Yes pretty much as it's not for "Security Reasons" as many NVME M.2 drives such as Samsung/Hynix already offer built in hardware encryption. It's straight up pure profit at this point. Apple is making tons more profit off an upgraded M4 mini with 32gb/512gb that's literally twice the price of a base mini vs buying 2 base mini's.
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Affordable Third-Party Mac Studio Storage Upgrades Coming in 2025
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Internal storate is 7000MBps.
External Thinderbolt Drives reach 2500MBps at max.
Thunderbolt 5, however, will make external drives reach similar speed.
Technically thunderbolt 4 could do 4000MBps, however I have never seen a combo nvme + external drive, reaching similar speeds
You are fully right - with thunderbolt5 however the performance argument will be less true
Even at 50% discount, they're making a killing on margins. Really drives home how ridiculous Apple's prices are …
Although, to be fair, they have to recoup a lot of initial investment here using a very small customer base. I wish them success, which will drive prices down and add competition. I'd be tempted to buy it just to spite Apple's price policy (but I'm not getting a desktop).
To be fair, most people who do jobs that require any kind of equipment, have a similar setup.
I work with animation and I have 2 displays and a million cables/devices I need.
The hyper-minimal setups you see in apple adversiting are very rare.
I have never seen a video editor with only a computer, display, mouse and keyboard on their desk.
Even TB5 is already limiting the latest NVME PCIe 4.0 drives like 990/SN850x burst performance, let alone upcoming PCIe 5.0 drives.
Apple had to increase the base memory from 8GB to 16GB to properly run their AI on Macs. They were not being generous in a benevolent manner to their customers. At Apple's purchase volume, the change in chip size cost was probably way under $20.
I believe it is better to have too much ram versus not enough for the life of the product.
As a commercial rated pilot with my own pressurized Cessna Skymaster, I always filled the fuel tanks because things can suddenly change and there are no refill points in the sky for small aircraft.
On a trip, I do not need to carry external drives as there is plenty of memory space on board. Plus, I can afford the cost.
I believe it is better to have too much ram versus not enough for the life of the product.
As a commercial rated pilot with my own pressurized Cessna Skymaster, I always filled the fuel tanks because things can suddenly change and there are no refill points in the sky for small aircraft.
On a trip, I do not need to carry external drives as there is plenty of memory space on board. Plus, I can afford the cost.
You haven’t met my dad. He not paying anyone. I’ll have to do it. 😂
You can move your entire home folder to an external drive
How to move the Home Directory in macOS Ventura
In macOS Ventura you can move your user's Home directory to a larger or faster external drive. Here's how.
with the Mini it seems you can break some plastic while you access the "core" - but they will for sure provide some tools for that
My thoughts as well. Plus the need to do a complete system reset using Apple's Configurator software to re-encrypt the drive makes this a solution only suitable for the most geeky amongst us.
I configured my Mac Studio with 1Tb of storage and got a 4Tb SSD on Thunderbolt for my data. I expect that the latter will need to grow in the lifetime of my machine, but upgrading external storage is a lot smoother than changing the system disk, especially given the above mentioned complications.
The main issue is that affordable SSDs seem to be stuck to 4Tb for quite some time.
It is super easy to do it:
Create a symlink (UNIX feature). It treats the pointed-to location as if it was in the exact spot where the symlink resides. I use this feature to store my iDevice backups to an external HDD.
How to Create and Use Symbolic Links (Symlinks) on a Mac
Use symbolic links to store application files elsewhere without breaking the app that depends on them.
www.howtogeek.com
It buggers messages though. All my texts come in with numbers and emails only. Haven’t found a way around itYou can move your entire home folder to an external drive
How to move the Home Directory in macOS Ventura
In macOS Ventura you can move your user's Home directory to a larger or faster external drive. Here's how.appleinsider.com
It is, but for most users, this change is too sophisticated. The average user barely knows how to clean the Mac Studio, let alone open it up and replace storage. Hence, people will try, they will fail, and then they will bitch and moan that Apple made it too complicated.
Those of us who can do this and have probably done similar things in the past may do so, but we tend to stay on top of technology and will already have moved on...
You can...
Move your Photos library to save space on your Mac - Apple Support (CA)
To save storage space on your Mac, you can move your Photos library to a different storage device.
Professional Requirements
- Need a laptop to be mobile.
- Don’t want a workstation and a laptop as overhead to maintain and clunky with workflow
- Having multiple TBs of sound libraries, recording, daw projects and plug ins in multiple plugin format: VST, Au, AAX etc. currently running at > 6Tb
- Don’t want to tether multiple external drives as it is inelegant, clunky and eats Tb ports that are needed for other things like interfaces, controllers etc.
- Apple only offer 1, 2, 4 and 8 TB configs.
So what else would satisfy those requirements?
I get it that this article is about the Mac Studio, but the assertion that 8tb of internal storage is ‘doing it wrong’ is not correct.
If you can afford it, justify the cost and have an use case then what’s the big deal? Why would you not?
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macOS still handles external drives very poorly so this is great.
Also isn't the SSD considered user replaceable according to the Apple repair documents? Thought I read that somewhere