Someone Destroyed EVERY PORT on this Mac Mini...

in this video I'm going to be repairing this M2 Apple Mac Mini Now by just looking at it from the outside here uh looks pretty much completely normal as you'd expect and in fact the machine works exactly normally as you'd expect too pretty much um but if we go ahead and take a look at the back of it here you will immediately start to see what the issue is so if we go and take a close look here and you start out by looking at those two USBC ports there you can see that they have been completely destroyed now the HDMI port next to it of course is no exception uh both usba ports have also been attempted to be destroyed um however looking at them it looks like they would probably still work uh even as they are and of course the ethernet port as well has also been uh intentionally destroyed now I don't really know why somebody would destroy the ports in something like this um because this was obviously intentional there's no way you know this was done by mistake um but it's still kind of puzzling what they were trying to accomplish here now I have seen uh many of these Mac Minis on eBay with this damage just like this so obviously it's something you know people have decided on as maybe I don't know an effective method of disabling the board or destroying the data on it even though there's still data on on here um I really don't know now this isn't my machine this was actually sent into me by a friend of mine who actually bought it off eBay for $200 and obviously in this day and age $200 is a really good deal uh for an M2 Mac Mini and I have checked the serial number on't it and it is not iCloud locked so definitely got a really good deal on this one um other than of course the ports being completely destroyed so before I get started here I am going to plug this machine in and show you that it does work now of course I'm not going to connect it to any keyboard monitor or mouse or anything with these damaged ports uh because I don't want to risk you know causing any more damage by actually plugging something into those ports in that condition uh but we'll go ahead and take a power cord here and just plug it in like so and we'll just power the board on and as you can see it chimed as expect um so the machine definitely is booting so we go ahead and unplug that turn it off and uh the next thing we need to do is I want to get this uh board taken out of this chassis uh take a close look at it and then we will begin the process of sourcing some donor a donor set of ports uh to install onto this board all right so as you can see here I've gotten the uh Mac Mini logic board removed from its chassis here and just at first glance here everything looks really good um you can see that the board itself looks like it's in perfect condition there's not a single flaw on it anywhere so literally the only thing that's a problem on this board are the intentionally damaged ports so that is a really good sign so with the board out here uh let's go ahead and take um an even closer look at those ports and you can see exactly what I mean here by intentionally damaged so you can see that ethernet port there is really damaged with all those um all of its pins all messed up and mangled up there um obviously both USBC ports as I showed you earlier that HDMI port and then of course those two USB ports there which like I said uh actually would probably still be usable as they are um but I still I'm going to replace them cuz the plastic is a little bit damaged so yeah like I said I don't really know what someone did to damage these it looks like they just stuck like a screwdriver maybe some pliers in the ports and I damaged them that way uh but nonetheless uh we need to replace all of them as I said now luckily for us uh we actually have a very good source for these ports because one device that happens to share the exact same port layout as this Mac Mini and the M1 Mac Mini and pretty much any Apple silicon Mac Mini unless of course it has uh four uh USBC ports there is the developer transition I kit and I just so happen to have a ton of those that are unusable so let's go ahead over to the dtk graveyard and find one that we think is suitable to steal its ports well here it is the dtk graveyard uh you can see I've got a whole box of dtk right here uh full pretty much up to the top so and these are all drilled so unfortunately these are all um completely unusable as you can see right there uh but in this case they are perfect for using for parts so let's just go ahead and find one here that has some good ports on it like this one right here and we'll use this one to steal its ports to fix the M2 Mac Mini all right so as you can see here I've got our donor dtk out on the board preheater and uh I do not expect it to be very easy to remove these ports uh these ports are are big they've got a lot of shielding and metal on them so they have a lot of thermal mass and that's going to make this process uh pretty difficult uh but first thing we need to do is just get the board warming up on the preheater here and then we'll remove all of these uh little Emi stickers here to expose the legs of the through hole ports well to make it even more difficult looking at it closer here uh you can see that there are actually little components in here