Thank you for the replies everyone.
It seems like a lot of effort and expense IMO. You would have to buy two computers, as well as an internal blu-ray player, which may or may not fit easy depending on what kind of mounting setup the 2010 has. Maybe someone on the forum has a 2010 and a 2011/2012 to see whether the swap is even possible. It wouldn't surprise me if they were incompatible since a DVD and a 2.5" SATA disk have different footprints. And you'd have to bet that the 2013 is gonna be the exact same, which isn't a guarantee.
I would just buy a 2013 and keep an external drive near by. It is slightly less elegant but will save a lot of headaches.
The thing that is so appealing to me about the Mini, is that it's a tiny all-in-one system that draws very little power.
I
really dislike external hard drives/optical drives, and the reason I have avoided PC solutions is because anything that size comes with an external power brick, unlike the Mini.
The ports on the back are likely to be in different positions and in different configurations.
Just buy an external drive and place it on the top.
Well my plan was to pull out the motherboard & backplate assembly, and just swap them out, leaving everything else intact. So things like port layout wouldn't matter.
Couldn't you just buy a a decent external drive one that aesthetically blends in with the Mac mini rather than brutalise it and damaging its resell value.....
I'm not sure why you think this would have been "brutalizing" it. I am experienced with building computers and repairing laptops etc. so opening up the mini for this job would be trivial. I was really only concerned about whether or not the parts were an easy swap or not, as it looked like they should be from a quick glance at the iFixit site, and I thought someone here might have already tried it.
When the 2011's came out, someone started a thread wanting to do the same thing (by the way, the current Mini's are 2012's, there are no 2013's yet). In the end it isn't practical. You would need a 2010 case. Which you can buy and runs over $100. Secondly, you need to figure out how you are going to properly mount the DVD drive. Since the 2012 has no mount points for the DVD drive, you would have to some how mount it to the 2010 case. Not to mention you would need to make sure there is room (i.e. heat sinks and other components don't get in the way). It isn't a simple swap. Do yourself a favor and save yourself hours (possibly days) of headaches and possibly hundreds of dollars and just get a nice external DVD and/or Blu-Ray drive.
Well all I had planned on doing was purchasing two Minis, and swapping out the backplate & motherboard. The hard drives/optical drive etc are mounted to the case, so I didn't think there would be any problem there.
You would still be left with two functioning computers, it's just that the one with an optical drive would be fast enough for my needs, and the 2010 hardware (in the 2012 case with two HDDs) could have been used as a media server or given to a family member.
It was done with the 2011 but required changing various parts. The guy who did it was an experienced case mod enthusiast.
Thanks, it never occurred to me to search for mods with the 2011 model for some reason, which put me on the right track. I've now found a good source of information for this, and it looks like you
can do a simple modification to fit a 2012 mini into the 2010 case, but it's not possible with a Blu-ray drive:
http://www.123macmini.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=206580
I think you might be able to use a Blu-ray drive with the 2010 motherboard, but that's far too slow for my needs.
It's too bad that Apple has been so anti-Blu-ray, and removed the optical drive from the Minis completely. A 2012-spec Mini (or a 2013 one, once they are released) with a Blu-ray drive would have been perfect for me.
