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Last weekend, I performed an invasive and meticulous operation on one of my more valuable gadgets: a late 2014 Mac mini. You see, it was slow and hampered by its components, and in desperate need of a speed boost. So I decided to replace its spinning hard disk drive with a solid state one. 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. Now, Macs are notoriously hard to upgrade, and that’s by design.
This I know well from simple cases like RAM upgrades. But I was not at all prepared for the massive undertaking the late 2014-era Mac mini requires of users.
And simply to reach one of maybe only two parts an average computer owner may ever want to upgrade on their own. It involved painstakingly dismantling the entire machine piece by piece, using janky tools in place of the specialized ones I didn’t have.
It was yet another much-needed reminder that Apple goes out of its way to make tinkering a herculean task. Macs are notoriously hard to upgrade, and that's by design I should preface this by saying I bought the Mac mini fully knowing it was not a very powerful machine. 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. 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. About a year after purchase, the mini just wasn’t cutting it.
It would stall, stop, and choke up on even the easiest of tasks. I knew the RAM was soldered to the logic board on this particular model, leaving a SSD replacement as the only true option. And that seemed fine. 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. Life is too short for slow computers, as The Verge’s. So I bought a 480GB SSD, an external hard drive docking station, and a torx screwdriver set off Amazon.
From my experience with the pre-2014 Mac minis, this would be a relatively painless process. Just a few parts needed removing and this new set would cover all the bases. Or so I thought. As soon as I got to, I realized the new Mac mini is different than its predecessor. Not only was this new guide 35 steps long, but just getting inside the Mac mini involved removing three TR6 Torx security screws.
Buy adobe creative suite cs6 for mac. The screws have a small pillar in the middle, requiring an even more specialized screwdriver to take it out. Neither of the two hardware stores within walking distance of my apartment had the appropriate tool.
Luckily, a computer repair store did. (In an uneventful twist, the maintenance guy just jammed a regular Torx tool into the screw head, as his security one didn’t even fit.) I assumed it would be relatively straightforward from there.