uh intermingled between all these pins so that's going to make this desoldering process extremely difficult um maybe I'll get lucky enough and I can just use like hot air uh to just heat and just pull them out that would be ideal especially on the you know Target board that we're actually repairing here um but first let me just let it uh warm up and then yeah I think first thing I'll do is just try uh that hot air method just kind of blast them with hot air with the preheater as well and hopefully I can just kind of take them and just drop them out that way hopefully I can get this hot enough to where you know the ports come out uh so let's get that warming up and then I'll I'll temp that and see if that actually ends up working as expected [Music] so one thing I didn't notice is there's these little black plastic pieces here that come through from the ports and they are definitely trying to melt but I think I'm just going to let them melt off because they really aren't needed and doing it this way will just be a whole lot easier than manually desoldering all these pins with solder Wick and such I just want to make sure of course that the ports themselves don't end up melting okay so that actually worked really well uh let's get the port that just kind of got away from me there so yeah if you take a look at that that actually looks pretty good minus those two plastic tabs that I melted uh the rest of the port is perfectly intact so that'll definitely work uh for our uses so that's awesome so let's go ahead and start desoldering the rest of the ports uh in the exact same [Music] manner there's the ethernet port [Music] there's the HDMI port and this will likely be the most difficult Port here but this will be the uh audio jack combined with the two usba a ports and that's it that's all the ports removed uh so now I need to get the M2 Mac Mini logic board up here and just attempt to do the same thing again all right so as you can see we've got the M2 Mac mini board up here now um so of course now we'll just do the exact same thing [Music] [Music] and just like that all of our bad ports have been removed uh so now I'm going to flip the board over and see if I can't manage to Wick all the solder out of these holes uh from the top side so I don't have to deal with these shields or any of these components uh that are right in between the pins of each port and then hopefully we'll be all good and we can solder the new ports on all right so now with the board flipped over to the top side here uh the first thing I want to do is apply some flux and some fresh leaded solder uh to all these pads and that way it'll make the lead free solder a lot easier to remove uh so we'll go ahead and just start applying the flux here so that's a good amount there and then we'll take uh the soldering iron and just apply some leaded solder okay we'll start with that there and we'll just hope that I can simply Wick all that solder out of these holes and I have a feeling it's going to be easier said than done uh but we'll see all right so yeah it's not really wicking very easily so one trick I found uh that tends to work pretty well is if you actually use hot air uh to Aid in the removal of the residual solder so I'm going to put my hot air on again and we'll use that alongside the iron to remove all of the residual solder and usually that works a little bit better actually first thing I'm going to do is just get as much of the solder off with just the wick as I can so that'll make it a little easier [Music] all right so as expected that was extremely difficult I'm still not done uh but I'm going to finish the rest of it off camera and hopefully you know it'll go a little bit smoother I would say just use the hot air and do not add extra solder cuz that actually made it a whole lot harder which is actually usually not the case um so for the next ones I'm just going to leave the original solder there just add flux and use the hot air with the iron on the solder Wick to remove it that way so I'm GNA finish it off camera and come back and then we'll begin the process of installing the New Ports all right well as you can see here I've gotten all the pads Wicked and let me just tell you that was an awful awful process that took so long um th hole stuff just absolutely sucks to work with I would much much prefer if these were SMD ports cuz that would make this process way easier and way quicker but regardless I've gotten everything cleaned up here all the pads wicked as I said if we take a look um at the bottom here you can see that it is a little bit messy under here just because of all the flux that went through the holes uh but is still you know clean enough to you know use in this condition um so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to solder on the ethernet port and the reason for that is as you can see uh right here it's got three um SMD D ground pads here and three SMD ground pads back here and I'm going to use the preheater with the hot air to seat this connector before I solder the through hole parts of it there um so let's get it back on the preheater once again and we'll get this ethernet port soldered on all right so as you can see I've got the ethernet port section here on the preheater so let's go ahead and just apply little bit of flux on there