iFixit has posted its teardown of the new Mac mini.
Along with the announcement of the iPad Mini on October 23rd (teardown coming soon; we promise) came the new and improved Mac Mini, the 2012 iteration of the optical-drive-less Mini from last year. With the current trend, we look forward to maybe one day tearing down a smaller version of the Mac Mini: the Mac Mini Mini. But until then, we content ourselves with tearing into the Mac Mini Late 2012.
Highlights: ● Same model number ● Tucked away neatly near the rear of the Mini is the hard drive ● The power supply provides 85 watts to the Mac Mini—that's the same kind of electric juice as the AC adapter for a 15" or 17" MacBook Pro.
Mac Mini Mid 2012 Repairability: 8 out of 10 (10 is easiest to repair). ● No proprietary screws are found within the device. ● You can easily upgrade your RAM and hard drive, as well as add a secondary drive. ● There's no glue anywhere inside that needs to be removed while disassembling the Mini. ● The CPU is soldered to the logic board and not user-upgradeable. ● While not difficult to do, you still have to remove almost all the internals in order to replace the power supply.
If the processor wasn't soldered on and it had a nvidia video chip I would buy one just to play with. Can't believe they dropped ATI and went with intel built in graphics.