- Mac mini M4 has been assessed for repairability by iFixit
- The compact computer scored a 7/10 with a commendable modular design
- However, there are bottlenecks with the native SSD
Apple’s Mac mini M4 has been given the teardown treatment by iFixit, and here are generally positive findings, albeit with some caveats.
The website is known for taking apart hardware and rating it for design and repairability, and iFixit starts its video teardown by highlighting how much smaller the new Mac mini is compared to computers of the past.
Apple has achieved this by impressively cramming a lot of components into a small space, and something to note is that the power supply has changed from a single module to a board that runs across the top of the chassis.
There’s also a large fan in the Mac mini M4 and an innovative cooling design that does a lot of the heavy lifting in controlling the power consumed, given the limited space in the more compact chassis.
Another interesting move in terms of cooling is that the Mac mini with vanilla M4 has an aluminum heatsink, while the model with the M4 Pro SoC has a larger copper heatsink to better cool the more powerful processor, which of course makes sense.
There’s good news on the storage front: the SSD is removable, as we’ve already heard, so upgrading to a larger drive is possible. We say that, but there are caveats here, which we’ll get to in a moment.
The plus point of removable and replaceable ports is also noted, at least on the front of the Mac mini – unfortunately the rear ports are soldered (as is the system RAM, next to the M4 chip itself at the heart of the machine).
The controversial position of the power button on the bottom of the Mac mini also inevitably gets attention, along with the comment that Apple may be too concerned about aesthetics here.
Overall, iFixit commends the thinking on the modular design, with such ports (on the front) and the storage, and gives the Mac mini M4 a (tentative) score of 7/10 for repairability.
Analysis: Storage and Apple’s own choice
Returning to the issue of storage, while the SSD is upgradeable, as mentioned there are pitfalls (which we already discussed in a previous report). The drives are physically different between the Mac mini with M4 and the computer with the M4 Pro, so you can’t swap SSDs between those models. However, iFixit has successfully upgraded a base Mac mini M4 with a 512 GB SSD from another model to replace a 256 GB drive.
The other caveat here is that the SSD is a proprietary Apple drive, so you can’t just buy an old SSD drive and plug it into your Mac mini. You’ll need an SSD from another Mac mini, or an SSD sold by Apple, if the company starts offering it (which it hasn’t yet). So that rather limits the options for storage upgrades, as you can imagine.
There is a possibility that third parties will produce compatible SSDs for Mac mini upgrades, and indeed there have already been announcements to that effect. The downside to such a ‘fudged’ (well, unofficial) drive installation could be that Apple closes this avenue via firmware updates that render the third-party SSD unusable, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.
Let’s hope Apple itself sells SSDs for Mac mini storage upgrades, but skeptics already doubt that could happen – and the replaceable drive point here is more about facilitating repairs than upgrades.