Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/upgrading-m4-pro-mac-minis-storage-half-price

by speckx • 1 year ago

434 268 1 year ago

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

Comparing the speeds of a new flash device and an old, used one will typically not be valid unless steps are taken to condition the new device into a steady operating state.

Retr0id• 1 year ago

What might those steps be?

daneel_w6• 1 year ago

Putting the new one through an equal amount of use that the old one saw, because SSD controller firmware is unpredictable and many SSDs see reduced performance with time.

jtbayly• 1 year ago

I’m surprised and happy that this is possible.

porphyra• 1 year ago

There are also shops in China that will upgrade the SSD in a mac mini for cheaper and they will do all the work of the DFU restore etc.

ttul2• 1 year ago

And when the machine arrives back in the States, it even has a fresh CPC ROM soldered onto the back of the SOC!

mattl2• 1 year ago

CPC?

bigyabai5• 1 year ago

Don't be rude, your NSA ROM gets lonely sometimes.

chvid• 1 year ago

Do you actually believe this?

hollerith3• 1 year ago

I'm not a security researcher, but I get the distinct impression that Apple's hardware security is good enough that if you actually had an evil-maid attack on the M4 Pro Mac mini, it would instantly become the hottest news in the security community.

daneel_w6• 1 year ago

But Jeff doesn't live in China.

jayd16• 1 year ago

Could such a place exist in the US or would Apple shut it down?

kjkjadksj5• 1 year ago

I think it could since a lot of shade tree iphone repair shops exist. Probably not enough demand to pay for the overhead unlike in china though.

notpushkin3• 1 year ago

I think https://dosdude1.com/ provides such services? And his YouTube channel is a great place to start if you’re looking to DIY this: https://www.youtube.com/user/dosdude1

wpm4• 1 year ago

I was quite pleased with the iBoff 2TB SSD I got for my M4 Mini. It's sad how badly Apple has some of us conditioned with the pathetic amounts of storage they include. I haven't had a Mac with more than 512GB of storage, basically, ever? And recently I was on my Mini, digging through some old backups, and hesitated as I normally would downloading a 40GB zip from my NAS, because "oh geeze this is 40GB plus another 40 after decompression, do I have enough space?" because 80GB is normally 15% of my Mac's storage space. Then I remembered, oh yeah, heaps of storage, this'll only cost me 4% of the total. I bought this Mac with the 256GB base SSD knowing I could upgrade, and nearly 40% of the drive was taken up out of the box.

It's pure robbery on Apple's part. Completely beyond the pale now. Their ridiculous RAM and storage prices were never that big of a deal back in the PowerBook/early Macbook Pro days, because you could always opt out if you were a tiny bit handy with a small screwdriver (my 2008 unibody lets me swap storage with *1* screw, swap a battery with zero!). Now? It's unforgivable. I don't care about soldered RAM, I get it, but it is despicable charging as much as the entire computer to upgrade the RAM a paltry 16GB.

There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit. Having to constantly hem and haw over oh god oh geeze do I have enough local storage for this basic task, having to juggle external storage and copying files back and forth (since plenty of their own shit doesn't work if its installed on an external SSD), or constantly deleting and redownloading larger apps, makes the product experience worse. Full stop. At the very least every Mac they sell should have 512GB, if not a TB, stock. I'm tired of acting like SSDs are some insanely expensive luxury like it's 2008 again.

skeezyboy• 1 year ago

cant you just install macOs on your own hardware or are they typically Apple in that department as well?

dylan60421• 1 year ago

Are you familiar with Hackintosh? That's what people did with Intel based platforms. Apple Silicon put an end to the Hackintosh.

dylan60421• 1 year ago

man, perspective here is quite funny to me. I just wrote a diatribe about SSD speeds vs my HDD experience in life. At $699 to have 5+GB/s throughput would make a younger me look at you like you had two heads and just walked out of UFO. There's no way it could be that fast/small/cheap in any future without alien tech. I get that Apple's pricing is higher than other options. Even still, it's dirt cheap compared for the performance that allows high-end to consumers.

Even still, I'm a huge fan of taking advantage of the cheaper options with an portable external chassis and a nice thunderbolt cable. While not quite as fast as the internal version, it's still 2+GB/s worth of speed that exceeds my needs/use.

So from my perspective, it's dirt cheap compared to your insanely expensive perspective

wpm4• 1 year ago

taking advantage of the cheaper options with an portable external chassis and a nice thunderbolt cable.

This has a number of downsides on macOS. I am well aware of the cheapness of this, but you also get a worse user-experience. I have a huge NAS that I could connect to over 10GbE too, save for no native iSCSI drivers. I have a handful of external SSDs in enclosures, but I can't easily boot off of it (and if I do, certain features of the OS get disabled). I can't easily or reliably move my home folder to it. I can't clean up my desk without buying expensive external "docks" or something that in addition to a standard M.2 SSD, come out to more expensive than the iBoff upgrade. I have to waste my time juggling files back and forth from the external to the internal in situations where I either want to (for faster speeds) or need to (in cases where Apple's software refuses to work if its not on the internal SSD).

