[JohnTHaller]

RAM and storage are both incredibly painful.

$200 to add 8GB RAM to the base 8GB (16GB total).

$400 to add 16GB RAM to the base (24GB total).

$200 to add 256GB storage to the base 256GB (512GB total).

$400 to add 768GB storage to the base 256GB (1TB total).

$800 to add 1768GB storage to the base 256GB (2TB total).

For comparison, a faster 2TB nvme PCIE4 SSD is a bit over $100.

[sp332]

Right, but you can add storage without soldering.

[jen729w]

You can, but as someone who is currently juggling external SSDs to try to get a video project finished, I can tell you that you don’t want to.

Hence me yesterday looking at the 4TB upgrade price on the M3 MBP. Hoooooooly cow. I mean I’ll almost certainly get it on my next upgrade, but wow.

[zarzavat]

Why? Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data. Watching Louis Rossmann’s repair videos disillusioned me from ever wanting to upgrade internal storage beyond 1TB.

Externals are cheap, fast, and safe. It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap), but I’m not sure I would pay the Apple tax just for that.

[jen729w]

> Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data.

You have backups though, so who cares? Your motherboard died, you need a new computer anyway. Do a restore. And it’s not like external drives can’t fail; they’re just tiny computers.

> It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap)

Hard disagree, friend. Example: my editing software has a ‘cache’ folder. If I set it on the external drive and that drive isn’t mounted for whatever reason, the software defaults back to ~/Movies. The first you know of this is the system notifying you that you have 20MB of hard drive space left.

There’s no substitute for an always-there-no-matter-what internal drive.

[precommunicator]

Nothing beats the convenience of unplugging a drive and plugging it to a next computer and it just works, within seconds you have everything ready for work.

[bpye]

Is there a good file system for this? For macOS I’d want APFS, for Linux ext4, Windows NTFS (maybe ReFS?). You can typically get read only access between them, and I know Linux can do RW with NTFS - but I’m not aware of a good option.

[jen729w]

Well, kinda! But not really.

I'm living this right now. I just switched laptops with my partner as she's doing a bunch of video editing. So she got my Pro and I'm using her Air. (I know, I'm an amazing boyfriend.)

So yeah, great, I have all my files. But none of my apps! And I'm not signed in to any of my websites. And even if the apps I use were on this laptop I'm not licensed for them. Oh and I have to get my password manager before I can do any of this. And configure my email.

Conservatively, it takes a couple of hours to restore minimal state. I know, I just did it!

In that time I could have connected an Ethernet cable and copied all of my data between the two internal SSDs. :-)

Edit: oh yeah, and I just command-strip-attached the SanDisk SSD to the back of this laptop's monitor. Because otherwise when I go and work somewhere else I'm trailing this umbilical around with me. This setup is absurd and I hate it!

Edit2: oh yeah again, now this external drive is constantly occupying fully 50% of my USB ports. Terrific.

[JohnTHaller]

Via USB/Thunderbolt or SD card you can. But you can't upgrade or replace your SSD in an Apple Silicon MacBook.

[VHRanger]

You can't add nvme that get the nvme level of performance.

Especially not at the level we'd be used to in any other serious isecase (eg. Split PCIe lanes into x4 and have a bunch of fast storage)