New Mac Mini Teardown Provides Look Inside Apple's Smallest Mac Ever

YouTube channel Brandon Geekabit today shared a teardown video for the new Mac mini base model with the M4 chip, 256GB of storage, and 16GB of RAM. The video provides the first complete look inside Apple's smallest Mac ever, revealing the computer's logic board, built-in power supply, cooling system, and other components.


While previous Mac mini models with Apple silicon chips had plenty of unused internal space, since the computer had not been redesigned since it used Intel processors, components take up nearly all of the space inside the new model.

The bottom metal plate on the Mac mini continues to double as an antenna. Once that is removed, you can see the fan and heat sink that help to keep the computer running cool. Beyond that, you can see the Mac mini's modular storage that we reported on earlier today. The base model with 256GB of storage has two 128GB chips, which means it will no longer have slower SSD speeds compared to higher-capacity models. Last, you can see the Mac mini's logic board with the M4 chip and the power supply below that.

The new Mac mini has an innovative thermal architecture, in which air is guided from the bottom foot to different levels of the computer.

mac mini thermal architecture feature
As far as the new Mac mini's repairability is concerned, we will have to wait for the website iFixit to share its own teardown video.

Overall, the new Mac mini is an impressive engineering feat made possible by the industry-leading performance-per-watt characteristics of Apple silicon. The new Mac mini launched in stores today, and we recently shared our own hands-on video.

Related Roundup: Mac mini
Buyer's Guide: Mac Mini (Neutral)
Related Forum: Mac mini

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Top Rated Comments

Chuckeee Avatar
9 months ago

Max Tech does unboxing the right way.


Sorry Max Tech cringe inducing clipbait commentary makes me want to puke.
?
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
JPack Avatar
9 months ago
Remember when M2 came out and some people invented ridiculous excuses for Apple using a single NAND?

“but THeY dOnt MaKe 128gB cHIps aNyMoRe”

Glad to see Apple listening a bit to customer feedback on price/performance and external display support.
Score: 8 Votes (Like | Disagree)
DavidSchaub Avatar
9 months ago

The ****ing RAM is not ****ing soldered onto it. It is integrated in the ****ing CPU.

But unfortunately, the SSD is not user replaceable, which honestly is inexcusable at this point.
No, the RAM are just standard LPDDR5 chips connected to the package that the SoC die is also connected to.

Three distinct chips on the package:



At least the flash chips are repairable, if not really end-user replaceable. Given that the Mac would otherwise be bricked when the flash chips failed, this is a nice change.

Attachment Image
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
mrhick01 Avatar
9 months ago
dosdude1 has done a teardown and an upgrade of the storage from 256GB to 1TB (the 2TB upgrade failed because of a bad chip).

It's doable, but not by any user. Takes technician-level skills and some tools.

Given the SSD speeds, a good attached TB4/USB4 drive with an NVMe2 SSD can beat the speed of the base 256 GB (1700 read/2000 write), and match the 1 TB upgrade (3000 read & write).
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Victor Mortimer Avatar
9 months ago

The ****ing RAM is not ****ing soldered onto it. It is integrated in the ****ing CPU.

But unfortunately, the SSD is not user replaceable, which honestly is inexcusable at this point.
The ****ing RAM is ****ing soldered onto it. It is not integrated in the ****ing CPU.

And the SSD IS user replaceable as soon as 3rd party parts show up. I suspect there weren't enough Studios for OWC to build the parts. That will not be the case with the mini.

No, I'm not joking about the RAM. It's NOT integrated in any way, it's just soldered onto the same package as the CPU.
It's separate chips.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Zdigital2015 Avatar
9 months ago

No SD card reader and limited ports?
No thank you.
They had a sale until I didn't see an SD reader.
Mac mini hasn’t had an SD Card reader since the 2014 model. A high quality reader plus a USB-C cable to run it will be ~$50 at most.

If you really need a new computer, then you outfit what they sell you with the stuff you need. Otherwise, you really don’t need a new computer.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)