Yeah, 20 years ago the thought of 5GB/s for less than a grand was fantasy. It's not fantasy anymore, and it's not 20 years ago. I'm tired of pretending it is to justify these outrageous prices Apple is extracting from their customers.

nordsieck3• 1 year ago

It's pure robbery on Apple's part. Completely beyond the pale now. Their ridiculous RAM and storage prices were never that big of a deal back in the PowerBook/early Macbook Pro days, because you could always opt out if you were a tiny bit handy with a small screwdriver (my 2008 unibody lets me swap storage with 1 screw, swap a battery with zero!). Now? It's unforgivable. I don't care about soldered RAM, I get it, but it is despicable charging as much as the entire computer to upgrade the RAM a paltry 16GB.

For what it's worth, I completely agree with you.

But.

I suspect that Apple isn't solely doing this for profit. Apple's pricing structure aggressively funnels people into the base config for each CPU.

Thinking about getting an M4 with upgraded ram? A base config M4 pro starts to look pretty good.

In practice, this means that Apple's logistics is dramatically simplified since 95% of people are ordering a small number of SKUs.

There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit.

It was really egregious when the base config only came with 8 GB of ram. I'll admit that storage can be a bit tight depending on what you're trying to do, but at least external storage is an option, however ugly and/or inconvenient it may be for some.

int0x29• 1 year ago

Don't want to deal with the logistics of lots of SKUs? Don't sell them. Trying to upsell people is a money move. Selling a SKU where the 80+gb OS is like 40% of the disk is a good SKU to cut. Especially if some consumers are unlikely to realize how little space they will actually have.

gmanley• 1 year ago

The RAM has always been the biggest issue, for me. I'd almost always prefer to have my larger data on an external system. In my case an NAS or several RAID enclosures. Having the data "mobility" is important. My normal workflow is to have my active work on the system in question and then move it back forth as I finish or swap projects. In recent years, I have never maxed out my storage on my Macs. To be fair, I don't work with a bunch of 4K video editing, or other huge datasets, so maybe that's where it becomes more of a problem.

yread• 1 year ago

700$ for 4TB! Getting robbed in broad daylight and writing a happy blogpost about it

kevincox• 1 year ago

Getting robbed less is better than getting robbed more.

master_crab• 1 year ago

True. But I don't know if I’d be gleeful if the robber left me the credit cards and took the cash.

Looks like you also have to do the upgrade yourself (so it’s not all just cash money being forked over).

tuananh• 1 year ago

I was provided the $699 M4 Pro 4TB SSD upgrade by M4-SSD. It's quite expensive (especially compared to normal 4TB NVMe SSDs, which range from $200-400)...

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

Yes, that kind of culture is why while I appreciate many of Apple's technologies, I rather let customers or employers provide hardware if they feel so inclined for me to use Apple.

Privately it is all about Linux/Windows/Android.

Very good insights,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cult_of_Mac

teaearlgraycold2• 1 year ago

Custom low volume hardware is going to be more expensive.

encom• 1 year ago

Behold the power of the Reality Distortion Field. Apple marketing is insane.

dylan60421• 1 year ago

SSD speeds are nothing short of miraculous in my mind. I come from the old days of striping 16 HDDs together (at a minimum number) to get 1GB/s throughput. Depending on the chassis, that was 2 8-drive enclosures in the "desktop" version or the large 4RU enclosures with redundant PSUs and fans loud enough to overpower arena rock concerts. Now, we can get 5+GB/s throughput from a tiny stick that can be used externally via a single cable for data&power that is absolutely silent. I edit 4K+ video as well, and now can edit directly from the same device the camera recorded to during production. I'm skipping over the parts of still making backups, but there's no more multi-hour copy from source media to edit media during a DIT step. I've spent many a shoot as a DIT wishing the 1s&0s would travel across devices much faster while everyone else on the production has already left, so this is much appreciated by me. Oh, and those 16 device units only came close to 4TB around the time of me finally dropping spinning rust.

The first enclosure I ever dealt with was a 7-bay RAID-0 that could just barely handle AVR75 encoding from Avid. Just barely to the point that only video was saved to the array. The audio throughput would put it over the top, so audio was saved to a separate external drive.

Using SSD feels like a well deserved power up from those days.

gchamonlive2• 1 year ago

I come from the old days of striping 16 HDDs together (at a minimum number) to get 1GB/s throughput

Woah, how long would that last before you'd start having to replace the drives?

dylan60421• 1 year ago

Depending on the HDD vendor/model. We had hot spares and cold spares. On one build, we had a bad batch of drives. We built the array on a Friday, and left it for burn-in running over the weekend. On Monday, we came in to a bunch of alarms and >50% failure rate. At least they died during the burn-in so no data loss, but it was an extreme example. That was across multiple 16-bay rack mount chassis. It was an infamous case though, we were not alone.

More typically, you'd have a drive die much less frequently, but it was something you absolutely had to be prepared for. With RAID-6 and a hot spare, you could be okay with a single drive failure. Theoretically, you could lose two, but it would be a very nervy day getting the array to rebuild without issue.

nordsieck3• 1 year ago

If you're interested in some hard data, Backblaze publishes their HD failure numbers[1]. These disks are storage optimized, not performance optimized like the parent comment, but they have a pretty large collection of various hard drives, and it's pretty interesting to see how reliability can vary dramatically across brand and model.

