Mac Mini 4GB Upgrade

I received my 4Gb of RAM today from Egghead. 4GB for $52 can’t really be beat. I love Apple to death but they wanted $200 for an extra 3GB of RAM over the 1GB standard. Not paying that price. So I thought if I was going to crack open the Mac Mini then I was going to max it out. I do not plan to upgrade the hard drive. All my movies and music are on external drives so the stock hard drive will do. I plan to keep the Mini clean with any apps I simply do not need on a home theater machine so space will not be an issue with only 120GB.

So after work I made dinner and fed the kids. Crash in the living room chair for about an hour before getting the kids ready for bed. Then I hit the basement for the Mac Mini operation. I have been reading what is available on the web for upgrading the new Mini. Everyone is bitching about the $200 difference between the low end and high end version of the mini. The only difference is a larger hard drive and 2GB of RAM over the 1GB of RAM. If you price it out then the $200 is a crock. Apple wanted an extra $200 to upgrade the Mini I bought from 1GB to 4GB and that was not for a bigger hard drive. As I mentioned Egghead sells 4GB of RAM for $52. I just saved myself $148 over what Apple was going to offer me.

The only question I had was could I do the RAM upgrade without jacking up the new Mini. I was having flash backs to modding my first XBOX about 5 years ago. I fried the motherboard on that attempt before getting it right and it cost me a new XBOX. If I jacked up my new Mac Mini my wife was going to shoot me. But I found a great breakdown of the Mac Mini at iFixit.com. After reading that I was confident I wouldn’t have any issues.

So the upgrade is complete and it took me no more than 30 minutes to save $148. If you are thinking of getting a Mac Mini my advice is not to pay for the top end model. Get the lower one and upgrade it yourself. It is very simple to do. The only real issue I had was almost stripping the head on one of the four screws. I got it out okay but if I would have stripped the screw then I would have been in trouble.

Here are the Mini details before the upgrade.

[ BEFORE STATS]

Below us we have the Mac Mini, the 4GB of RAM in two 2GB each, the highly specialized drywall spatula to take the Mini apart, and a #1 screw driver. I put a towel down on the basement bar as to not scratch the sexy Mac Mini.

The cover is off and the guts are exposed. She is naked and exposed.

Disconnected the three antennas and unscrewed the optical drive. I almost stripped out one of the screws and was cussing for a while. But I got it out in the end.

This is blurry but you see the 1GB and an empty spot for another card. We better go a head and fill it up.

Here the two 2GB cards are inserted and we are ready to put everything back together.

Here are the mini details after the upgrade. Notice the jump in video RAM from 128 to 256. That is shared with the RAM and another good reason to upgrade the RAM to something bigger than the standard 1GB.

[ AFTER ]

And so here sits the sexy beast….