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
I'm genuinely surprised Apple didn't devise a firmware lock or other shenanigans to block use of non-Apple parts, the same way those arseholes do with non-Apple parts for a phone or iPad.
Again, keep in mind that this isn't an SSD, the controller is built into the SoC, this is just some NAND and a few passive components on a PCB, as well as what appears to be an SPI flash or maybe even just an EEPROM chip.
Why? Below just an explanation:
I repaired two apple devices three years ago.
Both devices failed with the key combination and internet plugged in to remotely install an operating system.
one device looked like a desktop monitor. the hdd was dead according to apple operating system. It was readable in my gnu gentoo linux. I swapped the drive for a ssd and had a lot to do to get the operating system on that box. I learnt that there is a key combination for operating system installation but that was not working for that device. Just by chance i ripped the power on cable. Which was designed such way that you rip it by opening hte device. I repaired a lot of android based smartphones and a few x86 based computers before. I think I have a bit of knowledge on how to "refurbish" or repair a device. I do repair stuff when I get asked by my friends or work colleagues.
another device looked like a notebook. Same issue with upgrading the operating system.
Basically the only way for myself was like always. Like e.g. getting gnu linux on a box. Getting a macos image and get it bootable via usb.
Those are still running today thanks to the openness of the design.
I swear, after that, they created a dept that its only duty is to make sure their rabid fanbois cannot upgrade their Macs.
Actually, they have another assignment, make these things as complicated as possible so easy disassembling is not available to mere mortals.
Compare the tear down of a Mac Studio and a regular mini pc.
...and then I read it properly, rather than skimming it, and see that it works because they went to the trouble of desoldering the NAND packages :eek:
So maybe you're right - there's no reason to not lock it, forcing people to pay $400 for an extra 0.75TB of storage, worth about $40. If upgrading to 1TB cost as little as a $60 SSD and $15 adapter, Apple would be undercut but small retailers opening the devices and swapping out the SSDs themselves. I mean, that's one reason. The other reason is that Apple are the
greediestsecond greediest company on the planet...A regular user should be able to open the box and access NVMe drive slot without needing to remove any components.
Apple, are you learning anything finally? It's almost 2025, for God's sake...
9to5mac.com/2024/11/09/m4-mac-mini-storage-upgrade/
Modern Apple has, as we know, always charged a fortune for storage and RAM upgrades.Even the PS5 consoles are easier than this.
Apple's goal is to ensure that the product becomes e-waste in landfill as rapidly as possible so that they can sell more product.
They're not repairable, getting the parts to repair them is almost impossible, the parts are unnecessarily firmware/hardware-locked and proprietary, and Apple fight right-to-repair vehemently.
Apple are not anyone's friend; They exist to make money for their shareholders and anything that gets in the way of that is something Apple lock down or obfuscate in the next generation.
As there's no reference of anything else like this, it's hard to say if there's a performance penalty going through the edge connector and the connector on main PCB.
Comparing Mac mini to server-grade equipment or Rolex is really proof of copium overdose...
for example you can mod your macs to accept nvme drives, will be released in december