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Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

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Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#81

Post by geden »

mattnewton wrote: post #78
reaperducer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

128 GB doesn't work because it doesn't scale well with age As a counterpoint, my 2011 MacBook Air has 128GB, and works just fine. Photoshop, coding, and lots of personal projects. Maybe 128GB isn't enough for gaming, but I don't think that's what the "mini" is for.

Counter counter point, my 128gb 2013 mbp I use for development has 90gb of “system” cruft somehow and I regularly have to shuffle files around, and have been thinking I need to re-image it since I can’t dig deeper into what the “system” bucket is made up of easily.

https://whatsizemac.com - been invaluable over the years with my 256GB 2012 MBA.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#82

Post by riobard »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #77
riobard wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, I’m more concerned about silent data corruption instead of crashing. Why does Synology not have bit rot? Becuase of ZFS? I thought ECC memory is almost required for ZFS?

There is nothing special about ZFS that makes it require ECC. It's a myth. See: http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/03/will-zfs-and-non-ecc-ram-kill-yo...

Good point. Thanks! :)

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#83

Post by gshubert17 »

mattnewton wrote: post #78
reaperducer wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

128 GB doesn't work because it doesn't scale well with age As a counterpoint, my 2011 MacBook Air has 128GB, and works just fine. Photoshop, coding, and lots of personal projects. Maybe 128GB isn't enough for gaming, but I don't think that's what the "mini" is for.

Counter counter point, my 128gb 2013 mbp I use for development has 90gb of “system” cruft somehow and I regularly have to shuffle files around, and have been thinking I need to re-image it since I can’t dig deeper into what the “system” bucket is made up of easily.

I discovered that the Chrome browser had been storing every previous version as it updated them. I had over 20 GB of old versions of Chrome, which I recovered when I deleted them.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#84

Post by 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.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#85

Post by tibyat »

oblio wrote: post #61
jmull wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's disappointing is the base storage. But that just depends on use-case. There are plenty of scenarios where you just need the built-in storage to handle the OS, apps and miscellaneous storage while your large scale storage is external somewhere. Why make people get (and pay for) more storage than they have use for?

Because storage is cheap for everyone except Apple, that knows they can get 60%+ markup for everything they sell.

meh, Apple's certainly not alone in their profit margins on upgrades. It's a fairly universal strategy to keep the baseline appealingly low. Dell, for instance, charges $400 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB RAM on some racks.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#86

Post by spiderfarmer »

nicolaslem wrote: post #84

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 l…

As a counterpoint, when I wanted to sell my Mac mini after 5 years of 24/7 use, I found a buyer within one hour. Try that with any other maintainable PC.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#87

Post by luka-birsa »

mrpippy wrote: post #71
cptskippy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The PCIe interfaces SSDs that Apple's been using allow really fast speeds of upto 3Gbps AnandTech reported int heir review of the 2015 Macbook that this was just NVMe. Has something changed since then? This is just Apple again trying to pass off a standard as their own innovation to justify their proprietary incarnation.

It's NVMe to the T2 SoC, which acts as the storage controller (among many other tasks). It would be nice to have the raw NAND on a removable card, but the market for "raw-NAND-on-a-stick" would be entirely limited to these machines.

Come on guys, they are just ripping us off. There is no sane reason for removing m2 connector. SSDs can run pcie over m2 and there is no way they run something custom there. Its bullshit marketing that enables them to sell you overpriced ssd and mem upgrades or make you replace your PC faster.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#88

Post by kwiens »

lostlogin wrote: post #74
SloopJon wrote: post #3

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.

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.

We include good T6 security bits in our Pro Tech Toolkit: https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Pro-Tech-Toolkit/IF145-30...

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#89

Post by donarb »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #86
nicolaslem wrote: post #84

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 l…

As a counterpoint, when I wanted to sell my Mac mini after 5 years of 24/7 use, I found a buyer within one hour. Try that with any other maintainable PC.

I am still using my Mini from 2012, and it runs the latest OS, Mojave.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#90

Post by 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.
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