When hackers inflate the RAM and SSD of a Mac Mini

Written by Guillaume
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This article is an automatic translation

While some companies are doing their best to "lock down" their machines, some smart guys are finding solutions.

A few weeks ago, we reported on the case of a sweet crazy guy who wanted to boost his GeForce RTX 2070 graphics card. To do this, he removed the memory chips originally installed by NVIDIA and replaced them with components with double the capacity. As a result, while the card is only designed for a maximum of 8 GB of GDDR6, it has been perfectly upgraded to 16 GB: this is enough to give some air, even if given the power of the GPU such a modification is of little use.

The fact remains that this feat may have given ideas to other enthusiasts, who are more familiar with Apple machines. Thus, some Chinese maintenance engineers have set out to boost some of the elements of their Mac Mini. You should know that Apple's little machine is sold in a variety of configurations, but it is impossible to improve: the RAM is soldered without any free slots, and the same goes for the SSD. This is a shameful practice, since there is no reason for such a decision other than to force users to do more and more.

Having said that, our Chinese engineers set themselves a little challenge: they took a "first price" Mac Mini, the 800 euro model, and decided to "boost" it. They replaced the memory chips placed by Apple to upgrade from 8GB to 16GB of RAM. In the same way, they replaced the 256GB SSD with a bigger 1TB model. In absolute terms, it's nothing too complicated for someone with a bit of electronic know-how, and nothing that's "out of the ordinary". Indeed, a Mac Mini with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD exists in Apple's catalog.

Unsurprisingly, the physical changes made by the Chinese engineers seem to have been perfectly recognized by the machine, and this, without the need to modify anything in the software or firmware of the machine. It would be interesting to see how a Mac Mini would behave if we decided to add 32GB of memory or a 4TB SSD for example.