just going to open the case and inspect the sticker and, oh, wait...
And no, stickers on the outside of the case arent an option. Nothing can uglify that beautiful case.
Had a gateway once with a void warranty sticker on the case. Before I knew anything about hardware and how to build my own computers of course. How did I learn to build computers? Went to my first LAN party with said Gateway, cracked the case and installed a NIC. I was support after that.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I have been thinking of picking up one of these mostly for it's size. And the fact I miss having a mac in my pc room.
Once you start having 4 or 5+ pc's they start to take up a lot of space. And as far as upgrading things goes once your on a giga bit lan and have a TB+ disk storage you tend to slow down how much you open cases on anything other than a gaming rig.
Let's see there is the Gamming rig, 2nd pc (as in your upgrading fast enough that your leftovers tend to make a PC), Server 1 (Mostly web stuff but it can handle games for lan party's now and then.), Sever 2 Disk Space (5x 250gig in rad 5 for storage and a 60 gig drive for the OS), Old SUN box from ebay, iMac for MP3's in the living room, Laptop, and then the old junk that's now powered up but still takes up space...
Starting to wonder if I am ever going to go under 200$ electric bill again... probably not.
well, for the dell pc you could buy bluetooth and wifi for about 1/4 the price of the cost of selecting the bluetooth+wifi option for the mac.
nothing about the mac mini is cheap beyond the initial unit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Uh, no, what you want to do is use OS X's Spoken User Interface for hands free operation. The touch screen idea isn't bad, and maybe the best overall solution is some combination of the two.
Also, with the appropriate hacks (perhaps Salling Clicker), you could integrate your bluetooth phone into the mix. Open Address Book, search for a name and have the computer dial out over the phone with voice commands. Incoming calls could also automatically mute the volume on iTunes.
I dunno, that's just off the top of my head. You could also use your bluetooth phone to connect to the internet to look up directions on mapquest, but it'd probably be better to pull over for that.
One question. If the mini Mac goes into the car stereo space, does the printer go into the glove compartment or do you just mount it on top of the dash? =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
This was always a big point of contention for me. On the dell you could get any (because all network cards work with windows) 25$ 802.11G card that has a small antenna sticking out of the back of the pci slot (you wouldn't notice it if its sitting with its back to the wall). Wheras with apple - even if you had a pci slot you're stuck buying the one or two cards that work with OSX for quite a bit more.
Speak for yourself. "Most people" are not Slashdot techies who spend hours faffing around with their machines.
I have a car and I certainly do not spend half of my life messing around with the engine to squeeze 5% out of the thing. I use it to drive around. Same for most people and computers.
Besides, I am by this time sick and tired of having to maintain a lot of half-assed home-built computers. The waste of time is not really worth it.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I have to admit to being a bit old-fasioned, I'd probably crap myself if my car started talking to me or something.
:) As we all know, that just doesn't work...
What would be a cool idea would be car-to-car wireless networking combined with this, so you could set up your own little broadcast radio station for other people stuck around you in traffic.
But for UI, I'd probably just prefer to wire up something like my current mouse (an A4tech with two wheels and five buttons) which could basically control everything if you just disabled the mousing functionality and just used it as a tactile control. Hell, you could fit it to the gear-shift lever and be done with it, then you'd actually have an excuse for driving around with your left hand down there all the time other than trying to look cool
I've been using PC's since the 80286 (my first one actually had a 8088 in it, but it was old by then). I don't even want to start counting how many PC's I've owned since then. Suffice to say that currently I have six Windows machines and a dual G4 Mac.
FWIW, with the exception of hard disks, never ever have I had only one component fail on me. And believe me, after 20 years and god-knows how many systems later I've had my fair share of failures. Last time some broke, I lost a mobo, a processor, two network cards, a hard drive and a video card. I have no idea which one went first, they were all fried.
while true;do echo -e -n "\033[s\n\033[u\134_\033[B";done
What concerns me is the MAC Mini Power supply. As a European my wall plugs give me 220V at 50Hz. I have some American contacts who will be travelling here shortly and can bring me a mac mini. Mac mini sells here at about EUR 500, which is about 25-30% more expensive than $500.
7 50 99 doesn't give me any info. (yet?)
Does anyone know whether
- The power supply sold with the Mac Mini's in the US support 220V
- The power cable is easily replacable with one that fits European wall outlets?
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=
Compare the Mac Mini with Hoojum products. Coincidence? Engaged made made the same comparison.
In my experience, Apple UK is pretty bad too. I've had hardware problems with every mac I've had recently (my bad luck, I think), and every time it's been a real chore getting Apple to fix it, even with AppleCare. Each time, I've ended up having to call up someone in Customer Relations in the US and have them intervene.
The last time, my iBook screen went dead while it was just sitting on my desk. I was turned away from the Apple Centre in Kensington on the grounds that I'd bought the iBook at a different store (an Apple-authorised reseller). Apple's telephone support refused to even discuss the fault unless I paid an incident fee, which they assured me would be refunded if it turned out to be a warranty issue (which it did). That is NOT the way warranties are meant to work. My AppleCare-covered PM G4 workstation had a broken SuperDrive which destroyed the hardware test CD with a buzzsaw sound when Apple told me to try it. They wanted me to send them the machine for three weeks, just to replace a £30 part I could have fitted myself in less than a minute.
Apple US support is great. Apple UK support isn't. I'm hoping the presence of the London retail store might make things easier, at least for us London residents.
If I didn't rely so much on OS X and its pure superiority to everything else (IMHO), I'd never buy Apple hardware again.
They're not trying to prove that Macs are cheaper than shitty PCs - they simply released a Mac that is cheaper than other Macs.
