Reductive Reason

Several months ago I bought a 2 GB RAM upgrade for my Mac mini. Admittedly it was a total impulse buy. I saw the price, thought it was a bargain, and snagged it. After the new memory arrived, I finally decided to look into how to install it. That may have been a mistake. It turns out there was no guidance from Apple for upgrading RAM in a Mac mini. The official position was to take it to an Apple Store, which would undoubtedly have cost much more than the memory. Unofficially, there was a tutorial available in the Mac Forums, but it looked complicated enough that I didn’t want to undertake the project until I was prepared to see it through. So, for all these months, the modules have been sitting idle on my kitchen counter.

This morning, for some reason, perhaps because of the heat, I decided to opt out of my usual hike and instead tackle the RAM upgrade. And so, for about an hour, my dining room was converted into a Mac mini operating room. As it turns out, the procedure wasn’t nearly as hard as it looked. The idea of prying open my beautiful Mac mini with a putty knife was rather frightening, since I thought I might crack the case. I did put a few small scratches on the plastic where I inserted the knife, but they were underneath the unit where nobody will see them. I was more concerned about hairline stress cracks on the exterior of the unit, but I performed every step deliberately, and there were no problems.

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