Snazzy Labs created a even mini Mac mini without any performance loss

Euri
Mar 2, 2022
3 min read

Have you ever thought of an even mini Mac mini basically a Mac nano? If you do, great! Quinn Nelsons from Snazzy Labs uploaded a video about that which is literally 78% smaller than the Mac mini chassis!

For those who are literally interested on how he did it, how did he build it? Well that is what I will explain right now. So in his video, he tested out things first. Since the M1 chip is so efficient that you don’t really need a fan which is why the M1 MacBook Air does not has a fan, he was able to remove the fan from the logic board as the fan and heat sink is just separated from each other. Results? No performance drop or literally any sort of issues!

But what about the WiFi and Bluetooth antenna’s? It wasn’t pretty much a problem so he was able to remove that too as disassembling them was not really that complex, allowing him to remove both the antennas and that other one I forgot barely any inconvenience! But with the inconvenient part, well… The power button is soldered…. Fortunately, he was able to remove it via use of soldering iron.

Okay after the removal of the Logic Board, fan, and antennas from the Mac mini, he moved on with the power supply and learned something new, maybe. For those who aren’t savvy about inside parts, the connector apparently has: seven 12 Volt DC connector, seven return 0 Volt, and six not connected connectors. Have an image for reference.

Why 20 cable connector instead of two connectors? For short reasons, stability and safety. Two connectors may result to being unreliable and having thinner ones makes thing the opposite, being reliable and flexible. Oh yeah, thicker wires may result in fire risk Alright, back to the topic.

To make the power supply even smaller for a even smaller casing, he thought of a USB-C Power supply. But unfortunately, it is not enough for the Mac mini and ones that can have enough power were bigger. The goal was to make it smaller not a USB-C only Mac mini. And so, he decided to do a MagSafe version of it and bought a MagSafe 2 board from a 2015 15” Retina MacBook Pro just to make it similar to the M1 24” iMac and what the upcoming high end Mac mini would be getting which I will be making a video about that so make sure to subscribe to my channel and set notifications to all (Euri Tech) for that. And was successful as it has enough power to make the Mac mini happy but unfortunately had to use a charging brick from a 65 watt / 15 volt microsoft surface adapter for internal circuit protection and merge it with the MagSafe 2 wire to prevent unexpected shut down if the MagSafe pins happen to short out.

Here’s his setup: It will go from the surface charger to MagSafe then to the voltage regulator then success! The Mac mini gets power barely any inconvenience! I should stop saying “Barely any inconvenience“ now

Okay after all those stuff happened, the last step was to make the small case which obviously ended up becoming a problem but someone told Quinn to create a design similar to the 2019 Mac Pro cheese grater case if he wants passive cooling which he did. Many prototyping later via 3D printer and made a poll about what color should he use for the Mac mini, he decided to use a Masked Stereolithography (or MSLA) printer which help cures sections that are not being cured perfectly and used resin with mica powder for the colors as a shortcut and used a filament based thermoplastic case but unfortunately the case itself had to be glued but fortunately, he was able to screw the logic board without gluing it.

And walah! Here is the final product which I consider this as the Mac nano or Mac Air as it is small and fanless thanks to the M1 being power efficient and not generating more heat: