I looked around the internet for a while for another way to do this that wouldn’t require opening up the mini, but the best I found was a method where you have to power off the mini every time before shutting down, then it will restart when you reconnect power. “eh….”. Ultimately, I was faced with a decision, was the humiliation of having to walk behind my rack every time I had to turn the computer on worth risking having to spend another $1k? I decided no, at first, then yes very shortly after I suffered such a humiliation. OK, so baring in mind that you risk destroying your computer if you screw up, and you defintiely void your warranty (no big deal, mac warranties are crap anyway IMO), you’ll need a soldering iron with a small tip, some electrical tape, an exacto knife or razor blade, and probably a clean surface just in case, a grounding strap would also be a good idea.  Here’s how you do it, at your own risk of course!

Step 1.  Disconnect Power and Remove Lid

There are a plethora of tutorials and videos on how to do this online.  If you’re afraid to do this part, stop now!  It’s gonna get worse…

Step 2.  Remove switch connector

The nice part about this mod is you don’t have to remove any other components like you do for the hard drive or ram.   The bad part is, you have to cut some wires.  Now, at the moment, I haven’t been able to find a suitable y connector to replace the newest version of the mac-mini.  mp3car.com sells this y-adapter for use on earlier versions.  If you have one of these versions, use the adapter!!!  If you don’t….as far as I know there’s no alternative.  I think this has to do with the type of connector that is used on the newer models.  If yours looks like mine in the picture, you’ll notice it’s a lot smaller than the older version.  This causes some problems later.  Anyways, so once you’ve located the connector, remove it from it’s jack.   I would use a pair of needle nose tweezers here, verrrry gently play with it until you can wiggle it out of it’s slot.  Ultimately, you have to get the connector back in there, so be very careful at this point.

Just behind the front power switch is the black connector with the two black wires coming from it.  This is the switch connector.

Step 3.  Splice the wires

This is the nasty part.  As you’re probably aware at this point, you have about 1-2 inches of play on the wires there.  Those wires connect directly to your switch, which is pretty covered up, and go directly to the motherboard.  If you have the y-connector, all you do is connect your connector to theirs and you’re done.  If you don’t, you have two options.  You can cut off the mac mini connector completely, and simply connect new wires to theirs, making them longer, but this means you’ll render the switch on the back of the mini useless.  Alternatively, you can still keep the mini’s switch active while adding your own external control simultaneously.  To do this, you’ll want to keep the mac-mini connector unharmed.  So instead of cutting the wires, what I did was verrry gently cut away at a portion of the wire until enough of the bare wire was exposed that I could solder to.  Do this to each wire.

It’s difficult to see, but each wire there has the insulation barely removed in a small area.

Step 4.  Insert external wires

There might be other ways to do this, but I found one that worked for me and stopped looking.  You need to get two wires from inside the mini, to the outside.  One way is obviously to drill a whole in the case.  Not a bad option, but probably not very popular.  If you don’t want to do this, you can feed the wires through the lock slot (if you don’t intend to use it) and under the metal cage around to the button area, as shown in the picture.   Make sure to make your wires very long, it’s a lot easier to shorten a wire then extend it later.

Step 5.  Solder wires together

I think it should be obvious what you’re about to do…  Put a little solder on each of the mac mini wires, and the tips of the wires that you brought in through the lock slot.  Then, solder them together, doing this in a way that will make it easy to get the connector positioned correctly is the trick.  Obviously there’s not a lot of room for error or play.

Step 6.  Re-Insulate the wires

Using some electrical tape, and probably some tweezers, wrap up the newly soldered joints.  Each one should be wrapped individually, then as a whole together.  You don’t want any bare connections hanging around inside your mini, that’s a good way to fry something.

Step 6.  Reconnect Connector

Now that you’ve got your external wires in place, you can put the connector back in place.  Really, if you think you can do the soldering and wiring without ever removing the connector than you should, but I think that might be too hard.  If you removed the connector, you need to put it back in order for either switch to ever work.  How to do this is up to you…Theoretically, it should slide back in.  If it does, go to step 7!  If it doesn’t….go to step 6-F.

Step 6-F.  Solder connector pins to motherboard jack

So what happens if you can’t get the connector back in it’s place?  Then you go to step 6-F, F because you F’d up.  So did I, to be honest, I’m not sure that connector can really even go back once it’s out.   So now there’s two options, you can cut the connector off completely,  or you can kind of smash it up exposing the pins inside the connector, this leaves you with two solid solder joints, to start from and also a little more wire to play with.  In my case, my attempt to get the connector back in resulted in me destroying the connector.  As you’ll see, it’s very soft plastic and pretty much crumbles under any pressure.  So once you have the pins exposed, you need to connect them to those tiny gold pins on the jack where the connector was originally sitting.  Yes, I mean those 2mm long pins inside the black square.  NOTE:  There is no step 6-S, don’t screw this up or you’re out of luck.  This doesn’t mean just the mini switch won’t work, it means you’ll never be able to turn on your computer again without doing some serious tinkering around on the motherboard of the computer. Once you have the two points soldered in place, you may want to put some kind of insulation in there to ensure the two wires don’t touch each other.  This would equate to pressing the power button on your computer when it’s on (or off).

Step 7.  Put the lid back on, you’re done!

You now have two wires coming out of the mini that when connected together will simulate pushing the button on the back.  There are loads of ways to do this, for me, I only wanted to be able to turn it on from the front….But I know a lot of people are interested in using a remote to turn on the computer, so in this case, a simple RF receiver circuit would do the job using an opto-coupler to short the two wires together.  Good luck!  And don’t blame me if your computer never turns on again!