Our dog likes to walk around in my office. I did a bunch of cable routing stuff, so that all the power wires were over by the wall.
The dog today managed to pull down both Mac Minis off the desk, and snap off a USB-C cable to the RAID array. The fall would’ve been about 2.5 feet off the desk onto a glass chair mat.
It doesn’t look like there’s obvious damage. It seems to have landed on the side and fallen over onto the bottom, so nothing with the ports / cables (other than the cable to the RAID, which snapped on the RAID side) - but are there things I should be concerned about as far as long-term reliability? Or is this one of those “if it boots up, it’s probably fine” sorts of things?
There are a few little connections that could break things like WiFi if they are damaged. I doubt a fall would do it, but still. You might want to keep this in mind if you experience any weird gaps in functionality in the future.
FWIW, iFixit’s repair kit gives you pretty much everything you need to look under the hood, and it wasn’t very expensive on Amazon.
I’m not sure how new your Mac minis are, but if it’s fairly recent with an SSD and no optical drive, I’d say it’s good. Things are well secured inside, based on my experience disassembling mine.
The only thing I’d worry about is the fan impeller coming apart, but you’d find out really quickly if that was the case.
Bit of a weird suggestion maybe, but does it sound like something’s loose inside if you shake it a bit?
If not and it boots normal then you’re probably ok
My mac mini (2014 IIRC) was dropped onto tiles as I brought it home from the Mac store (its logic board was replaced). It’s still going today (except ethernet and sound got fried by a lightning strike!).
