Opening The Mac Mini: Here's How
A look inside the Mac mini's shell. Using two thin palette-knives, the outer casing can be removed by releasing the retention clips.
Unlike conventional miniature PCs, the Mac mini doesn't use any screws to hold the case together. The case can only be opened by following a certain procedure, which won't void the warranty. The following pictures describe the step-by-step disassembling of the case. Although the video available at smash'sworld isn't exactly of the highest image quality, it does give you a good feel for the procedure.
Apple Mac mini: here, the DVD drive has been removed. The 2.5" hard drive, the speaker and the system fan are now visible.
Motherboard with G4 processor and heatsink. There is only one DIMM slot available; 1 GB of DDR333 RAM is suggested for optimal performance.
The motherboard is populated by comparatively few chips. Near the front edge we see the integrated ATi Radeon 9200 chip. The other chips take care of networking, video memory and the core logic chipset.
