[vanilla_nut]

TL;DR it looks like the M4 Mac Mini redesign is _not_ soldered onto the logic board. So instead of paying 6x street prices of similar SSDs, you can just upgrade it yourself with an SSD of your choice!

This is absolutely huge news. I wonder if Apple will do something similar for the Studio, Pro, or -- dare I hope? -- even the Macbook Pros in the future? I can't imagine allowing this 'trapdoor' of money savings is a huge problem for profits since most businesses would never bother messing around with warranties for a spec upgrade. But this is absolutely MASSIVE for consumers. Just put in a little extra work and you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars compared to Apple's upgrade pricing, for a good enough end result.

Not to mention the fact that this must also save _Apple itself_ an insane amount of money for repairs! Instead of throwing away the entire logic board, the CPU, the soldered-on RAM, and the soldered-on SSD whenever any of those components fail, you can just replace the malfunctioning part. Who'd have thunk (other than, y'know, every single computer company from 1980-2015)?

I would also of course love to see this upgradeability return to RAM. I'm curious if anyone more knowledgable than myself might know if the SoC/Apple Silicon Unified Memory system makes that more difficult, or if we've just accepted it because Apple Says So.

And while I'm on the subject of non-upgradeable RAM: does anyone know why no SBCs, from Raspberry Pi to Orange Pearl Jam Cake to Milk, allow for upgradeable RAM? Surely it's possible in the SBC form factor?

[tiffanyh]

Unless I'm mistaken, this appears to be a custom storage module, not available for sale.

So Apple gets the best of both worlds. They can keep charging their high storage costs, but they themselves gets the flexibility of easily upgrading storage due to having this as a module.

[spacedcowboy]

It’s probably for warranty repair. Means you can walk into an Apple Store with a faulty SSD and walk out 30 mins later with a fixed one.

[faefox]

The modules are proprietary to Apple because of course they are. So no, no easy upgrades unless and until someone clones the design and is able to produce them in enough quantity to be competitive on price - but even then it'll be more expensive than a commodity SSD of the same size.

[amne]

Looking at the price difference between m4 and m4 pro I think they're not that worried about users "upgrading" SSDs. Also, good luck finding SSDs that match the speeds you get with Apple provided ones .. at reasonable prices. If this were a laptop I would worry about power draw as well.

[Wytwwww]

You can still get an 1TB Optane drive for ~$200? In theory much faster and same price as 256GB from Apple.

[ffsm8]

As an apple hardware enjoyer: you're so high on copium.

Apple's was actually super late to the nvme storage party, and they're not even remotely at the top wrt maximum write/read bandwidth compared to pcie Gen 5 m.2 ssds you can buy for ~$200-300/TB.

So yeah, Apple's ssds cost at least 3x (and perform measurably worse). And I might add: gen 5 is already what, 1 1/2 yrs old now?

[wtallis]

> Apple's was actually super late to the nvme storage party

I'm not sure what you're talking about here, because Apple was one of the first PC OEMs to adopt PCIe storage, and very quickly followed that up with a transition to NVMe. This was circa 2015. They just didn't use the M.2 connector, and when they introduced the T2 chip they stopped using third-party SSDs in favor of their own built-in NVMe SSD controller.

Also, I don't think PCIe gen5 SSDs are being shipped in laptops yet (at least not in any significant volume), on account of the extra speed being completely not worth the power cost. Much like the transition from gen3 to gen4, availability of SSDs that are only suitable for desktops with large heatsinks comes long before availability of reasonably-efficient SSD controllers. Eg. Samsung's PM9E1 SSD for PC OEMs only started mass production a month ago: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-starts-mass-producti...

[ffsm8]

Nvme hardware started coming out in 2011. Yes, 4 yrs later Apple introduced it too. That's kinda "years later" of you didn't notice.

[wtallis]

You may be confusing when the NVMe specification was first released and when the first NVMe hardware was actually available. From what I can tell, the first NVMe SSD controller was announced in 2012 [0], the first real product using it was announced in 2013 [1], but that was all enterprise-focused and the first controller and drives suitable for use in consumer systems (rather than high-airflow servers) didn't show up until 2015 [2], which is when Apple started using it.

[0] from IDT, later sold to PMC-Sierra, then Microsemi, now Microchip's Flashtec product line

[1] Samsung XS1715 was at least the first to pass compliance testing at UNH-IOL

[2] Intel rebranded their enterprise NVMe drives as the Intel SSD 750 marketed for PC enthusiasts, but the real beginning of consumer NVMe was Samsung's SM951 when they started transitioning away from PCIe AHCI (used for compatibility with systems lacking NVMe-aware drivers and firmware).