From the outset it was clear that you could build/buy a PC for less money than a Mac mini, but that's just not the point.
It's a Mac, in a box the size of a few CD cases, with a full OS, CD burning, DVD playing, wireless etc.
I will second the post claiming major perceivable changes when going from 4200 to 7200rpm. OSX is heavily disk dependent -- for example most menu operation require going to the disk and reading some file or worse like enumerating some files, or even worse like running some code that needs to read in from the disk. Think contextual menus for example. History menu in Safari. Sick of it already?
4200 is barely acceptable.
some considerations when upgrading hard drives.
Power - little change when going from 4200 to 7200, within 10% most. No problem here.
Latency - typically 7ms, 5.5ms amd 4.2 for 4200/5400/7200 rpm respectively. 7200 is almost twice as good as 4200.
Seek time - 12ms for 4200/5400, 10ms for the lone 7200 available. Nice but not earth shattering.
Buffers - 8GB in better drives. Unrelated to rpm.
Noise - slower is better. 7200RPM is roughly 2 time louder.
Reliability - who knows, specs are unhelpful here.
I'm no Mac fanboy; I've got plenty of x86 machines running Linux and XP (it does have its uses) all over the place at work and at home. But, the very next machine on my list to buy is the Mac Mini. Seems to me that the whole point of the Mac Mini (and indeed of all Macs in general) is this:
1. You bring it home.
2. You turn it on.
3. It just fucking works.
Constrast with the proceedure for x86 machines:
1. You bring it home.
2. You install all your expansion cards.
3. You install the operating system. We all do that ourselves, right?
4. You configure the operating system for the devices you have installed
5. You shut down and rearrange the expansion devices and pray that it clears up interrupt conflicts.
6. Probably go to step 4. Eventually fall out of this loop.
7. Tweek. Repeat.
8. Futz. Repeat.
I've wasted many, many hours of my precious life installing, configuring, tweeking, twiddling, rearranging, futzing, prodding, farting around with, etc., all these x86 machines. I want at least one computer that I don't have to dick with. Here's my checklist for justifying my buying one:
1. Runs Quicken? Check.
2. Runs TurboTax? Check.
3. Mozilla products? Check.
4. Runs MS Office (sorry, gotta use it)? Check.
5. Runs Photoshop? Check.
6. Runs iTunes? Check.
7. Unix-based? Check. X11? Check. ('tho I'm no big fan of BSD-ish installations, I'll get used to it).
8. Upgradable? Who gives a shit?
What this means for me is that I can dump two machines that I have at home (one Linux, one XP), and replace it with a smaller, no-muss-no-fuss, machine.
Geeze, how can I resist?
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
I guess this must be pretty common. First thing I did on Christmas was clean up my mom's computer of viruses and spyware. She runs Spybot Search and Destroy every day but can't understand the concept of having to update the signatures. I wish it had an automatic update like AVG does for viruses. I'd buy her one of these Mac Minis in a heartbeat except the thing she uses 99% of the time isn't supported: Yahoo Messenger Voice Chat. To her that is the killer application. I could completely get rid of her Windows box if Macs supported Yahoo Messenger Voice Chat. Sounds silly doesn't it? She could use iChat, but all her friends use Yahoo Messenger so she refuses to switch.
Would I tolerate a refridgerator that was cold enough to make liquid nitrogen if it also kicked out a 90dB whine? No. Would I ever use a toaster that was 5x larger than it needed to be and so ugly that I had to hide it under a desk? No. Do I want my toilet to blue-screen-of-death on me? Not particularly.
First off: Fedora runs just dandy with *pretty much* any motherboard on the market today. Bundled software be damned, it's all crap anyway. Second off: Pretty much any *nix oss application you can think of compiles and installes under OSX with little or no modification. There are even automated tools to do this with such as Fink and darwinports. Often times it is even easier than that. Just simply download Gimp, Wings3d, Blender, or dozens of other oss .apps that work perfectly, installing them by just dragging to the desktop / hdd. (for those that don't already know, .app "files" are actually folders containing the main executable and other required data files. This is what makes it so easy to install (drag to HDD) and dis-install (drag to trash) software on a mac.
Third off: There are Pros and cons to every operating system. I use my Powerbook 17" for image processing, colour critical work (properly calibrated 23" Cinema display HD), high end 3d, and lots of other stuff. I use my windows box for games (just about all it's good for). I use my Linux box as a raid fileserver, xmms, xvid encoding, and rendering.
Fourth off: All three of these operating systems have different target audiences while all three try to cator (sometimes badly) to all three audiences. Linux takes patience, time, but allows extreme custimization and speed. Windows... well windows plays games well sometimes. OSX does everything but (many) games very well.
Well that's my take on this for what it's worth.
lol! Sorry to make you a little green.
Here's the scoop on the unfortunate dual-USB G3 iBook:
A design flaw was caused by the way the video was mounted on the motherboard.
Even if you didn't buy AppleCare on your it, they extended the basic coverage on the motherboard for that particular model from one year to three, just because of this problem.
If you sent yours in sometime in the last year, odds are that they put in a motherboard which added a small spacer between the video card and the board, which is supposed to put a stop to the video problems. In my case, it just so happened that the tech who fixed it also re-assembled it incorrectly, and it came back damaged as a result.
Since I had gone back and forth with them a couple of times before the design flaw was discovered, and now they were not able to resolve the problem on the first attempt after the fix was known, they decided this time around that enough was enough, and gave me a new replacement.
I didn't insist on it or pound my shoe on the table or anything, I just persisted in my expectation that they would resolve the matter somehow.
If yours was fixed properly last time you sent it in (with the newly-modified mobo) the odds are against you having any further problems with it.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.