
Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown - nnjeremy
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac+mini+Late+2018+Teardown/115210
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OskarS
A bit disappointing to see that the storage is not user-upgradable. I guess it
matters less on a device like this where you could more easily use external
storage, but still. I wish Apple stopped soldering in stuff and just made
things a centimeter taller if that was the tradeoff.

~~~
sanketskasar
I think it's more because of the PCIe interface, and access control and
encryption through the T2 chip. The PCIe interfaces SSDs that Apple's been
using allow really fast speeds of upto 3Gbps, which is almost double those
offered by other interfaces like M2 or even more faster than SATA. What's
disappointing is the base storage. 128GB in 2019 is so ridiculous. I would't
otherwise mind a soldered SSD when I can just use the TB3 ports to connect
external drive with virtually no performance loss. But 250GB internal storage
is a necessity especially when the OS itself takes up almost 20GB out of the
paltry 120GB.

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isolli
Is encryption optional? In general I'm more worried of forgetting my password
(and thus losing all my data) than of unauthorized access to my home desktop.

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moftz
If you really don't care about unauthorized access, just write the password in
sharpie on the box. I have a bunch of machines hooked up to test equipment
that sit on their own network. I just write the username and password on the
box and no one ever needs to worry about trying to find the sticky note or
find me and ask or waste time guessing. The name of the computer, the
username, and password are all the same and reflect what the box setup for.

~~~
derefr
I also endorse writing the "password when passwords don't matter" on the side
of the machine. ISPs have been doing it with their gateway modems for years,
and I've never heard of any threat model that calls that out as a problem.

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nicolaslem
Apple can be proud of using plastic recycled at 60 percent but a not easily
serviceable computer will end up in a landfill way sooner than it should.

What happens three years down the line when the device is out of warranty and
the storage fails? Between paying an absurd amount of money to replace the
whole board and getting a new one I bet most people will go with the landfill
option.

My Mac mini 2012 got a second life after I maxed out the ram and replaced the
spinning rust. If a component fails I can easily replace it and squeeze a
couple of years more out of it.

~~~
rz2k
I think holding Apple to higher standards for its environmental impact has a
lot to do with why they innovate in this respect, and I think that it is
appropriate, given their size as a manufacturer and their positioning as a
premium product.

Tightly integrated hardware, and efforts to develop software that improves
performance of long-discontinued products does a lot to explain why Apple
products are used much longer than alternatives. Compare a Mac mini to a
budget mini tower, and it is difficult to argue that attaching an external
Thunderbolt 3 drive in 2024 is worse for the environment, when the competing
product will likely be in a landfill, due to difficult to diagnose hardware
issues and there not being an easily understood recycling program.

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andrewvc
OK, sure, but why do they need to manufacture everything out of CNC'd billets
of aluminum? That seems extremely wasteful.

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jessewmc
This is one of the least wasteful things they do. The cuttings are recycled,
and aluminum is one of the few materials that is more energy efficient to
recycle than to mine/manufacture from scratch.

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PascLeRasc
They also do CNCing pretty efficiently. The same piece of aluminum that makes
an iMac screen bezel makes two wired Mac keyboards.

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environment
The new mac mini makes a constant electrical noise when I move the mouse. It
is audible and irritating >2 meters away from the mac. I have tried hubs,
different ports and nothing else connected. It is ok with a wireless mouse,
lower polling rate. The fan is quiet, not irritating.

I might have sensitive hearing. Many modern gadgets are a pain in the ear.
This type of noise digs deep and ruins the mood. I am sending it back. This is
my data point, might not represent all new mac minis.

edit: I can probably go for a low polling rate, but then I wonder about
tomorrow. What other use case will stress the same circuit components?

~~~
Angostura
Take it back, get a replacement.

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riobard
I really hope someone could figure it out if Mac mini with the i3-8100B CPU
can work with ECC memory. According to Intel the CPU is ECC-capable, but I’m
not sure about the mobo. If it works with ECC, it would be a truly mini Mac
Pro.

The higher-end configs with i5 and i7 CPU are not ECC-capable, only the entry-
level i3 CPU is ECC-capable.

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sneak
What is your use case where ECC ram is that important?

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riobard
I plan to ditch NAS and just connect external storage directly to the mini,
and it needs to run 24/7\. ECC should give me better reliability, no?

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jamiek88
Yeah, but for a NAS it’s overkill in my opinion.

You’re more likely to run into on disk than in RAM issues with silent bitrot
depending on OS and FS even then pretty rare but if your NAS is huge becomes
more likely just law of averages.

~~~
riobard
Bit rot on cold storage is at least detectable if using filesystem with
checksumming (e.g. ZFS).

I’m not aware of any solutions to detect bit rot in RAM other than ECC.

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SloopJon
More accessible than the previous gen (although oddly iFixit gives it the same
score of 6/10), but it's harder than I'd hoped to get to the RAM.

~~~
lostlogin
The previous one was a horror. Security t6 screwdrivers are a nightmare to
source. I have bought 5 sets and none have been correct. Resorted to attacking
them with pliers and eventually had success.

~~~
kwiens
We include good T6 security bits in our Pro Tech Toolkit:
[https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Pro-Tech-
Toolkit/IF145-30...](https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Pro-Tech-
Toolkit/IF145-307)

~~~
lostlogin
There was a period where you were all sold out - it’s the first place I look
as your kits are great.

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exabrial
Replaceable RAM, finally, THANK YOU!

But soldered storage... And storage is the wear item, d'oh!

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Dunedan
What I really like about the Mac mini is the internal power supply. I'd wish
all the PC vendors would offer their mini PCs with internal power supplies
too.

