Ritchie Swann

Just had this issue myself on a 2012 Mac Mini, which suddenly locked up completely and couldn’t restart. When I rebooted off a USB, the drive had completely disappeared. Time to order a new drive. Fortunately I have performed a hard drive swap as documented in Mac mini Late 2012 Hard Drive Replacement several times and have backups of everything, making this merely annoying as opposed to fatal. As a general practice, I always keep my OS and data on several drives, backing up to a third, and have been doing so for decades. I realise this isn’t practical for Macbooks, though.

The M1 iMac is 24”, not 27”, although the increased screen real estate mitigates that somewhat. It features unified memory (https://www.apple.com/uk/newsroom/2021/0...-features-all-new-design-in-vibrant-colors-m1-chip-and-45k-retina-display/). There is no support for upgrading the integrated memory on an M1 chip whatsoever - it’s exactly the same as the earlier M1 macs (and, for that matter, the Raspberry Pi). I expect some Apple Fanboy will be along to say “but, but, buuuuut unified memory is faster”. Sure, until it fails, then it doesn’t work at all, and you can’t swap it out for another module.

Always, always, have a USB boot disk to hand. It makes diagnosing problems much easier. From my experience, a dead hard drive will result in a question mark being displayed on boot. Faulty RAM will involve a black screen and beeps. A failed display will give you the chimes but a black screen. On the logic board, there is an array of LEDs below the display connector, which will light up if the board is operational. The white screen boot problem sounds like a bad graphics card. From my experience, the GPU is the most likely thing to overheat on an iMac. As you cannot easily open the machine, dust accumulates inside it, trapping airflow and eventually leading to overheating failure. Typical symptoms are random lines appearing across the display at all times, and / or booting to a blank screen. However, you can still usually boot to safe mode, even when the display is messed up. If you’re really stuck, you can hold down Control+S on startup and go into single user mode. If that works, your CPU, disk and RAM is...

The first Mac Minis allowed a CPU upgrade (if you were brave enough) as well as RAM, disk and optical drive. Obviously you could only put in what the motherboard supported, but it was a step in the right direction. Even the 2012 model is okay, I've got mine up to 16GB RAM and two hard drives totalling 1.5TB, the latter using the guides on this very site. For me, the killer decision to not by an M1 Mac Mini, along with the non-upgradable disk and RAM (meaning I cannot buy the base model now and upgrade on the cheap in 6 months) is this : https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252...

It depends what you mean by “fit”. If you want to put a 2011 or 2012 logic board in a 2010’s case and get the additional optical drive, then no. The 2011 and 2012’s logic boards include capacitors that get in the way of the optical drive, so you cannot re-insert the logic board to fit. The 2010 server model will fit, as the case has the correct dimensions.

Just got hold of one of these, and it’s GREAT - it breathes life into an iMac whose power supply / logic board (didn’t figure out which) had finally given up. My question is - these boards have a connector labelled “speaker”, and I’ve got no idea what it does. I hoped I’d be able to plug one of the iMac’s speakers onto it, but it doesn’t fit. Is there an adapter available?

The lack of RAM is starting to manifest itself in the 2014 Mac Mini’s value. Doing a quick sample on eBay, I can see 2012 Mac Minis for sale for around £200-250, with several 4GB 2014s failing to reach the £200 mark. Of course, a 2012 model with 4GB is easy to upgrade to 16GB while the 2014 is impossible. It’s also possible to swap the hard drive on a 2012 model for an SSD without disconnecting the fan (easy to break), which can’t be done on a 2014. All in all, it’s complete lemon and a silly design decision from Apple.

Assume you mean 2, not 1 - on my 2133, all screws in this step were T10.

The IR cable has some slack on it. If you have slackened the fan cable in the same manner (see above) and are careful, you can pull the logic board a short distance without the tension snapping the cable, which will give you enough space to access the drive bay.

The fan has some slack cable on it. Once you have unscrewed the fan, you should see that the connecting cable is wrapped around two hooks. CAREFULLY move the cable around the hooks to free it. You can then move the fan to one side out of the way while you access the hard drive bay. On reassembly, thread the cable back around the hooks before screwing it back in.