The Mac mini... what&#8217;s inside the box?

I tried to pry one of the demo units open at Macworld, but security whacked my knuckles with a stick when I got out my black stick. So kudos to Macnews.de for being, I think, the first to take one apart!

You can see how your current Mac compares, with Xbench.

Of note: The mini uses a Freescale (Motorola) 1.42Ghz 7447 CPU and uses a 2.5-inch (that’s laptop-size) hard drive.

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I tried to pry one of the demo units open at Macworld, but security whacked my knuckles with a stick when I got out my black stick. So...

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pncc

Can anyone show or describe this 'putty knife'? Is it a plastic blade or really a putty knife??

January 20 2005 at 11:01 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

terrac

The apple part number for the case opener (putty knife) is 922-6761. ...and I thought I was going to get to use the black stick on this one too! ha.

January 18 2005 at 5:33 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Alex Eiser

Macs in general can be booted with out displays mice or keyboards. I do that with one of the machines I manage. However, no luck with XSAN, it requires fiber-optic cards for the network attached storage. So Mac OS X Server or Xserves only. You could do some nice stuff with the xgrid or with Xcode's network compiling features.

January 15 2005 at 6:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

pedro

Ummm I don't think they took it apart, unless they have apple.com placemats in their house... as this: http://www.macnews.de/gallery/displayimage.php?album=16&pos=23 shows, they merely took pictures at macworld of a display...

January 14 2005 at 5:26 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Laurie

It will boot without a display. See here: http://www.tuaw.com/entry/1234000917027372/

January 14 2005 at 2:20 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Michael Z.

Anyone know if this baby will boot without a monitor? What about without a keyboard and mouse. Just stick it on the network for VNC access? Or a dozen of them with Xsan?

January 13 2005 at 8:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Eric

Looking at the pics, I'm pretty sure I see a connector for a 2.5 inch drive, which makes sense since they draw less power and the length of a 3.5 is longer than could fit in the mini. The drive itself would be replaceable if you aren't afraid of a screwdriver. Probably easier to expand with an external firewire drive. RAM is just a DIMM slot, so that's easy to swap out. It's probably best to leave the bluetooth and airpont to Apple. All those tabs that sit around the perimiter scare me a bit. While the plastic is probably good quality, tabs can be a real pain to deal with. How do they hook to the cover? My guess is that the aluminum is a sleeve that fits over the cover that is plastic. Maybe there's a gap on the bottom that a tool can slide in to depress the tabs and allow the cover to be pulled off. You'll just have to wait until someone gets theirs. There's always someone who immediately takes it apart and posts pics.

January 13 2005 at 4:46 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

patrick

does that mean we will be able to upgrade the HD ourselves?, what about RAM, bluetooth and airport? (sorry, but this is making me seriously think about comming over from PC land)

January 13 2005 at 3:49 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Oliver

laptop drive huh? too bad, i was hoping i could put my iMac's 120gb drive in one. External it will have to be i guess.

January 13 2005 at 2:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply