Can you case-swap into the classic Silver body?
Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
141–150 of 197 posts
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is your use case where ECC ram is that important?
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?
What's a good and ergonomic way to attach something like 4-6 HDDs? I'm using HP Microserver Gen8 and it's a wonderful machine but it has its drawbacks. I'm thinking about replacing it, but it's hard to find something of its size and compatible with enough HDDs.
Also the major issue is that I've heard about problems booting Linux on recent macs, but probably it'll be resolved soon.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#143Flash 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).
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.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
From where does the belief that apple makes durable products come? I have the exact opposite experience, and I have been fixing my own and my friends computers for a long time. I started recommending against in 2014 and nothing I have seen since has given me any reason to change my mind.
My anecdotal evidence is the opposite. But I do not trust that to judge about reliability in general. The prices for used Macs are consistently higher even after 4-6 years than for comparable PC and this is much better statement about quality.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Your counterpoint is a bit weak. You sold a 5 year old Mac Mini, the OP literally just wrote how the old Mac Mini held its value precisely because it could be upgraded with replaceable components, while the updated Mac Mini is not. I doubt a current gen model will hold its value nearly as well as the older models because parts cannot be replaced down the line.
The important thing is that RAM is upgradable. New memory technologies in 5 years may make all storage to use RAM slots.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
M.2 wouldn't be a bottleneck. It supports up to PCIe 3.0 x4 which has a maximum bandwidth of 4 GBps in each direction.
NVMe specifically, as M.2 is just the connector (which can also use the slower SATA interface) rather than the interface.
Actually PCIe specifically. NVMe improves performance slightly, but it's mostly all due to PCIe.
I have a non-NVMe Samsung AHCI M.2 SSD from 2014 that gives me ~2.3GB/s sequential reads and ~1.2GB/s sequential writes, no NVMe required.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#147A 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.
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 u…
> 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.
Nonsense. NVMe is an industry standard, M.2 supports it, just like many SSDs. A Samsung 970 Pro SSD does 3.5 GB/s (not Gbps; SATA II already did 3 Gbps well over ten years ago).
Incidentally, Samsung 970 Pro SSDs come at a fraction of Apple's upgrade costs.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#148Earlier 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 have the exact same issue. I have 256gb in my MBP, but 162gb are used by system files. I can't seem to figure out what is being used and how to clear it out.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So use a tb3 enclosure with an nvme inside.
There are no bus-powered TB3 M.2 PCIe enclosures, and there never will be any[1]. This means you will have to buy a huge bulky externally-powered TB3 PCIe dock costing hundreds of dollars to accomplish this.
Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trade-off isn't height--an M.2 slot takes up a relatively large amount of floor space on the motherboard. There's nowhere to put it: https://d3nevzfk7ii3be.cloudfront.net/igi/ZLFbiRsOdiemeWLA.h... .
There's plenty of room for an M.2 module, especially on the backside of the board which is how they're traditionally mounted on desktop ITX boards. https://i.imgur.com/dW0ynV7.png They can also be mounted at an angle just like those SO-DIMM slots. The M.2 standard even supports 12mm, 16mm, and 30mm width modules in addition to the 22mm that seems to have become the norm. Apple could still be a dick by using a 12mm or…
> They can also be mounted at an angle just like those SO-DIMM slots.
Stand-off M.2 sockets are a standard part, because a number of mainboards put components under the M.2 slot.