Helped a friend breathe life into a 2014 Mac Mini by replacing the spinning-disk hard drive with an SSD. Here it is installing Mac OS on that SSD:

I know my way around the insides of early 2010s Apple laptops: the unibody MacBook Pros (see my post about expanding the RAM and fitting an SSD), the retina MacBook Pros, and the classic pre-retina MacBook Airs. The 2014 Mac Mini was a new experience: components are layered, unlike a MacBook.

I wish modern machines, Macs and otherwise, were more user-serviceable and upgradeable. This same friend has a 2017 MacBook Pro with soldered-on RAM and storage, which can’t be upgraded at all.

As someone who, as a teen, assembled his first PC in the late 1990s and upgraded it steadily for over ten years, the iPadification of computer hardware isn’t welcome – although I do see the benefit of increased security.