#MAC MINI 2011 MOTHERBOARD REPLACEMENT UPGRADE#
#MAC MINI 2011 MOTHERBOARD REPLACEMENT PRO#

Or so I thought.Īs soon as I got to step four of iFixit’s guide, I realized the new Mac mini is different than its predecessor. Just a few parts needed removing and this new set would cover all the bases. From my experience with the pre-2014 Mac minis, this would be a relatively painless process. So I bought a 480GB SSD, an external hard drive docking station, and a torx screwdriver set off Amazon. Life is too short for slow computers, as The Verge’s Nilay Patel put it back in April.

#MAC MINI 2011 MOTHERBOARD REPLACEMENT UPGRADE#

As someone who’s been enjoying the speediness of flash storage on a workplace MacBook Air, I felt the upgrade on my home machine was long overdue. I knew the RAM was soldered to the logic board on this particular model, leaving a SSD replacement as the only true option. It would stall, stop, and choke up on even the easiest of tasks.

#MAC MINI 2011 MOTHERBOARD REPLACEMENT PRO#

A Mac mini would let me keep my workflow, files, and apps intact from my dying MacBook Pro without having to spend upwards of $1,000.Ībout a year after purchase, the mini just wasn’t cutting it. I wanted a desktop computer, mostly because I could save some cash and felt I didn’t need a laptop if I would be using a work machine for 90 percent of my daily tasks. I should preface this by saying I bought the Mac mini fully knowing it was not a very powerful machine. Macs are notoriously hard to upgrade, and that's by design It was yet another much-needed reminder that Apple goes out of its way to make tinkering a herculean task. It involved painstakingly dismantling the entire machine piece by piece, using janky tools in place of the specialized ones I didn’t have. And simply to reach one of maybe only two parts an average computer owner may ever want to upgrade on their own.

But I was not at all prepared for the massive undertaking the late 2014-era Mac mini requires of users. This I know well from simple cases like RAM upgrades. Now, Macs are notoriously hard to upgrade, and that’s by design. Yet because the product is made by Apple, a seemingly simple procedure turns out to be a day-long adventure into the deepest, darkest parts of the DIY computer repair community. So I decided to replace its spinning hard disk drive with a solid state one. You see, it was slow and hampered by its components, and in desperate need of a speed boost. Last weekend, I performed an invasive and meticulous operation on one of my more valuable gadgets: a late 2014 Mac mini.

Mac mini 2011 motherboard replacement