All Hail the Return of Upgradeable Storage! Mac mini 2024 Teardown 

It shouldn’t be a big story that a desktop computer has upgradeable internal storage, but with Apple’s cute new 2024 Mac mini, that’s exactly where we are. It’s possible to pop the SSD out after removing a screw, and then switch in a bigger one. We didn’t run into the software blocks we saw in the Mac Studio—we were able to calibrate a higher capacity SSD with Apple Configurator with no problems. 

But of course, this being Apple, there’s a catch: the SSD’s proprietary format makes aftermarket upgrades tricky. 

Still, used parts should hit the shelves soon. And between the replaceable SSD and modular front ports, we’re pleasantly surprised to see the Mac mini move toward repairability and upgradeability.

These changes—plus launch day manuals—have earned the 2024 mini a respectable 7 out of 10 provisional repairability score. 

Upgrades Are Kind of Back on the Menu: The M4 Mac mini’s Replaceable SSD

Apple has always charged over market price for Mac memory and storage upgrades, but historically this wasn’t a big issue. RAM and SSDs used to be commodity parts, so you could just buy the minimum spec from Apple, and order your upgrades at a much lower price from another source. Then Apple started soldering things to the mainboard, and with Apple Silicon, everything—RAM, storage, and GPU—was integrated.

This has long-reaching repair repercussions, or repaircussions. First, you can’t ever upgrade or replace integrated parts, which can significantly reduce the useful life of your computer. It also means that broken Macs cannot be harvested for spares. And it also means that you have to pay Apple’s preposterous upgrade prices at purchase time.

My favorite example of Apple’s price gouging upgrade prices comes from the snazzy tech reviewer Quinn Nelson, who points out that you can buy two base model $599 Macs mini (16GB, 256GB) for the same price as upgrading the RAM and storage to 32GB and 512GB on one. Ouch.

The new 2024 Mac mini still has soldered-in RAM, as is the new norm with the Unified Memory architecture, but the SSD can be swapped out, and we have successfully upgraded a 256GB drive to a 512GB with no issues using the Apple Configurator tool. We also successfully swapped like-for-like 256GB drives between two base models. 

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Hold up: this is a big deal! The bigger Mac Studio also had physically modular storage, but no form of replacement or upgrade software solution. Back in 2022, we weren’t able to make the transplant work. Several combinations of drives in the Mac Studio’s two available SSD slots resulted in a non-booting computer, and running Apple Configurator didn’t make a difference. So we breathed a sigh of slightly-surprised relief when this swap went off without a hitch.

We’re already off to a good start, but here come those catches.

First, the Mac mini’s storage is non-standard. Although it looks similar to an M.2, it’s nothing you can just buy off the shelf and use, like you can for most Windows and Linux desktop (and many laptop) PCs. However, the fact that the parts are modular at least means that, in the future, there could be a ready supply of used parts harvested from other Mac minis, and the lack of a software lock makes the prospect of aftermarket parts look pretty good.

If you’re wondering, the SSDs are different between the two Mac mini models. The 256GB model in the base M4-equipped mini is smaller, more normal-looking, and in a completely different location than the one in the M4 Pro. It appears that this is due to the M4 Pro’s larger die, and in turn, larger heatsink. We thought the connectors looked close enough that we had to try the swap.

The M4’s SSD fits inside the M4 Pro but just barely: one of the integrated circuits on the PCB presses against the heatsink. The M4 Pro SSD fits inside the M4, but one standoff needs to be removed and the fan needs to be connected prior to installing the card. We ran out of time to test both with Apple Configurator, but we’re interested to see the results. While we don’t exactly recommend swapping in physically incompatible drives, we’re excited to see what the tech community cooks up. We wish both drives were the same, with Apple’s design priority being interoperability as these Macs age. But we’ll take what we got over soldered-on or glued-in parts.

Due to the non-standard nature of the SSD, we’re not holding our breath for aftermarket parts. But if anyone’s able to make it work at a hardware level, only time will tell whether Apple Configurator can configure a third-party card. Some sort of configuration will be required, since the storage controller is built into the Apple silicon.

Smaller Footprint Demands Some Fancy Cooling Solutions

The Mac mini had stayed roughly the same size and shape since 2010, and shape-wise, that 2010 revamp was just a pancaked version of the 2005 original, whose size was dictated by the need for an optical CD/DVD drive.

This long-in-the-tooth format was hilariously oversized for the tiny Apple Silicon computer inside the M1 Mac mini, but it had one huge advantage — the cooling system, designed for hot Intel chips, was massively overqualified for the job of chilling down Apple’s SoCs. I have never heard the fans on my own M1 Mac mini in all the years I have used it.

The new, smaller 5×5-inch Mac mini has an all-new cooling system where the circular bottom grille is used both for pulling in cool air at the front, and for ejecting hot air at the back. In between, the air is routed through various layers to cool them.

