131–140 of 197 posts
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OK, sure, but why do they need to manufacture everything out of CNC'd billets of aluminum? That seems extremely wasteful.
You know exactly why: you don’t get the quality that Apple wants any other way. Supposedly they reuse the shavings, so it might not actually be as bad as you think.
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It remembers which drive it boots from so as long as you keep the external drive connected it should boot from it
Still, another dongle to carry (with Mac Mini it's not that important) and a loss of speed/added latency for e.g. video editing. With normal usage patterns even USB 3.0 external thumb/SSD drives were just fine.
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…
This isn't the early 2000s. The Mac Mini has an SSD, and for the overwhelming majority of these machines it will easily outlive their useful life.
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…
I agree that Apple could make a more serviceable machine, but instead of throwing the Mini into the landfill, why not bring it to the Apple store so they can recycle it?
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It remembers which drive it boots from so as long as you keep the external drive connected it should boot from it
Still, another dongle to carry (with Mac Mini it's not that important) and a loss of speed/added latency for e.g. video editing. With normal usage patterns even USB 3.0 external thumb/SSD drives were just fine.
What is the speed difference between the on-board PCIe connected SSD vs. the USB3 connected SSD ? Aren't both PCIe and USB3 faster than the SSD, making it the bottleneck ?
A flash drive would, of course, be terribly slow ... do they make USB "thumb drives" that are SSD (not flash) ?
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Yes, if the soldered-on SSD has failed you can boot from an external drive by holding down the alt/option key while the system powers on to bring up the boot selection menu.
I thought this no longer works with the T2 chip? Don't you run into issues with e.g. upgrading the firmware because it will only accept firmware updates from the internal drive?
Also on the documentation of the T2 chip, Apple strongly recommends to use file vault, because if you do not, the ssd even though it is encrypted by default, gets decrypted [1] upon being mounted.
To sum up, I guess it is possible to boot from whatever device you want.
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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.
I have the exact same machine, 2011 MacBook Air, and it's always bloody out of disk space. It's the only machine I am constantly shuffling data around on. Delete photo library so I can upgrade xcode, let it resync from icloud next time I feel like having my photo stream. Can't use it to offload and edit photos while traveling, despite the convenient SD card slot, because the disk is too small. can't download an os up…
Obviously it depends what you do with it. A 1.5tb HDD can fill up on a week under some use cases, so it is silly to mention that yours fills up. The fact that some people can use it and it doesn't full up means it is still a viable option.
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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...
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
Total cost €680 vs €899 for the Mac Mini - it actually makes the mini look like an incredible deal.
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> 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. Here it's a bit more than just that: T2 is the secure boot system, but also the SSD controller (and a few other I/O things). They could have put an m.2 slot though.
I do wish they had gone with m.2. It really feels like T2 is wasted in the Mac mini and just there to check a feature list. It doesn't even make much sense in a machine that is turned off instead of put to sleep.