like so and then we'll just tin all of the these SMD pads here all right and with those 10 we will take our good ethernet port right here you can see all of the pins in there are intact from our dtk take that get it in position there and then I'm just going to heat it with the hot air to get those pad soldered all right and I think that's good right there so now it should be pretty much on there yep so now that's not going anywhere um so now I'm going to take it back off the preheater and then we'll just begin the process of soldering all of the through hole components all right so as you can see I've got the board ready here so now all we need to do is just install all of the uh through hole ports here that we took off of the dtk and then we can begin the process of soldering all the pins so we'll start with the USBC Port assembly here that goes in like so just making sure all the pins went through as expected okay yeah that looks good um next of course is the HDMI port got that installed and lastly we've got our usba and uh audio port assembly here and that just goes on like that so now it's looking much more complete once again um so of course now we need to flip it over and solder all the pins into position guess we'll start over on this side with the ethernet just a tiny bit of flux on there and then we'll just take the soldering iron and solder each pin into position all right and it looks like it will actually be a lot easier to do this on the preheater cuz the ground plane in this board is so thick that it's sinking way too much heat from my iron so let's get it back on the board pre here once again and we'll finish the soldering process on there take go [Applause] all right so as you can see here all the ports have been soldered on successfully uh everything looks good all the ports are even uh flush with each other and you know flat against the board as you'd expect um so if we go ahead and flip it over here and take a look at the bottom uh all the pins here are soldered uh soldering all these actually took quite a long time but I got it done and everything looks really good there um so yeah now the next thing I want to do is hook it up to a keyboard Monitor and mouse and give it an initial test all right so as you can see here I've gotten a power supply and keyboard Monitor and mouse hooked up so let's go ahead and plug it in turn it on and see if everything works so of course we'll be testing both USB ports and uh one of the USB C ports okay that's a good sign oh and look at that we've got video so that means at least that USBC Port works let me try the other one real quick and that one works too that's a really good sign um so it looks like this has a fresh copy of Ventura on it so let me go ahead and set this up and then we'll take a look and test everything else make sure the ports all the ports work and then uh we'll reassemble it all right so as you can see I've gotten uh the copy of Ventura set up here so let's go ahead into about this Mac uh you can see there that this is of course a base model M2 Mac Mini with 256 gigs of storage and activation lock is indeed disabled that's good would expect that since it was a you know a uh first time setup there uh but yeah everything looks good so far um so let's go ahead and connect ethernet to it and we'll make sure the ethernet port works as intended okay we got ethernet connected so let's check this status of that and we are connected so ethernet's working with that new ethernet port let's go ahead and open up Safari here and yep that works we've got an internet connection now over ethernet um so the only thing left I need to test is HDMI and the audio port but uh I'll do that later off camera before I reassemble it but uh yeah I'm very happy with the results there so now let's get the board back on the workbench and we'll reassemble it back into its chassis all right so I've got the board out here I got the heat sink on but uh we'll just go ahead and reassemble the rest of it here um so the first thing I've got here is a new IO plate uh to replace this one which obviously has a lot of damage from where whoever stuck something in there and tried to damage the ports with um so we'll install this one of course it's the same as the M1 Mac Mini uh so we'll put that on just like so and everything looks good there all the ports are aligned so that means you know they're soldered in their correct positions which is good um so now we'll just route all these antenna cables and get the rest of it reassembled and there we go that is a fully repaired Apple M2 Mac Mini so let's hook it up one more time and give it a final test all right so we've got the M2 Mac Mini hooked up again so let's power it on and there we go everything is still working yep got working USB again and I have tested the other ports including HDMI and the audio port and both of those work as well so that has been the Full Repair of intentionally damaged ports on this M2 Apple Mac Mini so with that I hope you enjoyed this video

Channel: dosdude1

Views: 49,831

Keywords: Apple, Mac Mini, M2, Apple Silicon, sabotaged, damaged ports, intentional damage, damage, intentionally damaged, repair, successful, macOS, Macintosh, board repair, PCB, soldering

Id: xUwH8q-E1Nc

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 20 2024