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.
Apple appears to have prematurely revealed the name of its rumored lower-cost MacBook model, which is expected to be announced this Wednesday.
A regulatory document for a "MacBook Neo" (Model A3404) has appeared on Apple's website. Unfortunately, there are no further details or images available yet.
While the PDF file does not contain the "MacBook Neo" name, it briefly appeared in a link...
Apple today announced the "MacBook Neo," an all-new kind of low-cost Mac featuring the A18 Pro chip for $599.
The MacBook Neo is the first Mac to be powered by an iPhone chip; the A18 Pro debuted in 2024's iPhone 16 Pro models. Apple says it is up to 50% faster for everyday tasks than the bestselling PC with the latest shipping Intel Core Ultra 5, up to 3x faster for on-device AI workloads,...
Benchmarks for the new MacBook Neo surfaced today, and unsurprisingly, CPU performance is almost identical to the iPhone 16 Pro. The MacBook Neo uses the same 6-core A18 Pro chip that was first introduced in the iPhone 16 Pro, but it has one fewer GPU core.
The MacBook Neo earned a single-core score of 3461 and a multi-core score of 8668, along with a Metal score of 31286.
Here's how the...
