M2 Pro Mac mini TEARDOWN review!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enApple's brand new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips are finally here and everyone's talking about the new MacBooks except me because I'm not ready to talk about MacBooks yet when I haven't talked about the most important thing that Apple announced and that is this guy the Mac Mini and I know what you're thinking you're thinking Luke are you insane the M1 Mac Mini was just an M1 chip in a box and the M2 Mac Mini well it's an M2 Chip in a box but the critical difference is that this is the M2 Pro Mac Mini specifically the cheapest one you can get at 12.99 and this I think is probably the most important Mac that Apple has released in about a year and a half and today I'm going to tell you why but first we gotta open it I am extremely curious to see what this thing looks like on the inside so we're gonna go straight from the unboxing stage to the teardown stage why wow familiar looking packaging here we have a Mac Mini in yup it's a box okay what do we have here got a power cord cool don't care all I care about is getting inside of this thing we got a little peely boy here on the bottom we got a peely boy here on the back okay cool unboxing done now let's go ahead and break out the high fix it protect toolkit and just tear it apart this right here this is why you come to the Luciano YouTube channel we don't mess around here I'm not gonna lead you on with any sort of grand verbios monologue we're just gonna take it apart all right so far this is just like every other Mac Mini in existence but I am expecting a little bit of difference because buried in Apple's website you can see that this actually weighs 0.2 of a pound more than the M2 and the M1 Mac Mini so clearly there's something going on in here okay so if it's like a normal Mac Mini it should be held down and is by a little screw just off to the side hmm the logic board is totally different wow and if I'm not mistaken the heatsink is longer and the fan has been pushed back and tucked under the lip here as well this this is actually interesting I was a little afraid when I started this video that I was going to open it up and it would just be identical but we're not having that issue are we okay so how do we take this apart well we've got some pretty regular looking screws holding the fan on that looks the same as the regular M1 they've relocated the screws that hold the fan into the sides here so they can actually be accessed without taking everything apart and look at this they've got a cut out in the logic board to allow for airflow into the bottom of this fan intake that's an interesting design oh no I was expecting the power supply to be the same but they've changed that as well take a look in the back of the case here you can see this long wire that runs from the power power supply into the logic board and it's actually held down with screws rather than a typical connector so I'll grab the T8 screwdriver and whip those bad boys out this is actually very similar to the way the Mac Studio works it has these metal tabs that are screwed down and that's how it contacts with the board and I actually kind of prefer this to a standard connector because you can't snap the plastic or bend a pin or rip the wires out of the socket it's just a nice little metal tab we've got what looks like some t10s to deal with in order to get this board out holy moly Great Balls of Fire those are really in there boys I'm gonna need a I'm gonna need a bigger screwdriver I need more torque okay we're gonna upgrade from the skinny boy to the chungus oh yeah oh they almost got me there's another one there's a sneaky third screw well done old sport all right now before we pull this board out completely we do have the status indicator light zif connector and there's also this guy um I don't know what that is that goes into the power supply as well interesting we'll have to do some digging ah excellent excellent very interesting this board is a lot bigger than the M1 Mac Mini though it still does not get anywhere near close to filling the Mac Mini's case so one thing that catches my eye pretty quickly here is this storage module here we've got three empty pads and then if we flip the board over you can see we have another module and three more empty pads now remember the new mag mini can be equipped with up to eight terabytes of storage and given that this one is the base model with 512 we can assume that these are each 256 gigabyte modules so if you populate all eight with 256 that gets you your two terabyte but if you get the eight terabyte version of this Mac Mini each of these modules has got to be one terabyte yeah that's why the eight terabyte gets real real pricey what's also pretty interesting thing about this board is the density of chips decreases a lot up at the top down here it's all very dense it's very similar to the M1 and M2 Mac minis you can see these chips are really packed in there but up here not not so much we've got all this room for empty pads there's no traces going under here it is interesting to see obviously they had to extend this board for the M2 Pro but it's not that dense up there now there are some things hiding underneath this heat sink and that's got me wondering if if maybe I should take off the heatsink what do you guys think should I should I take off the heatsink and look at the M2 Pro chip yeah I agree let's do it all right so we have some very crumbly little foam pads over the standoff screws okay one two three four screws later and let's see if that is all it takes to get this heat sink off okay well we've got liftoff here but there's some smaller screws here on the side aha okay so this is just the heat sink cover and it sort of channels the air out the back here the actual fin stack that looks like it's mounted separately so we've got four more screws oh okay something felt a little loose there uh-huh it's off so there's the heatsink that keeps the M2 Pro cool it's pretty small we have what looks like a little copper core down here and these I mean they might be copper for all I know they feel more like aluminum and they're anodized in Black of course even though this is on the inside underneath the cover and no one would ever ever see it but it's apples so they gotta anodize that heatsink oh look at that there's the M2 Pro oh that's a big boy that's beautiful well in typical Apple fashion it's quite minimalist under here