iFixit

Remove the four black Phillips screws holding the internal frame to the bottom housing.

We spent a lot of time searching for these screws. Is this an Apple conspiracy to prevent consumers from disassembling their products? Put on your tinfoil hats!

After the screws were removed, we separated the internal framework from the bottom housing.

On the left we have the bottom housing, which includes the logic board, CPU, and RAM. On the right is the internal framework, which contains the SuperDrive, fan, and hard drive.

Remove the six Philips screws from the left, right, and back sides of the SuperDrive.

Unplug the drive from the interconnect board to completely remove it from the framework.

Use the Mac mini Terabyte Upgrade Guide instead of this First Look to make any modifications to your mini.

Next, disconnect the small black two-wire connector from the interconnect board and move it out of the way.

Remove the four Phillips screws securing the hard drive to the internal frame.

The hard drive easily slides out once it is detached from the interconnect board.

The hard drive is a paltry 120 GB. If you'd like to hold more than six photographs on your computer, you can upgrade to a 500 GB drive for just $130 and a little time.

Apple only allows you to customize the mini with a 320 GB drive, and they want a whopping $175!

Remove the two screws holding the fan in place.

Disconnect the fan's blue/gray cable from the interconnect board. This should allow the fan to be removed from the framework.

The top half of the Mac mini is now completely disassembled!

Now for the lower half...

The standard quick pry with the fingers (and subsequent pull) frees the RAM from the logic board.

Our $599 Mini shipped with only a single 1 GB PC3-8500 chip. In this configuration, the NVIDIA 9400M graphics processor allocated 128 MB of this memory as VRAM. When we installed a second chip in this machine, for a total of 2 GB, the 9400M automatically allocated 256 MB VRAM instead.

On to the AirPort/Bluetooth board removal. A couple of steps are needed to remove the board:

• Disconnect the three antennas (marked in red).
• Disconnect the AirPort/Bluetooth communication cable (second photo).
• Remove three Phillips screws (third photo) and then completely remove the AirPort/Bluetooth board.