I know we are not all Apple fans so apologies, this is not meant to inflame old rivalries... But this week, it was time to rejuvenate my 2009 Mac Mini, which was struggling a bit with latest OS X and Apps, especially the XCode development IDE.
It originally shipped with 1GB Ram, and a firmware max limit of 4GB. I had already upgraded it to 4GB, but meanwhile Apple had quietly and generously shipped a firmware upgrade raising the limit to 8GB. I wanted a bigger disk too, so I could multi boot different versions of OS X. So armed with 8GB of DDR3, a new 500GB disk, and (for completeness) a 2032 battery, I dug out my old
wallpaper scraper official case opening tool and gently prised it open.
Inside, I won't compare it with a Swiss watch, but maybe a well designed carriage clock. Every cubic centimetre has been carefully planned, not just a generic motherboard and off the shelf PSU and fan. Really quite fun to work on, just be careful to figure out how things come off, and not to tug any wires, as you remove the bits. The HDD for example has a extra temperature sensor stuck on (with soft and removable glue) that could catch the unwary.
And result? My six year old system, now running latest OS X Yosemite now
perfectly responsive again.
Nice one Apple, for a six year old box