there's just a simple Apple logo dead center in the chip and doesn't even have thermal paste spread all the way to the corners so I guess this heat spreader doesn't really need to spread that much heat so there's your first ever look at the inside of the new M2 Pro Mag mini it's kind of funny that this much work went to designing a new interior for this thing but the outside looks identical to every Mac Mini for the past 10 years in fact this power supply looks like the same one that has been shipping since 2018 so it's probably 150 watts obviously that's going to be overkill for the M2 Pro it's also overkill for the M2 and the M1 which also use this power supply this actually does look like a Mac Mini Pro honestly I mean look at the size of this chip with this nice little gold around we got a big copper core heat sink this is pretty legit so I think what we need to do now is put this all back together and see how it runs okay so a quick cinematron reveals that we're looking at 11 800 for our score here and spoiler alert that's basically identical to the 14 inch MacBook Pro now I've run this a bunch of times back to back and the score has not decreased after four runs you know I can feel warm air coming out the back our surface temperatures are a little warm I think it was about 34 degrees again spoiler alert that's the same as the MacBook Pro and thanks to those dual nand chips our read write speeds are blazing fast on this machine look at that over three gigabytes per second right nearly three gigabytes per second read this thing is a screamer I have no complaints what Apple did here was take an Overkill heat sink make it a little bit longer and then put a CPU that makes more sense in this system I think honestly this is going to be one of the best products Apple has ever made because it's filling a gap until this came out you had your sub thousand dollar Mac Mini and then you had two thousand dollars and up for the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro this fits that one to two thousand dollar range so so well but you do have to be a little careful because at 12.99 it's a great price you can even add another three hundred dollars to step up to the regular M2 Pro and it's still a great price but if you spec it up just a little bit more you'll find that you're already at two grand at which point you might as well go for the Mac Studio because then you get an M1 Max with more GPU cores you get a bunch of additional ports like 10 gigabit Ethernet built in without having to pay a hundred dollars for it you get more USBC ports you get an SD card and who knows we might get a refreshed Mac Studio soon with an M2 Max and an M2 Ultra so I would be careful speccing this thing out but at this price point with this type of performance and you'll see more about the performance of this chip with my review of the base model 14-inch MacBook Pro tomorrow this is probably the best Mac that money can buy so I'm pretty excited for it check out links to buy in the description below their affiliate links so if you do decide to buy one of these things using those links does help support the channel big thanks to all of you for watching and subscribing I hope you've enjoyed the video and with that I will see you guys for a lot more coverage coming really really soon foreignApple's brand new M2 Pro and M2 Max chips are finally here and everyone's talking about the new MacBooks except me because I'm not ready to talk about MacBooks yet when I haven't talked about the most important thing that Apple announced and that is this guy the Mac Mini and I know what you're thinking you're thinking Luke are you insane the M1 Mac Mini was just an M1 chip in a box and the M2 Mac Mini well it's an M2 Chip in a box but the critical difference is that this is the M2 Pro Mac Mini specifically the cheapest one you can get at 12.99 and this I think is probably the most important Mac that Apple has released in about a year and a half and today I'm going to tell you why but first we gotta open it I am extremely curious to see what this thing looks like on the inside so we're gonna go straight from the unboxing stage to the teardown stage why wow familiar looking packaging here we have a Mac Mini in yup it's a box okay what do we have here got a power cord cool don't care all I care about is getting inside of this thing we got a little peely boy here on the bottom we got a peely boy here on the back okay cool unboxing done now let's go ahead and break out the high fix it protect toolkit and just tear it apart this right here this is why you come to the Luciano YouTube channel we don't mess around here I'm not gonna lead you on with any sort of grand verbios monologue we're just gonna take it apart all right so far this is just like every other Mac Mini in existence but I am expecting a little bit of difference because buried in Apple's website you can see that this actually weighs 0.2 of a pound more than the M2 and the M1 Mac Mini so clearly there's something going on in here okay so if it's like a normal Mac Mini it should be held down and is by a little screw just off to the side hmm the logic board is totally different wow and if I'm not mistaken the heatsink is longer and the fan has been pushed back and tucked under the lip here as well this this is actually interesting I was a little afraid when I started this video that I was going to open it up and it would just be identical but we're not having that issue are we okay so how do we take this apart well we've got some pretty regular looking screws holding the fan on that looks the same as the regular M1 they've relocated the screws that hold the fan into the sides here so they can actually be accessed without taking everything apart and look at this they've got a cut out in the logic board to allow for airflow into the bottom of this fan intake that's an interesting design oh no I was expecting the power supply to be the same but they've changed that as well take a look in the back of the case here you can see this long wire that runs from the power power supply into the logic board and it's actually held down with screws rather than a typical connector so I'll grab the T8 screwdriver and whip those bad boys out this is actually very similar to the way the Mac Studio works it has these metal tabs that are screwed down and that's how it contacts with the board and I actually kind of prefer this to a standard connector because you can't snap the plastic or bend a