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termie
Curious as to which 10Gb Ethernet controller is being used, no mention in the
teardown. Anyone know?

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jamesfmilne
Aquantia, same as the iMac Pro.

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robin_reala
Is there anyone else manufacturing 10G controllers at $100 end-user prices?

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walrus01
Not for Mac Minis, but you can get two port, Intel X520 series 10GbE (optical)
PCI-Express cards for $85 to $110 each on ebay these days. 1310nm/LX SFP+ are
really cheap, like $25 a piece.

I am biased, working in network engineering, but I really don't see a huge use
case for 10GBaseT. It's almost unheard of in an ISP environment. Anywhere we
need more than 1000BaseT we do everything optically.

~~~
PascLeRasc
What about connecting to storage, either an SSD NAS or a local disk array? At
work we have regular old HDDs in RAID 1 and it saturates a 1 gig connection,
so I'd imagine SSDs in some faster RAID would get way above that, and you
don't have to redo wiring everywhere if you already have Cat6 installed.

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amelius
Flash memory soldered to the main board also doesn't seem like a good idea,
since this type of memory has a limited durability (depending on # writes).

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vbezhenar
I wonder if it's hard to resolder it. It's not a problem physically for
experienced repair service, but may be Apple locked it with software.

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winter_blue
They say it’s got impressive specs, but I don’t find it impressive at all.
This brick-sized Gigabyte (NUC) computer has far more impressive specs than
the Mac Mini: [https://www.gigabyte.com/Mini-PcBarebone/GB-
BRi7-8550-rev-10](https://www.gigabyte.com/Mini-PcBarebone/GB-
BRi7-8550-rev-10)

~~~
ricardobeat
What's impressive about it? That's a mobile CPU, ~20% slower than the Mini
base model. Slower RAM (2400 vs 2666). Two USB3.1 ports vs four in the mini,
no Thunderbolt (10gbps vs 40gbps). Weaker GPU, can't output 4K. To top it off,
it doesn't come with RAM (+€80 8gb) or an SSD (+€50 128GB).

Total cost €680 vs €899 for the Mac Mini - it actually makes the mini look
like an incredible deal.

~~~
winter_blue
Those are fairly good points. I upvoted you.

Yes graphics is better — the GPU on the Mac Mini is the Intel UHD 630 vs the
UHD 620 on the Gigabyte Brix.

With regard to the CPU, the Gigabyte’s i7-8550U is slightly faster[1] than the
i3 in the Mac Mini, but slower than the i5 and i7 offered on the Mac Mini.

The lower TDP might be something that people who plan to run a server on it
might care about. I have a desktop with a i7-5820K (which has a 140W TDP), and
I realized that a DigitalOcean droplet was cheaper than keeping my computer
running all day (even with the monitor turned off, idle power usage was 100W+,
and my electric cost is over $0.20/kWh).

I consider 16 GiB of RAM a minimum, and it is significantly cheaper with the
Gigabyte. Apple’s $200 charge for an upgrade from 8GB to 16GB (in the US) is a
bit too much. You can buy 16 GiB (2x8GiB sticks) for that.

Having the flexibility to pick your own SSD is nice too. The 960 PRO is one of
the fastest PCIe SSDs out there — I wonder if the SSD in the Mac Mini comes
close to it in speed. Also: if you don’t care about the SSD speed but want a
lot more storage, you have the flexibility to get the slower 1TiB 860 EVO (or
similar SSD) for around $150 — wheread Apppe charges $600 for an upgrade to
1TB on the Mac Mini — and exorbitantly high price.

Lastly, I use Arch Linux both on my home laptop, and on my work machine
(whenever possible). And the fact is most people buy Macs for macOS; but I’m
quite comfortable using Linux, and don’t really need macOS.

[1] [https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i3-8100-vs-
Intel-...](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i3-8100-vs-
Intel-i7-8550U/3103vs3064)

~~~
ricardobeat
When I looked at userbenchmark.org the i3 came out ahead. Apple’s SSDs are top
notch, crossing 3Gbps. RAM is upgradeable on the mini so you can save a couple
hundred, plus OSX memory management is so much better than windows you’ll only
feel any difference if doing heavy video/audio/3D workloads.

For some reason a TB3 NVMe enclosure is dirt cheap, around €40, and gives you
full speed access to whatever SSD you like!

I just got a mini for myself - main driver being the OS, I can’t be productive
on my windows pc. Got the i5 and 256gb for ~$1200, which gives me same power
as a high end 15”MBP at a quarter of the price. Mac OS is worth the €200
markup alone.

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jdboyd
I'm disappointed that the CPU isn't upgradable. I got my hopes up with it
being a desktop part number (i3-8100 according to everymac.com).

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pkamb
Can you case-swap into the classic Silver body?

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jws
If it bothers you, you can remove the anodization chemically with household
products. That gets you to silver, but easily scratched. Then you can anodize
it using more household and hot tub chemicals and a current limited power
supply, a bench supply is fine. That gets you to silver and hard, but will
stain. Soak it in whatever dye you like to color it, or not, then boil it to
seal off the pores in the anodization and you have the case of your dreams.

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eecc
Soldered storage, soldered CPU, connectors on same board. Meh...

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saagarjha
These are all par for the course for Apple’s products. The fact that the RAM
is upgradable is quite surprising, since it’s a departure from the direction
they went in for the earlier Mac Mini.

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ddtaylor
That thing has like $400 worth of hardware in it.

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whateveracct
Heh every post about Apple products has this comment, doesn't it?

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captaincoont
If only someone could figure out how to put components into a larger box, so
that there is no need to solder things down. The motherboard is surely the
same whether it is i7 or i3, so if there was some sort of a socket, you could
replace a cpu like a bulb.

