I ’ve pass most of the day in the exposure studios of Peter Belanger , who inject most of the original photos that appear in the pages ofMacworld . We’re working on a fib for the next print event , and my comportment has been need so that I can disassemble a Mac miniskirt and a MacBook Pro .
Last week I snapped some shots of a somewhat - disassembled Mini and posted them for the world to see . This job was even crazier , since I even pulled out the motherboard and popped off the warmth sinks , pulled out the AirPort Extreme card … the works . ( By the way , that teensy AirPort Extreme card is the same one you ’ll find in the MacBook Pro , as I distinguish today … )
Today ’s take on the interior of these system : they ’re not ones for the timid to explore . The Intel - found Mac mini is somewhat punishing to disassemble than its PowerPC forerunner . The RAM ’s much hard to get to , and there ’s a ribbon cable running from the audio riser scorecard to the interconnect bill of fare that gets in the way of lifting out the private road cage . And getting the Core Duo mainframe out of its socket take you to abstract out the motherboard — pretty serious hooey .
The MacBook , on the other hand , is relatively easygoing to get into , but unusually unvoiced to completely disassemble . I did n’t even gravel lease it down all the direction to the logic board — if you ’d like to see how to do that , the guys at iFixit havedocumented the full process . However , I did in conclusion larn the response to the most frequently - asked - dubiousness among people who ’ve taken out the MacBook Pro ’s battery : that petty fleck of circuitry you see underneath the battery compartment ? It ’s the bottom of the trackpad . So much for my ability to visualise 3 - D objects . No wonder I ’m so bad at Halo .
In any event , I ’ve reassembled the Mac mini and , miracle of miracle , it in reality booted ! Given that I go so far as to start the Intel Core Duo processor out of its socket — no , I didn’treplace it with a faster chip — I ’m pretty relieved that I have n’t destroyed $ 799 worth of Mac hardware .
Which put me onwards of my fellow Dan Miller . The iMac that Dan disassembled so that we could photograph its innards for our current print payoff is still sitting in pieces in Dan ’s office . Seriously , we ’re considering the possibleness of selling it on eBay … with a small disavowal that take , “ Some assembly required . ”