---

1. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/resources/hard-drive...

adastra224• 1 year ago

I run 24x RAID at home. I’m replacing disks 2-3 times per year.

lvl155• 1 year ago

You should try now-discontinued Intel Optane especially p5800x. I got my OS running on them and they are incredible.

the8472• 1 year ago

Just a few more years until we get MRAM as viable storage technology. And affordable fusion, and hovercars.

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

The endurance on those drivers is amazing.

I have (stupidly) used a too small Samsung EVO drive as a caching drive, and that is probably the first computer part that I've worn out (bar a mouse & keyboard).

MrDrMcCoy• 1 year ago

I'm running 12 of them for ZFS cache/log/special, and they are fast/tough enough to make a large array on a slow link feel fast. I shake my fist at Intel and Micron for taking away one of the best memory technologies to ever exist.

geerlingguy4• 1 year ago

This hits home even more since I started restoring some vintage Macs.

For the ones new enough to get an SSD upgrade, it's night and day the difference (even a Power Mac G4 can feel fresh and fast just swapping out the drive). For older Macs like PowerBooks and classic Macs, there are so many SD/CF card to IDE/SCSI/etc. adapters now, they also get a significant boost.

But part of the nostalgia of sitting there listening to the rumble of the little hard drive is gone.

brailsafe2• 1 year ago

For older Macs like PowerBooks and classic Macs, there are so many SD/CF card to IDE/SCSI/etc.

Would those be bandwidth limited by the adapter/card or CPU? Can you get throughput higher than say, a cheap 2.5" SSD over Sata 3/4?

dylan60421• 1 year ago

I had a 2011 MBP that I kept running by replacing the HDD with an SSD, and then removed the DVD-ROM drive with a second SSD. The second SSD had throughput limits because it was designed for shiny round disc, so it had a lower ability chip. I had that until the 3rd GPU replacement died, and eventually switched to second gen butterfly keyboard. The only reason it was tolerable was because of the SSDs, oh and the RAM upgrades

thecosas• 1 year ago

But part of the nostalgia of sitting there listening to the rumble of the little hard drive is gone.

I remember this being a key troubleshooting step. Listen/feel for the hum of the hard drive OR the telltale click clack, grinding, etc that foretold doom.

SpecialistK2• 1 year ago

I've just finished CF swapping a PowerBook 1400cs/117. It's a base model with 12MB RAM, so there are other bottlenecks, but OS 8.1 takes about 90 seconds from power to desktop and that's pretty good for a low-end machine with a fairly heavy OS.

Somehow the 750MB HDD from 1996 is still working, but I admit that the crunch and rumble of HDDs is a nostalgia I'm happy to leave in the past.

My 1.67 PowerBook G4 screams with a 256GB mSATA SSD-IDE adapter. Until you start compiling code or web surfing, it still feels like a pretty modern machine. I kind of wish I didn't try the same upgrade on a iBook G3, though...

starkparker• 1 year ago

While these are geared toward retrocomputing, there are things that attempt to simulate the sound based on activity LEDs: https://www.serdashop.com/HDDClicker

jorvi2• 1 year ago

It's not really the SSDs themselves that are incredibly fast (they still are somewhat), it's mostly the RAM cache and clever tricks to make TLC feel like SLC.

Most (cheap) SSDs their performance goes off a cliff once you hit the boundary of these tricks.

forrestthewoods4• 1 year ago

once you hit the boundary of these trick

Tell me more. When do I hit the boundary? What is perf before/after said boundary? What are the tricks?

Tell me something actionable. Educate me.

bob10292• 1 year ago

The latency of modern NVMe is what really blows my mind (as low as 20~30 uS). NVMe is about an order of magnitude quicker than SAS and SATA.

This is why I always recommend developers try using SQLite on top of NVMe storage. The performance is incredible. I don't think you would see query times anywhere near 20uS with a hosted SQL solution, even if it's on the same machine using named pipes or other IPC mechanism.

Numerlor2• 1 year ago

Then there's optane that got ~10us with. The newest controllers and nand is inching closer with randoms but optane is still the most miraculous ssd tech that's normally obtainable

MortyWaves• 1 year ago

Meanwhile a job recently told me they are on IBM AS400 boxes “because Postgress and other sql databases can’t keep up with the number of transactions we have”… for a company that has a few thousand inserts per day…

Obviously not true that they’d overwhelm modern databases but feels like that place has had the same opinions since the 1960s.

Weryj2• 1 year ago

I’m still buying old Optane drives for that latency when it matters. RockDB loves it

wslh• 1 year ago

So, now someone can strip several SSDs to gain more performance as well for other purposes than video editing, right?

Spooky23• 1 year ago

Totally. I spent a lot of time 15-20 years ago building out large email systems.

I recently bought a $17 SSD for my son’s middle school project that was speced to deliver like 3x what I needed in those days. From a storage perspective, I was probably spending $50 GB/mo all-in to deploy a multi million dollar storage solution. TBH… you’d probably smoke that system with used laptops today.

392• 1 year ago

If only folks wrote software with this in mind.

S04dKHzrKT• 1 year ago

In a similar vein, I had Western Digital Raptors striped in my gaming PC in the mid 2000s. I remember just how amazed I was after moving to SSDs.

contingencies4• 1 year ago

While you're at it add the USBC power hack https://github.com/vk2diy/hackbook-m4-mini

I've been traveling for business with this as my sole machine for 3 months straight and it has proven to be an excellent system.

beanjuice• 1 year ago

What is the benefit over a macbook in this case?

wpm4• 1 year ago

The linked repo has a pretty good rundown of possible reasons:

If non-square screens on Macbook Pros make your blood boil with rage
If you can't afford or don't want to pay for a Macbook Pro (smart choice)
If you have ergonomics concerns with shrinking laptops and one size fits all keyboards
If you like your systems to be repairable and modular rather than comprised of proprietary parts shoehorned in to a closed source design available only from a single vendor for a limited time
If you are blind (and don't want to carry a screen around)
If you want to use AR instead of a screen and therefore prefer to be untethered
If you are on a sailing ship, submarine, mobile home, campervan, paraglider, recumbent touring bicycle, or otherwise off-grid
If you want a capable unix system to power a mobile mechatronic system

I'd add in not having to deal with a Macbook in clamshell mode doing stupid crap like forcing you to double-tap the touchID button sometimes, refusing to connect to external keyboards and mice on wake, and some of the other annoyances I have dealt with.

Also, a Mac Mini is small, and a MacBook is not, at least as a function of "desk area" vs "area consumed".

contingencies4• 1 year ago

1. cheaper 2. different form factor 3. more choice of battery/kb/mouse/screen/camera 4. not landfill when you have to replace battery/kb/mouse/screen/camera 5. doesn't have an annoying chunk out of the screen 6. doesn't have a video camera pointed at you all the time 7. keyboard that suits large hands 8. keyboard in preferred layout 9. not subject to apple tax on most components/upgrades

afandian• 1 year ago

I wonder why Apple left those two large power pads? They don't look like typical test points.

Are the populated from the existing PSU input or just there in case anyone wanted to mod it?

contingencies4• 1 year ago

They probably use them in production as test jig connects for passing power. They are vertical inter-board rails. When making physical connections for high current contacts it pays to have a larger surface area in case there is a poor connection as substantial draw may occur for short periods. Also, such surfaces may degrade over time, so extra surface area is desirable.

joshvm• 1 year ago

Fix the cables in place. This can be very fiddly. It helps greatly to have a fine pointed set of tweezers to assist with placement, bending and the application of pressure whilst screw-down is underway. Take your time and try to get all the cable core under the screw or at least a fair amount.

If you do this mod, you should really use crimped ring connectors instead of just hooking the power cables around the screws. It greatly reduces the risk of pull-out since the screw retains the connector, which also means less chance of shorts and a much easier install. Also since the terminals are uniform and flat, you get much more even clamping. I would also add heat shrink over the crimp.

I don't have a Mini so can't comment on the right size to buy, but you can buy ring terminals in practically any diameter for next to nothing:

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/filter/terminals/ring-co...

GeekyBear9• 1 year ago

The article speculates on why Apple integrates the SSD controller onto the SOC for their A and M series chips, but misses one big reason, data integrity.

About a decade and a half ago, Apple paid half a billion dollars to acquire the patents of a company making enterprise SSD controllers.

Anobit appears to be applying a lot of signal processing techniques in addition to ECC to address the issue of NAND reliability and data retention. In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.

Through all of these efforts, Anobit is promising significant improvements in NAND longevity and reliability.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/5258/apple-acquires-anobit-br...

jeffbee4• 1 year ago

Through all of these efforts, Anobit is promising significant improvements in NAND longevity and reliability.

Every flash controller does this. Modern NAND is just math on a stick. Lots and lots of math.

dontlaugh• 1 year ago

Presumably Apple want to be able to guarantee the quality of such logic.

Still sucks that you can’t use standard parts.

wpm4• 1 year ago

Note that this isn't too long after Apple abandoned efforts to bring ZFS into Mac OS X as a potential default filesystem. Patents were probably a good reason, given the Oracle buyout of Sun, but also a bit of "skating to where the puck will be" and realizing that the spinning rust ZFS was built for probably wasn't going to be in their computers for much longer.

GeekyBear9• 1 year ago

When Apple announced the creation of APFS they mentioned that their intent was to handle data integrity at the hardware level.

kjkjadksj5• 1 year ago

More evidence they thought hdds were on their way out was the unibody macbook keynote. They made a big deal about how the user can access their hdd from the latch on the bottom without any tools as they said ssd was on the horizon.

throw0101c6• 1 year ago

Patents were probably a good reason, given the Oracle buyout of Sun

There is no reason to speculate as the reason is know (as stated by Jeff Bonwick, one of the co-inventors of ZFS):

> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a "private license" from Sun (with appropriate technical support and indemnification), and the two entities couldn't come to mutually agreeable terms.
I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

* https://archive.is/http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs...

* https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mail.opensolaris.org/pi...

throw0101c6• 1 year ago

The article speculates on why Apple integrates the SSD controller onto the SOC for their A and M series chips, but misses one big reason, data integrity.

If they're really interested with data integrity they should add checksums to APFS.

If you don't have RAID you can't rebuild corrupted data, but at least you know there's a problem and perhaps restore from Time Machine.

For metadata, you may have multiple copies, so can use a known-good one (this is how ZFS works: some things have multiple copies 'inherently' because they're so important).

Edit:

Apple File System uses checksums to ensure data integrity for metadata but not for the actual user data, relying instead on error-correcting code (ECC) mechanisms in the storage hardware.[18]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_File_System#Data_integri...

GeekyBear9• 1 year ago

If they're really interested with data integrity they should add checksums to APFS.

Or you can spend half a billion dollars to solve the issue in hardware.

As one of the creators of ZFS wrote when APFS was announced:

Explicitly not checksumming user data is a little more interesting. The APFS engineers I talked to cited strong ECC protection within Apple storage devices. Both NAND flash SSDs and magnetic media HDDs use redundant data to detect and correct errors. The Apple engineers contend that Apple devices basically don't return bogus data.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/a-zfs-developers-ana...

APFS keeps redundant copies and checksums for metadata, but doesn't constantly checksum files looking for changes any more than NTFS does.

bell-cot• 1 year ago

Worth noting, for ZFS - you can use the "copies" property of the dataset to save 2 or (usually) 3 separate copies of your data to the drive(s).

brookst• 1 year ago

Believing that giant companies are monolithic “theys” leads to all sorts of fallacies.

Odds are very good that totally different people work on the architecture of AFS and SoC design.

sneak• 1 year ago

You can do this yourself in userspace if you really want it:

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/attrsum

I use zfs where I can (it has content checksums) but it sucks bad on macOS, so I wrote attrsum. It keeps the file content checksum in an xattr (which APFS (and ext3/4) supports).

I use it to protect my photo library on a huge external SSD formatted with APFS (encrypted, natch) because I need to mount it on a mac laptop for Lightroom.

vlovich123• 1 year ago

Not just durability. Performance too. Apple has a much better SSD controller that is vertically integrated into the stack.

pkaye• 1 year ago

Do Apple SSDs have a much longer longevity and reliability? I've not looked at the specific patents nor am I an expert on signal processing but I've worked on SSD controllers and NAND manufacturers in the past and they had their own similar ideas as this.

fckgw• 1 year ago

From my experience working on Mac laptops, yeah. SSD failures are incredibly rare but on the flip side when they do go out repairs are very costly.

I know if my previous job at a large hard drive manufacturer we had special Apple drives that ran different parts and firmware than the regular PC drives. Their specs and tolerances where much different than the PC market at a whole.

rasz• 1 year ago

Main reason was capturing 100% of storage upsell/upgrade money. They did same thing with RAM.

paxys• 1 year ago

So you pay $700 for an SSD that otherwise retails for $200 and then do an "unauthorized" modification of your own computer and void the warranty to install it, but that's still preferable because it otherwise costs $1200 directly from Apple. The Apple tax is really something else.

hoistbypetard• 1 year ago

an "unauthorized" modification of your own computer and void the warranty to install it

Citation needed. This modification doesn't look to me at all like it'd void the warranty unless you damage the machine while you do the installation.

If you need to make a warranty claim, you should of course reinstall the factory one before you do so, since the vendor doesn't expect users to replace that and won't have any practices of looking/removing so they can return it to you if you take your machine in for service with a non-Apple card there.

But voiding your warranty for this has been roundly rejected, in the US at least, as long as you don't damage your equipment by doing it.

geerlingguy4• 1 year ago

Apple even provides a support page with details on the process, for example: https://support.apple.com/en-us/121508

xyst• 1 year ago

The people behind the "kingsener" YT channel have been doing these types of upgrades for a long time.

He recently posted an upgrade of this same process as a short - https://m.youtube.com/shorts/b-Z5GhYhbjM

It’s wild to see how much Apple invests in making these as hostile to the user to upgrade. But also cool to see people out there with the skills to desolder the chips, memory, and storage and replace with a much faster alternative.

If Apple truly cared about their carbon footprint, devices would be easily serviceable and upgradeable by user

vachina• 1 year ago

Apple solves carbon footprint by making devices that you will want to use for at least 10 years.

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

Being relatively greener than a trash-tier dell laptop doesnt make you a green supplier in absolute terms...

jeroenhd3• 1 year ago

You mean the company that had several generations of those terrible laptop designs that made you rip out the whole chassis when your keyboard became unusable after dust got into the keys?

New in box after having been stored in a warehouse for twenty years maybe. Apple isn't any greener than any of their competitors.

celsoazevedo• 1 year ago

Shame that they don't support the device for 10 years too.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

nonsense, no developer wants to use a 9 year old computer, slower processor, slower lower graphics, paltry memory, and Apple also cuts you off from the latest OS long before that.

and even if what you say had a shred of truth, the carbon footprint would still further reduce if they were not user hostile to upgrades.

