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. $82.04 (opens in new tab) at Amazon (opens in new tab)

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. 2012 and earlier or the newer 2018 model all have socketed memory and can be upgraded it is only the 2014 model that does not.Pry Tool Kit (Image credit: Amazon) (opens in new tab) Any DIY attempt would merely destroy either the logic board or chips or both. However newer logic boards, chips and manufacturing techniques mean that these days an ordinary soldering iron is totally useless for this purpose and you need tools equivalent to those used originally to build the logic boards, as such it is not possible unless you are a major manufacturer and they have no interest in doing this. ) I remember some enterprising people doing this to upgrade the original Macintosh 128KB to a 'Fat Mac' with 512KB, I even had this done to my own one back in 1985. In theory one could unsolder the existing chips and solder new bigger capacity ones, this indeed did use to be commonly done in the olden days. This leaves the only option as being to sell it and buy a better model.

For the Mac mini 2014 the memory is as you state soldered to the logic board, as such it is generally regarded as impossible to upgrade the memory.

Mac mini a1347 max ram