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Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

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Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#151
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not use a password manager? I use it for every kind of username/password entry. Safe and reliable at least relatively depending on which manager you use.

If you need a password to log in to your system and decrypt your storage, a password manager is useless.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#152
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not that they couldn't make m.2 PCIe NAND; it's that nobody else is making m.2 PCIe NAND. The T2's storage controller wouldn't know what to do with any other (NVMe or SATA) m.2 SSD, since then it'd be the T2's storage controller talking to the SSD's storage controller.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#153
post #43
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I do this with wifi passwords on routers. Though I use masking tape.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#155
post #43
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#156
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Apple should build SSD storage thingies that are exactly the same size as the mini so they can be stacked. They're already stacking them for demos and it would definitely look cool. Especially if you get Thunderbolt cables that exactly match 1-4 mini heights (since it got 4 Thunderbolt ports) + daisy chaining.

Contemporary SSD storage only takes up as much space as a pack of gum, just like sticks of RAM. Even SSDs with terabytes of capacity! Any desktop computer, even a small one, has all the physical space needed to have upgradeable storage.

Yes, you could fit one m.2 SSD slot into a Mac Mini.

But anyone who has a serious professional need for large storage (e.g. video editors), probably doesn't just want 2x-4x the internal storage, with the same bus-factor-of-1 fault-tolerance. No, they probably need either a Thunderbolt RAID array (that they can put into RAID5/6/10), or a SAN. And neither of those fit in a Mac Mini.

(Though, a Thunderbolt RAID array of m.2 SSDs might fit in a Mac Mini-sized enclosure. Does anyone sell that?)

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#157
post #144
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Two other reasons I can think of why Macs cost more, including used:

1. The MacOS premium. It's impractical to run MacOS on anything else.

2. Status symbol.

Anecdotally, I see a lot of people outside of HN comparing their experiences with the quality of a $1200+ USD Macbook to ~$500 USD laptops of other OEMs. Of course the Macbook wins over things half its price.

Personally I've had great experiences with Thinkpads and Latitudes, which have held up great and are very easy to repair or upgrade.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#159
post #2

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.

Someone should sell a kit that replaces the bottom panel of the new Mac Mini with a slightly thicker one containing an "external" NVMe drive enclosure. It could be coupled with a piece which replaces the Mac Mini power plug assembly, which could then tap mains power, allowing the "external" enclosure to be a Thunderbolt 3 NVMe enclosure. (Could have thicker ones for thin profile and regular 2.5" SATA drives.)

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#160
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s not what necessity means. I think most users of this device will be fine with 128gb. I think you underestimate cloud usage for this machine’s target market.

I wouldn’t want this little storage onboard, but recent macOS versions do include the feature to automatically shuffle infrequently files up to iCloud.
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