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

Tangential, just based on a funny coincidence noticeable in the article: What do all these M’s stand for, anyway? I guess the M.2 might be inherited from the m in mSATA and mPCIe(?).

For Apple… they had A for for their cellphone chips, which vaguely made sense because they were the only chips Apple made at the time. But then, M for their laptop chips? M as in… mobile, or mini? But they use it in their Macs Pro, including their workstation-y ones…

mdasen• 1 year ago

M as in Mac

bee_rider2• 1 year ago

Oh. I’m an M as in dummy, haha.

russelg• 1 year ago

This isn't particularly true anymore since some iPad models are also shipping with M processors.

gpm• 1 year ago

Honestly the external option seems a lot better value for the money for almost all use cases. Something like half the cost. No tinkering with the internals of the very expensive thing. You can move it between computers, upgrade the stick in it, etc.

I'm sure there are cases where you really do care about speeds >3GB/s (and USB-4, the port on the mac, should max out at ~5 which is still marginally lower than the internal one). But I doubt they are common. It's hard to process most data in a meaningful way that fast.

whartung2• 1 year ago

My only nit with that is that with external storage there’s definitely a race when it comes to mounting.

More than once I’ve had, say, Photos complain that it couldn’t find its library because I have apps relaunch on startup, my library has been moved to external storage, and the drive was not ready yet.

Also there’s no guarantee, at least naively, that what was /dev/disk4 on the last boot will be /dev/disk4 on this boot. Normally not necessarily an issue, but if you care about actual drive devices vs volume names, it can be an issue. (And there well be some low level config file wizardry to fix that issue, I just haven’t bothered to research it.)

touristtam• 1 year ago

on the boot stuff, can you not write the boot sequence (unsure of the exact terminology here) like you do on Linux? ie just get the hardware id of the device, and set which device that will correspond to (like /sd1 or whatever)?

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

Yep, you can pick up a 4TB usb-c SSD for a few hundred dollars/euros. Unless you are moving around 10s/100s of GB routinely, it's not going to be horribly slow. I had a 2TB Samsung taped to my imac for a few years when its fusion drive failed. The 64GB SSD still worked. So I used that for the OS. And the Samsung for the rest. I had Steam installed and X-plane and a few other things. Worked great. This was the 2015 5K imac. Eventually the motherboard died. I still have the SSD.

I've considered getting a mac mini with decently specced CPU/GPU and plenty of RAM and then just attaching a big SSD via thunderbolt. Probably a lot cheaper than maxing out the internal SSD and I don't think it will be that horrible. My main use case would be dealing with photos, maybe X-plane, and some videos. I might buy some games as well but it's not my core use case. It seems the Apple store is slowly filling up with a decent selection of ported games. I gladly pay the Apple tax to never deal with Windows again. I actually have a linux laptop running Steam. The hardware is just really crap and I keep longing for my macbook whenever I have to use it. Actually typing on this thing right now as I'm traveling and I left my work M4 Max mac book at home (it's a bit of a beast to lug around on vacation). The mini would probably be hooked up to a TV so I can watch stuff via Firefox and use a sane ad blocker and UI rather than dealing with whatever crap tastic shit comes with modern smart TVs.

So a reasonably beefy mac mini would basically be my entertainment center and double as a home PC with a ginormous 4K screen. I have considered getting some AMD equivalent with Arch Linux. Still on the fence about that. But either way, external USB-C for storage seems fine.

gigatexal• 1 year ago

Not worth the hassle and the faffing. Just pay Apple their tax. Your time is far more valuable. And if it’s not then you have bigger fish to fry.

hollerith3• 1 year ago

That is a sensible attitude, but some of us welcome an excuse to get out the box of tools and take something physical apart.

bigyabai5• 1 year ago

Apple won't upgrade the storage for you aftermarket, as far as I'm aware. There's no tax you can pay them to take your current machine and bump the spec.

Frankly, this is exactly the sort of head-up-ass attitude that will end with Apple being smacked around by investigatory commissions like what happened to John Deere and Microsoft.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 1 year ago

I'd rather start with replaceable batteries in smartphones.

radley3• 1 year ago

Apple won't upgrade the storage for you aftermarket

Not only that, they won't repair devices with third-party hardware. If my Mini has an issue, I'll have to remove the new SSD and reinstall the OEM one before I drop it off. I experienced this when tried to get my 2012 MacBook Pro fixed (wet keyboard).

They did the replacement, but I learned how to do it myself, including replacing the keyboard again, another SSD upgrade, and eventually a battery upgrade.

radley3• 1 year ago

Dunno... $500 for 30 minutes of fun work?

To be fair, I did this upgrade and actually ended up wasting several hours because the first SSD failed after a few weeks.

lotsofpulp• 1 year ago

Right...so $500 + the risk of having to spend hours to deal with problems rather than taking it to an Apple store and having them deal with it (assuming you live close enough to one).

Obviously, the tradeoffs are different for everyone.

