

IFixit tears apart new Mac Mini  - barredo
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac-Mini-Mid-2010-Teardown/3094

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hop
I do lots of crazy CNC machining, own a mechanical engineering/industrial
design company, and think this housing is unreal if its really machined from a
solid block of aluminum. The undercuts, the thin walls, the perfect finish, a
mass produced part... they are really pushing the boundaries.

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wmeredith
Would you mind expanding in this a bit? I think it's really interesting.

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hop
For a unibody macbook pro, they stamp the underside curvature (I think...),
then put it in a fixture and hog out the aluminum in similar fashion to this-
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHTQG_7bdbg>, then they finish the sides, add
tapped holes and cut out the cd slots and ports from the side with a small
endmill.

For this, <http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/SiKdJKFBvUOZvqYK.huge>, they
either put it on end and machined the inside with a big, long endmill, then
followed with some smaller ones to get those inside radii... or came down
through the big round hole with an upside down T-shaped cutter and hogged out
the material with underside cuts. Then cut out those little features near the
end opening, somehow I don't know, and then detail the mounting features on
the disk opening and cut the slot for the CD and laser cut the the little
eject pin next to it.

Then they sandblast them, probably robotically b/c its so perfect, and then
hard anodized.

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K3G
The robotics company I'm working for uses the mac mini for one of our robots,
and we had just finished a chassis overhaul based on the old model.

Time to go hit the CAD program again...

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snowbird122
If you ever want to know where a product is in the Apple refresh cycle, check
out this link. I find it invaluable when considering an Apple product
purchase: <http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/>

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barrkel
I look at these teardowns from a different aspect: once upon a time I worked
as a computer technician, and built and upgraded hundreds of systems. When I
see these pictures, I see a monolithic block of really hard to work with
pieces. An appliance, not a computer, in other words. They make me less
inclined to purchase.

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moxiemk1
I had been holding out until the next iMac refresh to buy a new computer; the
27inch screen and the Core i7 were pretty darn attractive.

However,a server model paired with two cheap 22inch screens tempts me greatly,
given the smaller dent on my wallet...

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markkanof
It would be great if getting to the hard drive were easier. I love that they
made the memory easily upgradeable, but I would really like to put an ssd in
one of these.

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adolph
I was checking out the tear-down with an eye for the same. With the base cover
off, you can see most of the HD, but it looks like the curved bottom part of
the case covers it enough so that the motherboard must slide out to replace
the drive.

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teilo
I was really hoping for an i3. What is the deal with Apple and old CPUs?

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wtallis
Apple doesn't want to ship a computer with a crappy integrated GPU, because
they want to ensure that users have OpenCL-capable GPUS. Intel is not offering
i3s or i5s with good integrated GPUs, and Intel won't let NVidia make chipsets
anymore, so in order to offer an i3/i5/i7 system with a good GPU, they need to
use 3 big, power hungry chips (CPU+chipset+GPU). During the Core 2 era, Apple
took advantage of the great combo of a Core 2 CPU + NVidia chipset with good
integrated graphics to offer reasonable performance in smaller packages. They
no longer have enough room for a 3 chip solution, so until Intel either
improves their GPUs or starts playing nice with NVidia again, Apple faces the
choice between using older CPUs or regressing to older enclosures and higher
power consumption.

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smackfu
My Core2Duo 1.83GHz mini has an intel GMA 950 GPU. Are the current GPUs worse
than that?

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pmjordan
The 'GMA HD' GPUs in the i3/i5/i7M are better than the GMA 950 (or even the
GMA 3000 & 4500 series as far as I know), but they're still massively inferior
to the nVidia Geforce 320M or its predecessor, the 9400M. There aren't any
OpenCL drivers for the Intel GMAs as far as I know, although to be honest I
can't see an obvious technical reason for that in the GMA 4500 and HD. Maybe
there's no point as using the CPU in the same die is just as fast. Or maybe
it's because Intel are rubbish at developing decent GPU drivers - their OpenGL
implementations are pretty poor.

