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Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

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Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#181

Post by PhantomGremlin »

kllrnohj wrote: post #168
OskarS wrote: 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.

The bigger problem isn't that it's not user-upgradable, it's that you can't access your data in the event of a failure of any other component. Cap blew on the motherboard? Data gone. CPU kicked the bucket? Data gone. Spilled water on it? Data gone. Not literally gone, of course, just practically. No chance of popping the drive out and trying it elsewhere to recover data. Nope. And since Apple never repairs only repla…

That's absolutely insane for consumer tech where backups are rare.

Are backups really rare? Apple couldn't have made it easier to plug in a backup disk. Plug one in and you immediately get asked if you want to use it with Time Machine. I can't imagine an easier backup solution.

I agree with the rest of your comment. Any component failure means losing all your data.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#182

Post by walrus01 »

robin_reala wrote: post #26
jamesfmilne wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aquantia, same as the iMac Pro.

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

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.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#183

Post by kllrnohj »

derefr wrote: post #174
kllrnohj wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's incredibly false. Literally everyone makes m.2 PCIe NAND. In fact it's increasingly hard to find M.2 SATA these days with how overwhelmingly common PCI-E 3.0 x4 M.2 is. And M.2 PCI-E isn't just stupid common, it's also cheap. Really, really cheap. 1TB of crazy fast PCI-E nand is $230: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-1TB-MZ-V7E1T0BW/dp/B0...

Er, no, you didn't understand my statement at all. What you're talking about is NVMe NAND—which is a standard protocol on top of PCIe. If you aren't aware, both the PCIe m.2 NVMe SSDs, and the PCIe "card" NVMe SSDs, and even the DIMM-slot SDRAM-speaking NVMe SSDs, all still contain a flash controller behind their PCIe/SDRAM controller, which implements the standard NVMe protocol, acting as a translator between the ho…

Ah, you're talking absolute nonsense. That's why I didn't understand. They didn't slap the nand directly on pci-e because that doesn't work. There has to be an interface chip, a controller if you will. They only way to get anything close to what you've made up is to not use PCI-E, either. And it doesn't even make sense because NAND doesn't work in "directly accessible" anyway. It still needs to read and write in blocks. It still needs those batched up, it still needs a queue depth to achieve its speed, it still needs garbage collection, etc...

And since they are using an off the shelf CPU, it's using PCI-E not something custom. Which means a flash controller is on the other side of the PCI-E bus.

They are probably still using nvme because there's no reason not to, but regardless there is still a nand controller between the pci-e bus and the nand flash.

There's nothing particularly incompatible with secure enclave + standard nvme. You'd still do encryption wherever you wanted.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#184

Post by PascLeRasc »

jessewmc wrote: post #177
andrewvc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#185

Post by PascLeRasc »

walrus01 wrote: post #182
robin_reala wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#186

Post by stevewodil »

kalleboo wrote: post #170
oblio wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphone/apples-iphon... ... You were saying?

That analysts are full of shit

They literally priced out the components. I would love to see any information you have that shows they are full of shit if you can provide any

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#187

Post by Crabtr »

environment wrote: post #91

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…

That whine's almost 100% coming from the CPU as it's a common issue with Intel CPUs these days. It's the weirdest thing ever, but my Hackintosh makes it as well (i7-6700k) so you're not crazy. It also very notably comes and goes independent of workload and mouse polling rates, but no matter the case I'd still return/replace the Mini just because it's an option.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#188

Post by bjoli »

_0w8t wrote: post #144
bjoli wrote: 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.

My wife's old MacBook (from before the whole unibody thing) is a tank. But I have fixed so many strange things in Macs. Chips becoming unsoldered (apple soldering is quite frankly not very good), heat issues and even broken SATA cables (!!!).

Apple makes amazing things. I would love something as slick as a Mac laptop,but I can't make myself get one.

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#189

Post by kalleboo »

stevewodil wrote: post #186
kalleboo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analysts are full of shit

They literally priced out the components. I would love to see any information you have that shows they are full of shit if you can provide any

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/04/27/apple-product-component...

> [Tim] Cook commented on the inaccuracy of estimated cost breakdowns on Apple products.

> "I haven't seen [them for Apple Watch], but generally there are cost breakdowns around our products that are much different than the reality. I've never seen one that is anywhere close to being accurate," Cook said

Re: Mac mini Late 2018 Teardown

#190

Post by dwaite »

kllrnohj wrote: post #183
derefr wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er, no, you didn't understand my statement at all. What you're talking about is NVMe NAND—which is a standard protocol on top of PCIe. If you aren't aware, both the PCIe m.2 NVMe SSDs, and the PCIe "card" NVMe SSDs, and even the DIMM-slot SDRAM-speaking NVMe SSDs, all still contain a flash controller behind their PCIe/SDRAM controller, which implements the standard NVMe protocol, acting as a translator between the ho…

Ah, you're talking absolute nonsense. That's why I didn't understand. They didn't slap the nand directly on pci-e because that doesn't work. There has to be an interface chip, a controller if you will. They only way to get anything close to what you've made up is to not use PCI-E, either. And it doesn't even make sense because NAND doesn't work in "directly accessible" anyway. It still needs to read and write in bloc…

The T2 chip is the flash storage controller. It is not talking to a soldered-on PCIe storage device, it is addressing the NAND directly.

Apple theoretically could have a slot for NVMe separate from the system drive, but there is no industry standard for "card with NAND on it that the T2 chip understands".

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