Dylan168074• 1 year ago

Your time is far more valuable.

Damn I wis--

And if it’s not then you have bigger fish to fry.

You make it sound like anyone in tech that isn't making giant piles of money screwed up their career.

And if I take that literally, wouldn't I have to be making at least a thousand dollars an hour?

wjnc• 1 year ago

This should even hold for non-US salaries? This is a machine that enables you to work for about four years. What’s that 200k € in /median/ EU wages. Penny pinching. The thing is that consumer and prosumers vary and everybody wants to drive a Porsche to work And to leisure.

Not blaming anyone for wanting a machine like this. Trying to point out that tech has become so accessible that we all aspire to have a supercomputer as our daily driver.

When I was young a PC (xt and on) would set my dad back about a monthly wage. What I see is a huge compression of the price range. But the upper part of the range still exists (training LLM is not much different from the central computer at universities in the 70s/80s).

abytecod• 1 year ago

Or just avoid Apple products to save money and time

bravesoul2• 1 year ago

I better get the skillet out then.

Although yes I didn't buy a Mac because of this.

bigyabai5• 1 year ago

It's always a joy reading comments like his, having not touched a Mac in 6 years and saved myself weeks of troubleshooting in the process.

My time is more valuable. That's why I don't waste it researching Apple's arbitrary price-optimal solution so I can write and debug Linux software in a VM.

ProllyInfamous• 1 year ago

I made a 16TB external SSD RAID0 using four 4tb SATA drives and a Terramaster external enclosure... for less than $700 [1]

Not as fast as a single nVME in external Acadis enclosure... but it is fast.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/TERRAMASTER-D4-320-External-Drive-Enc... [sold out]

footlose_38152• 1 year ago

$1200 for 4TB upgrade is so ridiculous. Manufacturers holding RAM for ransom is very annoying. Esp when the lowest setting isn't even meant to be purchased, and the specs are so low they will underperform, or be obsolete in a few years.

This is kind of why people start cloning macs in the 90s. They were too expensive straight from the factory.

Casteil• 1 year ago

Esp when the lowest setting isn't even meant to be purchased

All current models ship with 16GB so this isn't really true anymore.. 16GB will be good for most folks for years and years (most folks aren't doing heavy virtualization or other highly ram-intensive use cases).

and the specs are so low they will underperform, or be obsolete in a few years.

...what?? People are still using OG M1 macs because they're still very capable machines. These things - especially the M4s - have crazy amounts of performance headroom.

footlose_38152• 1 year ago

Esp when the lowest setting isn't even meant to be purchased

Yes, I'm glad they finally went to 16/18GB for the new processors.

M3 non-pro processors were shipping with 8GB. That was less than a year ago.

People are still using OG M1 macs because they're still very capable machines.

If precedent holds up, they won't be for long. The 8GB M1s are already dead in enterprise. There's m1 8GB airs out there that are next on the obsolete block. Soon, some basic web browsing + the OS updates will throttle it to barely usable. (Still better life than a Chromebook, but low bar).

On an enterprise level, the 8GB M1s are no longer deployable for us. Add antivirus, a zoom call, slack, mail, calendar, and a few SaaS app tabs, and it's not usable.

Every yearly OS update there's closed-source overhead that's introduced to the users silently. After dealing with macs for 10+ years, it's the one of only things I can rely on.

Old macs work great until you give them updates, or run modern software on them. Or until a few years after they change chip designs.

As for trusting them to maintain the headroom a few years from now, I really doubt it. They will find a way to fill that headroom, they always do. My 16GB M1 pro practically dies trying to run Logic Pro now. All my shiny expensive intel macs of the 2019 series are now basically paperweights. They don't get extra years of good use like the M1 does. They're no longer deployed because they all started having performance issues right-on-schedule. i9, 32GB RAM goes for $400 on Ebay right now. Lower specced models going for ~$200. A huge loss in value and performance.

throwawayffffas• 1 year ago

It's still more expensive than a normal nvme, but not by too much.

It's double the price, double is too much.

gandalfian• 1 year ago

Mothers mac mini 2014? Slow as a dog, 30 second pauses, became unusable. Extremely tricky to reach the 5400rpm hard disc. Found a third party adaptor could bodge an nvme under the easily removable base flap. Suddenly transformed it to a fast nippy useable machine. (She paid up for the 8gb ram originally). But still rather annoyed that Apple essentially crippled their own product and it could only be fixed by chance. Wasn't a cheap pc...

moooo99• 1 year ago

I completely quit buying Apple devices all togehter, but I still occasionally check their website. The SSD upgrade prices are ridiculous and funny, especially since I keep meeting people that are convinced that Apples SSDs are somehow magically better than my 60 EUR Samsung M.2 and the price is hence justified.

The upgrade prices - 13" MacBook Air: 256GB to 512GB -> 256GB for 250 EUR

- 14" MacBook Pro: 512GB to 1TB -> 512GB for 250 EUR

So the Air upgrade is twice the price for what is - as far as I was able to figure out - the same hardware?

jeroenhd3• 1 year ago

Double check the SoCs. The base model MacBook Air has a slower GPU than the base model MacBook Pro and the upgraded MacBook Air. When shopping for Apple products, you need to compare every number on the spec page individually because Apple is scared of model numbers.

