Unboxing a Mac mini: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Install My Own SSD with Mac Mini(malism)

Recently it was time to upgrade to a new shiny M based silicon Mac (the old Intel one was on its last legs). As it was going to be used as the main system and for day to day use, the Mac M4 mini Pro seemed ideal.

The new Mac Minis come in a simple white box (it’s a shame that the strips have to be torn to open it).

Mac mini Pro box

Once the lid is removed the power chord sits on a thick card with a hole in, lifting this reveals the Mac Mini and that’s it. Apple minimalism to the maximum.

Power chord removed and cardboard with hole

Removing the Mac Mini reveals an aluminium case with nothing on the top and air vents and the power button on the base.

Top and base of Mac mini Pro

The back has a power socket, Ethernet socket, full sized HDMI socket and 3 USB-C/Thunderbolt sockets.

Rear of Mac mini Pro

The front has 2 USB-C/Thunderbolt sockets, a power indicator and a headphone jack socket (maybe the more professional audio types still use wired headphones).

Front of Mac mini Pro

Since this is a Mac Mini Pro it’s all Thunderbolt 5 and the Ethernet is 10G. There’s also 14 CPU cores, 20 GPU cores and 16 Neural engine cores, 64GB RAM and 512GB of SSD.

512GB of SSD may seem a bit low, but there’s a reason for that and that’s a 3rd party 4TB SSD upgrade.

M4-SSD box

Again the SSD upgrade from M4-SSD.COM is a simple box, the side indicates what model of Mac Mini (Mac Mini or Pro or various Mac Studios).

M4-SSD showing model

Opening the box the SSD is lying in what looks like conductive foam.

Internal SSD on conductive foam

Lift this layer off and there’s a card separator with a hole (similar to the Mac Mini packaging) and then instructions on how to install the SSD.

conductive foam removed

Below that is a bag containing a screw driver and bits to open the case.

SSD install instruction manual

There’s a metal strip that can be inserted into the Mac Mini case and a “spluger” to insert once the base has separated and can then be slid around to pop open the clips.

Screwdriver and tools in bag

There’s screw driver has all 3 heads that are needed to open the various screws in the Mac Mini Pro (slightly different from the Mac Mini version).

Screwdriver, metal separator and spludger

It’s nice that everything is included that’s required to open the Mac Mini unscrew everything and put it all back together and the instructions are very clear.

All the heads needed for screws

The Mac Mini Pro has enough CPU/GPU/NPU grunt to do the things you want when needed, is beautifully small and is more cost effective than going to its big brother the Mac Studio.

Memory is key (especially in the modern age of running LLMs locally) so the largest memory configuration is 64GB, that's built into the main M4 silicon, so no option there but to pay Apple's prices, however the internal SSD disk is removable and now there's a lot of 3rd party vendors who offer Apple substitutes (Apple buy standard NAND memory and then put them on their own proprietary SSD modules - why they just don't support standard PCIe NVMe SSDs making life easier for everyone?).

Apple charge £1200 for a 4TB SSD, while going to M4-SSD gets you an upgrade for a M4 Mac mini or M4 Mac mini Pro for a lot cheaper. The 4TB for the M4 Pro is $699.00, which is just over £530.00 (at the time of writing). There's shipping to add, but it's not a lot.

Opening a Mac can be daunting, especially for the uninitiated, but M4-SSD include the right tools to open it (a metal pry and a plastic picker and a screwdriver with the correct T heads for all Apple's screws). The metal pry is placed into the (thin) gap between the base and case, then the plastic picker is inserted and moved to where the clips are and just prise the base up with a bit of pressure, go around the case and repeat for all 4, allegedly a spudger works better (from someone like iFixit), starting from the opposite side of the power button is safest as you don't want to damage or disconnect the cable. The base is attached by a small cable, which connects the power button, be careful and rest the base on the side of the main unit, then remove the 8 screws around the edge of the next layer and again carefully lay against the side of the unit as this has the WiFi/etc antennas and don't damage or disconnect the cable. Then remove the screws around the fan and lay this against the side. This now exposes the internal SSD, unscrew it (it's screwed in tightly). Wiggle the SSD out and replace with the 3rd party SSD. Ensure it's fitted securely and then screw the screw back in.

