IFixit tears apart new Mac Mini | Hacker News Reader

IFixit tears apart new Mac Mini

ifixit.com

41 pointsbarredo25 comments

I do lots of crazy CNC machining, own a mechanical engineering/industrial design company, and think this housing is unreal if its really machined from a solid block of aluminum. The undercuts, the thin walls, the perfect finish, a mass produced part... they are really pushing the boundaries.

I'm pretty blown away too. I've always assumed that "solid block of aluminum" really meant that these things were cast and then cleaned up, but I can't imagine how that would be cast... in any case, it really is nuts.

Would you mind expanding in this a bit? I think it's really interesting.

For a unibody macbook pro, they stamp the underside curvature (I think...), then put it in a fixture and hog out the aluminum in similar fashion to this- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHTQG_7bdbg, then they finish the sides, add tapped holes and cut out the cd slots and ports from the side with a small endmill.

For this, http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.net/igi/SiKdJKFBvUOZvqYK.huge, they either put it on end and machined the inside with a big, long endmill, then followed with some smaller ones to get those inside radii... or came down through the big round hole with an upside down T-shaped cutter and hogged out the material with underside cuts. Then cut out those little features near the end opening, somehow I don't know, and then detail the mounting features on the disk opening and cut the slot for the CD and laser cut the the little eject pin next to it.

Then they sandblast them, probably robotically b/c its so perfect, and then hard anodized.

Not a big mac fan boy, but I have to agree they are really pushing the boundaries in design and products in almost every aspect of personal computer market that I can think of. Even their server looks sexy as hell: http://www.apple.com/xserve/

Would it really be machined? or just cast?

CNC Machined, you cant die cast with that accuracy or get all that inside geometrey - http://www.apple.com/macmini/design.html

Clearly apple does the design and value-add but these are the people actually pushing the boundaries of machining:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn

Foxconn certainly pushes the limits of mass production, but Apple's engineers make their designers visions come to life and figure out how to do manufacturing no one else has done before. Johnny's CNC play ground - http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/blog/uploaded_images/ive2-7...

That photo is from a documentary [1] in which Jony Ive said that a big part of his work was designing fixtures that hold the parts in the machines.

I always figured that Apple designed the process and others merely implement that, they don’t seem like the kind of company that works with many ready made parts.

[1] http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/

The robotics company I'm working for uses the mac mini for one of our robots, and we had just finished a chassis overhaul based on the old model.

Time to go hit the CAD program again...

If you ever want to know where a product is in the Apple refresh cycle, check out this link. I find it invaluable when considering an Apple product purchase: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

I look at these teardowns from a different aspect: once upon a time I worked as a computer technician, and built and upgraded hundreds of systems. When I see these pictures, I see a monolithic block of really hard to work with pieces. An appliance, not a computer, in other words. They make me less inclined to purchase.

I had been holding out until the next iMac refresh to buy a new computer; the 27inch screen and the Core i7 were pretty darn attractive.

However,a server model paired with two cheap 22inch screens tempts me greatly, given the smaller dent on my wallet...

It would be great if getting to the hard drive were easier. I love that they made the memory easily upgradeable, but I would really like to put an ssd in one of these.

I was checking out the tear-down with an eye for the same. With the base cover off, you can see most of the HD, but it looks like the curved bottom part of the case covers it enough so that the motherboard must slide out to replace the drive.

I was really hoping for an i3. What is the deal with Apple and old CPUs?

Apple doesn't want to ship a computer with a crappy integrated GPU, because they want to ensure that users have OpenCL-capable GPUS. Intel is not offering i3s or i5s with good integrated GPUs, and Intel won't let NVidia make chipsets anymore, so in order to offer an i3/i5/i7 system with a good GPU, they need to use 3 big, power hungry chips (CPU+chipset+GPU). During the Core 2 era, Apple took advantage of the great combo of a Core 2 CPU + NVidia chipset with good integrated graphics to offer reasonable performance in smaller packages. They no longer have enough room for a 3 chip solution, so until Intel either improves their GPUs or starts playing nice with NVidia again, Apple faces the choice between using older CPUs or regressing to older enclosures and higher power consumption.

My Core2Duo 1.83GHz mini has an intel GMA 950 GPU. Are the current GPUs worse than that?

The 'GMA HD' GPUs in the i3/i5/i7M are better than the GMA 950 (or even the GMA 3000 & 4500 series as far as I know), but they're still massively inferior to the nVidia Geforce 320M or its predecessor, the 9400M. There aren't any OpenCL drivers for the Intel GMAs as far as I know, although to be honest I can't see an obvious technical reason for that in the GMA 4500 and HD. Maybe there's no point as using the CPU in the same die is just as fast. Or maybe it's because Intel are rubbish at developing decent GPU drivers - their OpenGL implementations are pretty poor.

My personal speculation is that it is do with the current lack-of-performance currently in Intel GPUs. Intel’s current i3 two chip performance is not as enticing graphically as the Nvidia’s two chip solution with a Core 2 Duo processor. I think a better question is why does Apple keep insisting on a Nvidia or AMD GPU in their current products? It’s a question that Anand Lal Shimpi has asked as well:

“Apple is up to something. For the past 1.5 years every single Mac has shipped with some form of NVIDIA graphics, standard, regardless of price. These are all G9x based GPUs with full support for OpenCL. From the looks of it, Apple is trying to broaden its install base of OpenCL compliant machines. In preparation for what I'm not really sure, but something is coming.“

(http://www.anandtech.com/show/3762/apples-13inch-macbook-pro...)

webGL?

Core i3 has an integrated GPU that benchmarks just a bit faster than the GeForce 9400M in the previous Mini, but much slower than the GeForce 320M in the new Mini/MacBook/MacBook Pro 13-inch.

The MacBook Pro 15" and 17" include Core i5/i7 but have GeForce GT 330M in addition to the intel HD graphics to provide a graphics boost. It would increase the mini cost to have a second GPU.

==== GeForce 330M (MacBook Pro 15/17)

3DMark 05 = 12503

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-GT-330M.22437.0....

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP585

==== GeForce 320M (MacBook/Mac Mini Mid 2010)

3DMark 05 = 7262

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-320M.28701.0.htm...

==== Intel Graphics Media Accelerator HD Graphics (Core i3)

3DMark 05 = 3096

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Graphics-Media-Accelerato...

==== GeForce 9400M (Mac Mini Late 2009)

3DMark 05 = 3002

http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-9400M-G.11949.0....

http://support.apple.com/kb/SP577

The i3's GPU sucks so it would need an additional discrete GPU, which would cost more and require a larger motherboard.

I guessing they wouldn't be able to get an internal power supply in there if it had to power an i3.

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