The Mac mini M4 has only been available for a few days, but there are people who have already had time to tear it apart and discover several interesting secrets about it.
One of the most striking is the one that affects the power supply of these teams. It’s always been surprising that Apple managed to integrate the power supply into previous Mac minis, but doing so in the new Mac mini M4 design is especially notable.
This is demonstrated by the images of that power supply already removed from the equipment. It does not actually look like a power supply, and it almost looks like a conventional motherboard in which the components have managed to adapt to that layout in a truly spectacular way.
That’s something virtually no PC maker does today: conventional power supplies in desktop PCs are enormous by comparison—more than twice the size of a full M4 Mac mini, in fact—and the miniPCs that compete with The Mac mini use external power supplies.
There is also especially interesting news in the internal storage section. The new Mac mini M4 make use of a connection slot similar to the M.2, but not exactly the same. Even so, the modules used, similar to those already used in the Mac Studio, can be removed relatively easily.
The question is whether that opens the door to change SSD drive standard for one with greater capacity. Apple offers these expansions, but their Price is extremely high: in the M4, going to a 2 TB drive costs 920 euros, but a 2 TB M.2 NVMe drive like the Crucial P3 Plus in 2230 format currently costs 175 euros in Amazon.
The savings if we could use it, but we can’t. Are there other options? There is, but it is not simple. A YouTuber called DosDude1 has published a video in which he demonstrates how he managed to change the NAND chips in the SSD unit of his basic Mac mini M4 (256 GB) for ones that allowed him to reach 1 TB of storage.
The process is really complex and involves removing the NAND chips from the original module and then replacing them with the new ones, which must also go through a reballing process. All of this makes it necessary specialized tools such as knowledge and quite clever.
It is possible that specialized technical services have these tools and can therefore carry out the process, so it will be interesting to see if this discovery causes some professionals to offer this option for users of these Mac mini M4.
At the moment one thing is evident: these small teams have surprises inside them, and the comments that are being published on platforms like Reddit show that we are facing a special model of this family.
In WorldOfSoftware | If the question is whether someone turns off their computer now, Apple has the answer. And the answer is the Mac mini M4