Opening the Mac mini Pro

Then the whole process is reversed, fit the fan, the heat spreader/antenna system and then pop the case back on. Make sure all the screws are placed somewhere safe after they've been removed as they are very small and easily lost.

Closing the Mac mini Pro

The whole process took about 30 minutes, it would have been quicker but not having done this before there were a few niggles including doing the video stuff. Also ensure the camera will not just stop videoing after a certain time, the Sony RX100 m6 limits to 5 minutes.

The next stage requires another Mac as the new SSD in the Mac mini Pro has no operating system or anything else on it. The process requires putting the system into DFU mode, this requires powering the Mac mini down, then holding the power button on (while connected, preferably by a high speed USB C cable) to the other M series Mac. The power LED will go orange and then release the power button and the other Mac will recognise it and then go into DFU mode, downloads the latest macOS and transfer it to the Mac in DFU mode (that's why having a high speed USB cable helps). The USB cable must be connected to the USB C port at the back with the Thunderbolt icon (on the M4 Mac mini Pro it's the middle USB C port).

DFU in progress

This takes quit a while as it has to download a full copy of macOS and transfer between Macs, but it's not something that requires watching, either it will error out (and the process needs repeating or it could be that the SSD isn't fitted/seated properly and the whole opening the Mac needs redoing) or it will just work. Luckily all went smoothly so all that was required was unplugging the M4 Mac mini Pro and rebooting (with monitor and keyboard/mouse connected) and it will be in macOS setup mode and boom there's a 4TB SSD Macintosh HD.

The SSD is fast too (it uses the same NAND memory that Apple uses) and people have shown it operates as the same speed (some reports say improves vs Apple). No issues so far. Bigger SSDs tend to operate faster as they can spread the read and more importantly writes across all the memory so reducing SSD wear.

The M4 Mac mini Pro is fast, it runs programs really well, including large beasts like Fusion from Autodesk for 3D design.

The Mac mini will probably last quite a while, the Mac Studio was tempting with the greater RAM capacity, but it's a lot more expensive. If you want to run large LLMs the the Mac Studio is probably a better choice with 128GB+ RAM which will be able to run the larger models - the Mac Mini Pro can run Meta’s Llama but not the full sized one.

Real geeks will run multiple machines and link them through Thunderbolt 5 (using RDMA) as now macOS supports shared execution so a model can be split between them. Though probably real power users are still probably going to link multiple Mac Studios rather than Mac Mini’s. There's even software to support this now (EXO) which makes setup a breeze (well considerably easier with a nice UI to drive it all).

Going back to a simple one machine setup, the Mac Mini Pro is a great choice (especially as future releases of macOS are no longer going to support Intel Macs). Thunderbolt 5 is fast and adding a good USB Hub means that you’ll get great performance from peripherals that operate at high speed. Adding external USB disks also makes sense (especially fast SSDs). 

Unfortunately there seem to be shortages now (or long ship times) due to the popularity of using things like Openclaw (a local agent using ‘AI’ to monitor and control the Mac that can automate personal tasks. Memory prices have also drastically increased since this was started. NOTE due to RAM pricing increases the Mac Mini Pro now is only available with a max of 48GB of RAM.

Though this was for the M4 Mac Mini Pro (retail £1299), Apple have released M5 based systems, so there’s likely to be an M5 Mac Mini soon. It also included the Apple Magic Keyboard with TouchID (initially thought this was a waste of time, but it makes accessing passwords and paying for stuff so much quicker and easier).

The M4-SSD upgrade was $699 / £530.

This upgraded a 5K 27” i7 iMac and the performance difference is amazing. The only issue with the upgrade is that a new monitor is also required and Apple’s Studio Display is costly. There are good offerings from other vendors. As an aside, initially a BENQ 32" monitor was acquired and connected via HDMI. This worked well, though there would be occasional vertical red or blue lines appearing on screen and the monitor would occasionally (randomly) lose sync, the screen go black and a few seconds later turn on again. Replacing HDMI with a USB C / Mini DisplayPort made all those problems disappear and the HDMI port is now used for a second older HD monitor.