If its exterior design amazed the gallery with its compactness, the interior is not bad either. With its power drawn from the M4 (and M4 Pro) chip, the small desktop computer is capable of handling heavy tasks, whether gaming or video editing for example. Better, if you are short on disk space, the good news is that the Mac mini 2024 is modular, its SSD storage is removable, well almost.
Half good news
On the iFixit website forumsthe user KianWee Lim posted a photo of the internal design of the Mac mini M4 showing that the SSD card is not soldered to the motherboard. This suggests that the SSD is modular and relatively easy for a user to remove, similar to the Mac Studio.
As we explained in 2022 about the Mac Studio, this doesn’t mean the computer is upgradeable. iFixit confirmed at the time that the Mac Studio did not recognize any SSD combinations other than the one it shipped with from the factory. The same is probably true for the Mac mini M4. This reminds us of the serialized parts of the iPhone.
While some were hoping to see post-sales SSD storage options from Apple, the firm ultimately only offered an SSD kit for the Mac Pro.
Despite everything, this discovery remains good news. Indeed, as you can see below in a teardown video published on M2 generation.
Partial teardown of M4 Mac Mini /w 16GB RAM & 256GB SSD. Interesting revelation: Wifi chip & antenna on the back of bottom air intake. SSD on a daughter board. And even the base 256GB version comes in two chips. No compromise in speed. Theoretically also end user upgradeable. pic.twitter.com/vA2vQwkl7J
— ＨＧ阿聻𓆣𓇽 (@ohgkg) November 8, 2024
This means the M4 Mac mini will offer significantly faster read and write speeds, addressing one of the biggest complaints about the previous generation model. Apple also fixed this issue with the MacBook Air M3 earlier this year.
The new Mac mini M4 is available today from €699, accompanied by the new MacBook Pro and the iMac, both powered by the M4 chip.
