Neat! It's obvious from the outside that they've put a helluva lot of thought into how to package this, but it's even more obvious from the inside.
I wonder what the next-generation Mac Mini will look like. Take out the batteries and the remaining components would be truly tiny. What I'd kinda like is to unplug my computer from its desktop keyboard and screen at the end of the day, take it home in my pocket, and plug it into my keyboard and screen at home.
This reminds me of an anecdote where Jobs was arguing with an engineer about the look of the original Mac's internals:
"I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it's inside the box. A great carpenter isn't going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet, even though nobody's going to see it."
That's actually one of the selling points for me. Something that elegant inside the case seems very unlikely to have questionable engineering behind it.
Having disassembled a mid-2010 Mac Mini, the main limiting factor right now is without question the optical drive. The space required for an optical disk drastically increases its footprint. Replacing a 2.5" disk with a mini-PCIE SSD a la the MacBook Air would also free up valuable space.
They certainly could get the computer to within spitting distance of the new Apple TV, if it lost the optical drive.
Overall, I can't discount the current Mini's usefulness. With a Seagate Momentus XT and 8GB of memory it's a great development box (spinning up 4GB VMs with ease), great every day machine, and even plays games decently enough (including Starcraft II). Power consumption with a 23" display and external FW800 disk rounds out to 45-60W depending on the display's brightness.
However, the real "zero footprint" Mac is still the iMac. With the Mini, I still need a display, and the requisite display cable and second power cable.
I was kind of hoping that the times when the power and sleep buttons are put directly on the keyboard are long gone for good, so now I was very, very surprised to see the power button right above the delete key, looking just like the eject.
The power button really is a hassle if you use the 12 South BookArc stand. You have to lift the laptop out of the stand, open it up, hit the power button, close the laptop before it fully starts...
Some kind of external power button would be really nice.
It's really a shame apple put in a 5-point Security Torx for the bottom casing. Just got a new toolkit a few weeks ago... but it doesn't have the security torx tip.
But overall really nice form factor. I love how neat and well fit everything looks.
Why? There's no user replaceable/upgradable parts. If you're going to the trouble of buying a part and replacing it touurself surely you can get the right screwdriver.
It's an anti-geek arms race that I have never liked. I worked at an authorized Nintendo shop almost 20 years ago. "Regular" Torx screwdrivers, the kind you can pick up for nothing today, were hard to come by back then. They cost something like $50 direct from Nintendo. Every new model required some special tool for no reason except to make it harder for Joe Blow to take things apart. I understand the many reasons for it, but it's still anti-geek, physical DRM.
...not having to buy them? Being a geek is not about owning toys. It's about being open, curious, and observant.
There are hundreds of these types of screwheads now. The regular Torx used to be a security screwhead. Now that everyone has a Torx they whip out a 5-pointed Torx, call that one the "security" version and start the stupid cycle over again. This excludes people from hacking and learning, eg children.
This excludes people from hacking and learning, eg children.
That's nostalgia talking, I think. I took apart a lot of things when I was a kid, too, and put most of them back together plus or minus a few screws--but I just learned everything there is to learn from taking apart this particular thing in five minutes over the internet, a thing vastly more hackable with vastly more to learn from that I would have gladly traded in my screwdriver for back then.
The regular torx was never intended as a security screw head. It was just designed for powered assembly in an environment where screw driver bits are consumables.
Matching the 3 screwdrivers in the kitchen's "everything drawer" was not part of the design specification.
Thank you jws for the sanity here. It's not "anti-geek", it's engineering and manufacturing (and, I may add, keeping 5-year old Timmy from opening his dad's new MacBook Air and frying the innards with the screwdriver they keep in the kitchen drawer).
Not to be too negative, but if you can't find a way to quickly get inside, maybe you shouldn't be there in the first place. A real tinkerer/geek knows how to make their own tools in no time.
I think you are confusing two kinds of exclusivity: that from real technical challenge which teaches you something (eg how to correctly disassemble a machine) and that from random speedbumps (eg an exotic screwhead).
Have you tried to make a Torx head? I suppose you could get the shape with some kind of mouldable plastic or epoxy, but that's probably not strong enough in practice. They are designed to be set with much higher torque than Philips, hence the name.
If I was the engineering putting the MBA together, I would think that in the back of my mind as I decided that baked on SSDs were the way to go that this wouldn't catch on with everyone (manufacturers).
I mean, there's no way you deny that incredible space savings you get. But you're also locking in the main storage, something that people have been able to change in their laptops for (seeming) forever, something that I probably just did in my own MBP (cause those base Toshiba units are kinda funky) a few months ago.
I'm fairly certain that the SSD is basically a Mini PCI-E card. The overall dimensions are uncommon, but I believe there's no common standard for the size of Mini-PCIe SSDs in the first place.
In theory, the drive could be upgraded. Securing it to the chassis is a challenge left to the reader.
Might be interesting for this to turn into a new storage standard. It doesn't seem like they had to go through any particular shenanigans to cram the flash chips onto that form-factor. Then the non-upgradeable MBA main storage would become upgradeable.
Apple hater or Apple lover, I don't think anyone can disagree about their laptops and their Mac Mini being masterpieces of engineering. Really amazing compactness.
Actually, you can't. People who "hate apple's policies" are people who hate apple for ideological reasons and are attempting to rationalize it.
If you understand apple's policies you'll realize that all of them are designed to produce the best user experience for consumers.
I've never seen apple do something malicious, like I have Dell and Microsoft, nor betray their customers, like I have seen Microsoft, Google and Facebook do.
These "policies" that people hate generally amount to nothing more than failing to march according to some rigid stallmanesque ideology.
I wonder what the next-generation Mac Mini will look like. Take out the batteries and the remaining components would be truly tiny. What I'd kinda like is to unplug my computer from its desktop keyboard and screen at the end of the day, take it home in my pocket, and plug it into my keyboard and screen at home.