pin or rip the wires out of the socket it's just a nice little metal tab we've got what looks like some t10s to deal with in order to get this board out holy moly Great Balls of Fire those are really in there boys I'm gonna need a I'm gonna need a bigger screwdriver I need more torque okay we're gonna upgrade from the skinny boy to the chungus oh yeah oh they almost got me there's another one there's a sneaky third screw well done old sport all right now before we pull this board out completely we do have the status indicator light zif connector and there's also this guy um I don't know what that is that goes into the power supply as well interesting we'll have to do some digging ah excellent excellent very interesting this board is a lot bigger than the M1 Mac Mini though it still does not get anywhere near close to filling the Mac Mini's case so one thing that catches my eye pretty quickly here is this storage module here we've got three empty pads and then if we flip the board over you can see we have another module and three more empty pads now remember the new mag mini can be equipped with up to eight terabytes of storage and given that this one is the base model with 512 we can assume that these are each 256 gigabyte modules so if you populate all eight with 256 that gets you your two terabyte but if you get the eight terabyte version of this Mac Mini each of these modules has got to be one terabyte yeah that's why the eight terabyte gets real real pricey what's also pretty interesting thing about this board is the density of chips decreases a lot up at the top down here it's all very dense it's very similar to the M1 and M2 Mac minis you can see these chips are really packed in there but up here not not so much we've got all this room for empty pads there's no traces going under here it is interesting to see obviously they had to extend this board for the M2 Pro but it's not that dense up there now there are some things hiding underneath this heat sink and that's got me wondering if if maybe I should take off the heatsink what do you guys think should I should I take off the heatsink and look at the M2 Pro chip yeah I agree let's do it all right so we have some very crumbly little foam pads over the standoff screws okay one two three four screws later and let's see if that is all it takes to get this heat sink off okay well we've got liftoff here but there's some smaller screws here on the side aha okay so this is just the heat sink cover and it sort of channels the air out the back here the actual fin stack that looks like it's mounted separately so we've got four more screws oh okay something felt a little loose there uh-huh it's off so there's the heatsink that keeps the M2 Pro cool it's pretty small we have what looks like a little copper core down here and these I mean they might be copper for all I know they feel more like aluminum and they're anodized in Black of course even though this is on the inside underneath the cover and no one would ever ever see it but it's apples so they gotta anodize that heatsink oh look at that there's the M2 Pro oh that's a big boy that's beautiful well in typical Apple fashion it's quite minimalist under here there's just a simple Apple logo dead center in the chip and doesn't even have thermal paste spread all the way to the corners so I guess this heat spreader doesn't really need to spread that much heat so there's your first ever look at the inside of the new M2 Pro Mag mini it's kind of funny that this much work went to designing a new interior for this thing but the outside looks identical to every Mac Mini for the past 10 years in fact this power supply looks like the same one that has been shipping since 2018 so it's probably 150 watts obviously that's going to be overkill for the M2 Pro it's also overkill for the M2 and the M1 which also use this power supply this actually does look like a Mac Mini Pro honestly I mean look at the size of this chip with this nice little gold around we got a big copper core heat sink this is pretty legit so I think what we need to do now is put this all back together and see how it runs okay so a quick cinematron reveals that we're looking at 11 800 for our score here and spoiler alert that's basically identical to the 14 inch MacBook Pro now I've run this a bunch of times back to back and the score has not decreased after four runs you know I can feel warm air coming out the back our surface temperatures are a little warm I think it was about 34 degrees again spoiler alert that's the same as the MacBook Pro and thanks to those dual nand chips our read write speeds are blazing fast on this machine look at that over three gigabytes per second right nearly three gigabytes per second read this thing is a screamer I have no complaints what Apple did here was take an Overkill heat sink make it a little bit longer and then put a CPU that makes more sense in this system I think honestly this is going to be one of the best products Apple has ever made because it's filling a gap until this came out you had your sub thousand dollar Mac Mini and then you had two thousand dollars and up for the Mac Studio and the Mac Pro this fits that one to two thousand dollar range so so well but you do have to be a little careful because at 12.99 it's a great price you can even add another three hundred dollars to step up to the regular M2 Pro and it's still a great price but if you spec it up just a little bit more you'll find that you're already at two grand at which point you might as well go for the Mac Studio because then you get an M1 Max with more GPU cores you get a bunch of additional ports like 10 gigabit Ethernet built in without having to pay a hundred dollars for it you get more USBC ports you get an SD card and who knows we might get a refreshed Mac Studio soon with an M2 Max and an M2 Ultra so I would be careful speccing this thing out but at this price point with this type of performance and you'll see more about the performance of this chip with my review of the base model 14-inch MacBook Pro tomorrow this is probably the best Mac that money can buy so I'm pretty excited for it check out links to buy in the description below their affiliate links so if you do decide to buy one of these things using those links does help support the channel big thanks to all of you for watching and subscribing I hope you've enjoyed the video and with that I will see you guys for a lot more coverage coming really really soon foreign\n"