Take a closer look for yourself in this interactive embed from our Lumafield Neptune CT scanner:

The power supply unit itself (which, admittedly, is a work of art) is no longer encased as a module, but instead sits bare at the top of the sandwich, right beneath the Apple logo. Apple pointed out in its press materials that this puts the power circuitry above the computer parts instead of below them, which stops the SoC from getting an extra toasting. And, since the main cooling happens near the base, the hot SoC gets first dibs on cool air.

There are also noticeable differences between the M4 and M4 Pro models in terms of cooling power. You just have to look at our comparison photo to see that the M4 Pro model has a much beefier cooling rig, from a fatter heat pipe to an upgraded copper heatsink with more fins. 

This is where we have to mention the new power button, which is on the bottom. Turning on a new Apple computer for the first time is always a puzzle—I had to Google the position of the power button on my old 2010 iMac the first time I used it. The previous minis had their buttons around the rear right-hand corner, and you had to reach around to press it. The new design puts the button on the rear left, but on the bottom. To press it, you have to slip a finger in the gap between the desk and the bottom of the Mac.

Frankly, it doesn’t seem like the big deal that some are making it out to be. It’s not like it’s any harder to locate than on the old model, and the small Mac will hardly crush your finger. It might even be easier to find blind than the Mac Studio’s button, which is impressively flush with the enclosure. I, for one, also don’t find the need to power down my desktop-bound Mac all that often. The new model is also aluminum all-round, whereas the old model had a plastic insert containing the ports and the power button. Putting a button on the back would mean machining another hole in the body.

We do wonder how this redesign might affect vertical use. The previous Mac mini worked just fine when set on end, with its exhaust at the top. If the new design relies on convection to weave the airflow through the internals and back out, then the vertical orientation might not be optimal. On the other hand, Mac minis are used in rack format in large server farms all the time, and Apple even acknowledged this in the release video. If you want to velcro the new mini to the back of a monitor, then, you should be just fine. But if you set it on its face, rear-end upwards, you’ll lose access to the front-facing ports. Which brings us to…

Modular Front Ports

The new Mac mini has modular front-facing ports. Cool! Those two USB-C ports, along with the headphone jack, can be removed and replaced individually without soldering. The rear ports are all soldered, though. We’d prefer all the ports to be modular, but as the front ports will be subject to more wear-and-tear, this is at least a sensible compromise.

That headphone jack might be better at the back, too, where it used to be. I’d argue that a desktop computer is more likely to have a permanent connection to a speaker or headphones, and cable management would be much neater if kept at the back. That depends on your usage though, so no real complaints there.

Green Machine?

Finally, we get to Apple’s sustainability claims. The 2024 Mac mini is, they say, the “first carbon-neutral Mac.” 

The changes Apple has made to get to this point are laudable—and it’s important that all corporations move to reduce their carbon emissions. “Carbon neutral” certifications incentivize companies to improve their processes and contribute to carbon capture, reforestation, and other important initiatives. 

But don’t mistake “carbon neutral” to mean that the mini has no emissions, or to come to the conclusion that you’re better off buying a new carbon-neutral mini than repairing your old one.

Apple has indeed made several significant process improvements: The mini’s recycled aluminum enclosure is made via impact extrusion, which has lower waste than other methods of aluminum fabrication—they say 85% less, which is in line with efficiency we’ve seen in research. Apple also explains that the energy used in manufacture was 100% renewable, and they increased their surface shipping over air shipping (50% by weight according to Apple’s numbers). Air shipping accounts for quite a bit of the emissions impact of consumer goods, as much as 15x more than ground shipping. In fact, being able to do more surface shipping and less air shipping is one of the reasons iFixit opened a new warehouse in Tennessee this week. These changes mean big reductions in Apple’s emissions, well worth applauding.  

The claims of carbon neutrality, however, bear a little more scrutiny. Know that the carbon credits market is underregulated and claims of carbon equivalence are notoriously hard to verify. The first credit organization that Apple names in their mini sustainability report, Verra, was resoundingly criticized last year. A joint investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial found that “more than 90%” of Verra’s rainforest offset credits “are likely to be ‘phantom credits’ and do not represent genuine carbon reductions.”

Still, all this work to reduce emissions and fund climate-supportive projects is a step in the right direction.  And Apple could go further in that direction by leaning even harder into repairability, modularity, and reuse. When Fairphone looked at the sustainability impact of repair over the lifetime of their phone, they found that most parts paid off their emissions impact if they extended the phone’s life by a matter of days. We’d love to see Apple do the same analysis: What emissions reduction did the M4 mini see thanks to lifetime extension via its modular SSD? What would we see if even more components were modular and easily replaceable?

The standout feature here is clearly the user-swappable storage, but this is only useful if Apple makes it easy for us to buy replacements, including ideally from third parties. We also want to see the same thing in Apple’s portables. After all, it’s easy to plug a big external SSD into a desktop computer, but a major hassle to add storage to a laptop. In all, though, the new Mac mini typifies Apple’s repairability path—it’s moving in the right direction, if slower than we’d like.