
To verify all is well, boot up the Mac Mini and check out the About This Mac information. Push down gently until they lock into place.Line up the new RAM sticks and push gently into the slots.Pry apart the metal brackets around the current RAM sticks.The base should simply pull away, but may need prying with a plastic tool or even a credit card.Place your thumbs in the circular divots and twist the base clockwise.So the best you can do is grab a 16GB kit (opens in new tab) made up of a pair of 8GB sticks. The 2012 Mac Mini uses 1600MHz DDR3 SODIMM modules and can accept up to 16GB across two slots. The most you can install in the 2012 Mac Mini, 16GB of RAM is a great performance upgrade, and this kit from Crucial will slot right in.īesides adding an SSD, the next best thing to do to give your old Mac Mini some additional legs for present-day computing is to add more RAM. Insert the logic board removal tool into the holes pictured.Remove the final screw from the logic board with a Torx T6 screwdriver.You will need to detach any remaining items from the logic board at this point, including the wireless shroud and the IR cable.

Follow steps 1-17 from the section above to remove the existing drive and prepare your new SSD boot drive.You can use either a hard drive or an SSD, or as we have here, a Seagate Firecuda hybrid drive, not unlike the Fusion Drive Apple uses in some of its machines. You could reuse the existing hard drive, but since it's over six years old, it makes much better sense to use a fresh one. Not everyone will want to do this, but it is possible to install a second drive in the 2012 Mac Mini to maximize its storage potential. Professional pry tool kit (opens in new tab) ($10 at Amazon)īetter than using your fingers, this pry tool kit is worth having in your tool kit for those hard to remove and tiny parts. Still, it happily crunched through the test video files we processed in iMovie – part of the included iLife suite Apple preload, as well as iPhoto, GarageBand and other apps – though took a little longer than the heftier CPU/GPU combos in the MacBook Pro line.Pry Tool Kit (Image credit: Amazon) (opens in new tab) That means it's unlikely to be a gamers' dream machine, but can still pump out up to 2560 x 1600 resolution over Mini DisplayPort or 1920 x 1200 via HDMI (an HDMI to DVI adapter is included in the box, or you can buy a Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter separately). Graphics on both models are courtesy of NVIDIA's GeForce 320M, which shares 256MB of the main memory.

That's respectable for a small-form-factor desktop, and well in excess of what we've seen from Atom-based nettops.

Altogether, it scored 3550, around 100 points less than the similar architecture and processor in the current-generation 13-inch MacBook Pro (which, it's worth remembering, starts at $1,199). We ran Geekbench on the Mac mini, a synthetic test that measures processor and memory performance.
