The new Mac Mini may be faster and run on less power, but it's still a bitch to take apart.
I know it was idealistic of me, but especially with the price of Apple's Mac Mini upgrade options, I was hoping that the new Mini would take design cues from Apple's latest laptops and allow for a simple way to swap out the RAM and hard drive, or at least open without the use of a putty knife.
Well, the hard drive is easy enough to access if you crack the Mini's hood, but to reach the RAM you'll still need to remove the hard drive and then the optical drive—minding more cables in the process (3) than you did with the old Mini (1).
The moral is that while swapping components is certainly possible, it's not something made any easier than before. Other than that, it was confirmed that the new Mac Mini has been upgraded with a SATA hard drive, as most of us expected.