Friday, November 8th 2024
Apple's New Mac mini Comes with Removable Storage
Both pictures and videos of a partial teardown of Apple's recently launched Mac mini with the M4 SoC have appeared online courtesy of various Chinese sources. There are at least two interesting parts to these partial teardowns and they're related to storage and WiFi. On the storage front, Apple has moved away from having soldered NAND chips straight on the main PCB of the Mac mini, to instead having them on a custom PCB which is similar to M.2, but a custom Apple design. The PCB pictured contained a pair of 128 GB NAND chips and with the source of the teardown being from China, there's also a video showing a repair shop desoldering the two chips and replacing them with two 1 TB chips, or in other words, the SSD was upgraded from 256 GB to 2 TB.
The upgrade brought with it some extra performance as well, even if the write speed remained at a comparatively slow 2900 MB/s, the read speed went up from 2000 MB/s to 3300 MB/s which is a significant gain in performance. This is obviously not a consumer friendly upgrade path, but we'd expect to see third party upgrade options at some point in the future, assuming there's no black listing of third party storage modules. The NAND controller is still likely to be integrated into Apple's SoC, but the PCB that the NAND flash chips are mounted onto appears to have some kind of SPI flash on it as well, which might make third party upgrades a lot harder.
As for the WiFi module, Apple has designed a very quirky solution that connects via a ribbon cable to the main PCB of the Mac mini. The entire module sits at the bottom of the Mac mini and not only houses the WiFi and Bluetooth module, but it's also the antenna and it looks like it's either a 3x3 antenna or a 2x2 plus Bluetooth antenna, but Bluetooth shouldn't need nearly as complex of an antenna design as a tri-band WiFi antenna, as the Mac mini supports WiFi 6E. The WiFi module also has a gap for the air intake for the CPU fan, as well as two parts with mesh to allow the hot air to escape out of the Mac mini. This is by far one of the most elaborate WiFi solutions we've ever seen in a mini computer.
Sources:
via @L0vetodream on X/Twitter, videos via @ohgkg on X/Twitter
The upgrade brought with it some extra performance as well, even if the write speed remained at a comparatively slow 2900 MB/s, the read speed went up from 2000 MB/s to 3300 MB/s which is a significant gain in performance. This is obviously not a consumer friendly upgrade path, but we'd expect to see third party upgrade options at some point in the future, assuming there's no black listing of third party storage modules. The NAND controller is still likely to be integrated into Apple's SoC, but the PCB that the NAND flash chips are mounted onto appears to have some kind of SPI flash on it as well, which might make third party upgrades a lot harder.
45 Comments on Apple's New Mac mini Comes with Removable Storage
Edit:
I wouldn't mind buying an Apple Mac Mini at the Student price ($499).
Imagine if IBM-compatible had never been a thing.
They are getting too much power imo.
One thing for Apple to not include things, another to actively use digital code to block others.
1. Are considering a Mac Mini,
2. for whom upgradable internal storage is a deal-breaker, and
3. insist upon said storage being M.2 NVMe.
My guess: single-digit percentage at best.
You do know that macs can remotely reinstall macOS on new drives right? Or you can download the installer from the app store and make a bootable USB drive, no different from windows.A single digit percentage that are some of the biggest enthusiast and act as an advertising arm for the company in question.
Apple is using a Broadcom BCM57762 Ethernet controller and a Genesys Logic GL3590 USB 3.2 Gen 2 hub in the Mac mini, based on what I could see in the videos.
Be warned, he's annoying.
www.youtube.com/shorts/8vax1fShm8E
So this device and it's SSD quirks aren't abnormal by any stretch.
As for remarks on reinstalls and the power connector it sounds like people here have never managed Macs or .nix here. You can remotely reinstall the OS at any point you want. You can also directly reinstalling it from the device. It's a non issue but you rarely have to reboot them and they handle power states much better and make Windows look like a pile of shit. Ditto for memory and storage management. In the case of the Mini they are often installed on the back of a display. Thus the button on the back makes sense. Another common use is clusters of them. In which case they are sort of shelf racked and remotely managed like blade servers. And just like blade servers or servers if you do need to truly shut them down you are pulling it out anyways. If this is going to sit on your desk due to the SOCs sipping power and apples superior power management you are not going to turn it off unless you need to take it to the store for repairs and restarts are rare.This makes no sense considering apple has much higher customer statisfaction, service, resale value, and everything else compared to all the Windows stuff and ASUS type brands that make hardware for it.
You might as well say the contempt Rolex has for it's customers compared to Timex.
I wonder if you buy 8TB model do they slap QLC flash on those, because that would be double hilarious if people spend 3k$ on 8TB QLC drive. I know that Apple was moving (or at least planning) to QLC on iPhones with 2TB to of course raise profits while shitting on ignorant customers.
Base MM is nice, decent machine, but that's it. All expansion options are totally F up with Apple greed.
Typical Apple iWaste design, which needs to be boycot.