Mountains of Mac minis and iPhone re-entry

In this week’s “Sunday Reboot,” a storage upgrade for the MacBook Neo, an excuse to buy many Mac minis, and the iPhones come back to Earth with a late congratulatory message.

Sunday Reboot is a weekly column covering some of the lighter stories within the Apple reality distortion field from the past seven days. All to get the next week underway with a good first step.

This week, researchers managed to get around Apple Intelligence security measures using prompt injection techniques, a repairability report panned Apple’s hardware again, and Apple’s lawsuit with Epic Games over the App Store continued to roll on. There was also a bug found to break Mac networking every 49 days, 17 hours, two minutes, and 47 seconds.

Upgrading the unupgradable, again

The MacBook Neo has already been the recipient of great press when it comes to its construction. Back in March, iFixit said the MacBook Neo was the most repairable Apple notebook since 2012, giving it a score of 6 out of 10.

Yes, 6 out of 10 seems “low,” but that’s pretty high when it comes to Apple’s products. The iPhone 17 Pro managed 7, and that’s the highest Apple has managed to get.

Obviously, with such a low-cost product, people were keen to experiment. Early attempts included adding thermal pads to improve its ability to cool down, which certainly helped, but now someone’s upgraded the storage.

Sure, 256GB or 512GB of capacity isn’t much for a modern notebook, but Apple doesn’t provide any higher-up capacities for the Neo. If you want more, you’d have to pony up for a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, or use external drives.

Cue YouTuber dosdude1 whipping out the soldering iron to switch the 256GB SSD in the MacBook Neo for a 1TB version.

While this worked, it is in no way an easy enough process for a typical user to undertake. Storage swaps have also been done before, with a similar level of expertise required.

All said, it is also a situation that could’ve been made easier by Apple itself.

We ran a story in January 2025 about the slotted and upgradable SSD in the M4 Mac mini. It was possible for a user to open the Mac mini up, remove the old SSD, and insert a new one.

Again, this was a lot of work and wasn’t an instant switch like a SATA-based drive, so not really usable by a typical end user. But even so, it showed Apple could make storage upgrades happen.

The real question is why Apple has yet to incorporate this idea into its notebook lineup. Maybe then, iFixit could stretch to give Apple an 8 out of 10.

iPhone re-entry and a relatively late acknowledgment

It’s been a busy few weeks for space fans, as Artemis II took off, flew around the Moon, and landed back on Earth. The minivan-sized capsule has splashed down, and everyone’s safe and well after a very long trip.

While NASA has been busy, as well as journalists covering the monumental event, it was also a massive boon to Apple. We talked last week about it being a fantastic example of an unintentional Shot on iPhone campaign, due to sending a bunch of iPhones up for the astronauts to use.

As Apple’s marketing teams spend some time working out how to capitalize on the event, there’s one thing that is still puzzling: Apple’s own delayed response to the affair.

The Artemis II crew, shot on iPhone – Image Credit: NASA

CEO Tim Cook made a post to X about the “successful mission” and mentioned the iPhone photography at “new heights.” Marketing SVP Greg Joswiak joined in shortly after, being honored that iPhones were taken into space and reposting NASA’s own image-laden tweet.

My only real issue is the decision to wait until a safe splashdown before either executive commented on the mission at all. For the entire ten-day jaunt around the Moon, neither of them posted about what was happening.

There’s an obvious bit of optics at play, since the last thing a public personality needs is to have an X post connected to a space mission that ends in tragedy. That certainly makes sense.

However, they could’ve been braver and complemented the imagery much earlier, even when the shots started to spread online. If they did that and the worst thing happened to the crew, there would be options such as posting condolences.

I understand perfectly well that you do have to be careful about what you post online, in case it gets misinterpreted or misused. But here, it wouldn’t have hurt Cook and Co to take the extremely moderate risk and acknowledge the imagery earlier than they did.

AI and a ton of Mac minis

As AppleInsider regularly reports on AI, we have seen a lot of stories involving the Mac mini. Partly, it’s because it is an ideal platform for things like OpenClaw.

But then there’s also the topic of clustering, in using Thunderbolt 5 and RDMA support in MLX to spread work across multiple Macs.

While you could use this to run a local model for your own private ChatGPT, as well as general AI research, there are some other practical uses.

Rack-mounted Mac minis. Image credit: Overcast

On Tuesday, Marco Arment showed off his own enviable collection of Mac minis. A rack of 48 of them, all being used to handle the transcription feature of Overcast.

This is quite smart, since it brings all of the AI processing in-house instead of paying for it to be performed in the cloud. Apparently, cloud pricing would cost thousands of dollars daily, versus the one-time cost of a bunch of Mac minis and setting them up.

There are also the continued costs of electricity and Internet access, though the high performance-per-watt of Apple Silicon will certainly help with the former.

This isn’t necessarily a project that everyone will find a use for. Let alone the initial cost of buying so many Mac minis at once.

But for an app developer with enough money on hand and a potentially high cloud processing bill, this is a pretty good investment. If the cost-saving is there, it’s hard not to go down this route, as the financial justification is there.

Last week’s Sunday Reboot discussed employee gift bags, the Apple Intelligence flub in China, and iPhones on Artemis II.