News site The Register reports that the Mac mini may be hiding a few features, such as a future built-in iPod dock.
The Apple machine's optical drive connects to the motherboard not by a cable but is attached directly to an Ultra ATA-100 riser card which itself fits into a slot toward the rear of the Mini's mobo. According to Leo Bodnar, the guy who figured out how to overclock the Mini's G4-class CPU, that's not all the riser does.
Apparently, it's got a Firewire bus on there too, though there's no connection beyond the riser card itself. In addition to the ATA-100 lines that feed the optical drive, the riser has a connector pinout that takes the Firewire signal and provides a number of other lines, whose functions remain unknown but are likely to carry extra control signals, Leo believes.
The Mini's Agere FW8028 Firewire controller, mounted on the underside of the motherboard, connects direclty to the riser card slot, itself installed on the top of the mobo.
The linked story within The Register's report shows clear pictures of the riser board in question, and the available connectivity in each of the unpopulated connectors. Before the release of the Mac mini, AppleInsider had suggested that the new "headless Mac" would have a built-in iPod dock.
You'd think things would be slowing down heading into the holidays, but this week saw a whirlwind of Apple leaks and rumors while Apple started its next cycle of betas following last week's release of iOS 26.2 and related updates.
This week also saw the release of a new Apple Music integration with ChatGPT, so read on below for all the details on this week's biggest stories!
Top Stories
i...
Monday December 22, 2025 11:30 am PST by Juli Clover
Apple hasn't updated the Apple TV 4K since 2022, and 2025 was supposed to be the year that we got a refresh. There were rumors suggesting Apple would release the new Apple TV before the end of 2025, but it looks like that's not going to happen now.
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Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said several times across 2024 and 2025 that Apple would...
Tuesday December 16, 2025 8:44 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Next year's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max will be equipped with under-screen Face ID, and the front camera will be moved to the top-left corner of the screen, according to a new report from The Information's Wayne Ma and Qianer Liu.
As a result of these changes, the report said the iPhone 18 Pro models will not have a pill-shaped Dynamic Island cutout at the top of the screen....
Friday December 19, 2025 10:37 am PST by Juli Clover
Since the beginning of December, Apple has been pushing iPhone users who opted to stay on iOS 18 to install iOS 26 instead. Apple started by making the iOS 18 upgrades less visible, and has now transitioned to making new iOS 18 updates unavailable on any device capable of running iOS 26.
If you have an iPhone 11 or later, Apple is no longer offering new versions of iOS 18, even though there...
Tuesday December 16, 2025 4:42 pm PST by Juli Clover
There has been a whirlwind of rumors over the last few days, sourced from leaked internal software designed for the iPhone and the Mac, and news sites like The Information. Below, we have a quick recap of everything we've heard this week, which serves as a guide to Apple's product plans in 2026 and beyond.
We've organized the info by likely release date, though there are some products that...
Apple is significantly increasing its reliance on Samsung for iPhone memory as component prices surge, according to The Korea Economic Daily.
Apple is said to be expanding the share of iPhone memory it sources from Samsung due to rapidly rising memory prices. The shift is expected to result in Samsung supplying roughly 60% to 70% of the low-power DRAM used in the iPhone 17, compared with a...
Monday December 22, 2025 7:47 am PST by Joe Rossignol
Italy's Competition Authority (AGCM) has imposed a €98.6 million ($116 million) fine on Apple over its App Tracking Transparency feature.
Since the release of iOS 14.5 in April 2021, Apple has required apps to ask for permission before tracking a user's activity across other apps and websites for personalized advertising, as part of a feature named App Tracking Transparency. If a user...