For a while, some MacBooks also had slower disks because some capacities used one NAND chip while others used two. I believe they stopped doing that for their latest models, though. That kind of fuckery means you need to look up benchmarks for each individual model, because the performance differences aren't clear from the product description.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 1 year ago

Non upgradeable storage and ram is ridiculous.

Interestingly, when M4 mac mini went on sale, version with 32GB RAM/1TB drive was priced exactly 2x as 16GB RAM / 512GB drive version. This kinda implies that Apple sells only RAM and storage, and gives away the rest for free.

FireBeyond2• 1 year ago

There is someone on YT (Doctor Feng, or similar, though I can't find) who literally will have people ship him entry level iPhones/iPads/MBPs, etc, and he'll upgrade them to 4 and 8 TB SSDs. And create ASMR videos of the process.

Even with upgradable memory:

When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD.

Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).

I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, which cost me $1,300. However, I kept the 1TB "system" SSD, which was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive's 5.5 GBps.

Similar to memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications). Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.

gorhill• 1 year ago

Doctor Feng, or similar, though I can't find

DirectorFeng: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbzzMQ1mNKjAaDwbELsVYcQ

dlcarrier• 1 year ago

It makes no sense for nonvolatile storage, where the power consumption, bandwidth limit, and latency of socketed interconnects are trivial, compared to the speed, latency, and power consumption of the drive itself.

For RAM, it's an entirely different ball game. The closer you can have it to the processor die, the higher the bandwidth, the lower the latency, and the lower the power consumption.

throwaway311312• 1 year ago

On the one hand, I get you. On the other, I’m just not sure we live in that world anymore for most people.

My daily driver is a base config 16” M1 MacBook Pro from 2021 and I have no inclinations to upgrade at all. Even the battery is still good.

I run CAD, compile and run large C++ projects. Do tons of heavy stuff in matlab. Various visualizations of simulations. My laptop just isn’t the slow thing anymore. I’m sure workloads exists that would push this machine but how many people are actually doing that. (Ok fine, chrome exists)

Even the smaller SSD isn’t an issue for me in practice because iCloud Drive and Box automatically move things I don’t often access off disk freeing local space.

Frankly if smaller memory footprints and smaller SSDs translates to lower base config prices and longer battery life it was the right choice, for me anyway.

radley3• 1 year ago

I bought one during their preorder period. The first SSD started to fail due to overheating. I just received and installed the replacement this week. Fingers crossed that it will be okay.

Important note: the seller provides no warranty for the SSDs. I was fortunate that they offered a 1-year warranty when I bought mine, but that is no longer the case now. $700 is a pretty big risk when there's no warranty.

FWIW, the non-Pro-compatible SSDs were overpriced initially as well, but they came down in price as they became more prevalent. Wait a few months, and we'll probably see the same with Pro-compatible SSDs.

userbinator• 1 year ago

I was provided the $699 M4 Pro 4TB SSD upgrade by M4-SSD. It's quite expensive (especially compared to normal 4TB NVMe SSDs, which range from $200-400)

Depends what type of flash that's comparing. QLC is cheap, TLC a bit more expensive, MLC nearly unobtainable, and SLC insanely expensive unless you SLC-mod a QLC drive.

blinded• 1 year ago

nicely done

justinator2• 1 year ago

Are there any suggestions on upgrading the storage of an M1 Macbook Pro? Even with the 1T version, I'm feeling the pinch.

Synaesthesia• 1 year ago

Unfortunately it doesn't have a socketed SSD but one which is soldered on, so while it can be done by a technician it's extremely technical.

justinator2• 1 year ago

rats, what I thought. Ahh, well.

SXX• 1 year ago

If you're okay to void warranty there are repair shops that will solder larger NANDs for you. It's not cheap though.

999900000999• 1 year ago

Weird product.

For the desktops you can always just plug in an external drive.

That said, SSDs eventually have to go bad.

This is probably more important as a RTR( right to repair ) issue.

dewey• 1 year ago

I did the same a few weeks ago (https://blog.notmyhostna.me/posts/ssd-upgrade-for-mac-mini-m...), usually I’m far into the “just pay for convenience” camp but this was so easy to do and the price difference was just too big.

Saving $500 for 30 min of actual work that’s also easily reversible if needed for a support case is too good to ignore.

zwilliamson• 1 year ago

Or just go with a Beelink SER8 and toss Arch Linux + Wayland on it. you’ll save thousands of dollars and have a better user interface that’s way more customizable and efficient.

Zenst• 1 year ago

Ones you can replace the storage with a screwdriver are a safe risk, the soldering upgrades are a void warranty and something you are always best getting somebody who can do it in their sleep to do for you. Soldering is not as easy as it used to be, even the pros will not have 100% success and need to reflow or rework.

nehal3m• 1 year ago

I'm not usually one to respond with snark, but I'm sorry, your comment reads like what I imagine a stroke feels like. Can you please rephrase?

Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price

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