In many places this shouldn’t have any effect on your warranty. Should fall under right to repair and similar ordinances in many places. Though tech support might try to claim that. Obviously this may not be true all over the world.
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Affordable Third-Party Mac Studio Storage Upgrades Coming in 2025
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Absolutely, but the fact Apple will be one of their first customers is interesting.
I wonder if there’s a right to repair style argument to be had here too. As in potential legal defense could be that they’re providing an option for a part replacement rather than infringing any Apple IP. If as you say the board design is different enough then unless Apple tries to prove it can cause damage there’s nothing too much to argue against it.
There’s nothing uniquely Apple component wise on the original boards. They use the same generic voltage regulators found in some of the MacBooks which saw burnouts due to too much voltage demanded for more nands than they could handle. Apple quietly resolved this as they reduced the nand count on the MacBook logic boards.
I know of at least one other manufacturer designing Mac Mini boards like these which has shied away from that well known voltage regulator for the above reason, an improvement could be argued over the original design.
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
HobeSoundDarryl
macrumors G5
It's oh so very profitable to be the lone, "company store" in anything. Shareholders need to feed their families. 💰💰💰
"Another record quarter..." doesn't come from selling things at competitive rates... even though there could be some argument of going for volume of sales over few sales at very high margin-per-sale. But customers keep right on paying up anyway... and Apple gets tremendously rewarded for buyers rationalizing anything they want to charge.
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Interesting.
Apple's insane storage prices are creating new business opportunities for other companies.
Apple's insane storage prices are creating new business opportunities for other companies.
Easy to remove heatsink so can be used in PC motherboards or SSD external enclosures.
Used to be their philosophy until Tim Apple took over. I still remember when the 2008 MBP was released, they harped on the user upgradeable memory and hard drive. Heck, even the battery was easily replaced.
I wished Big A would message the reason why their SSDs cost more is that they are making custom chips and using fasted technology. TBR, I'd rather pay less for slightly slower uncustomed SSDs. I get Apple SSDs are "supposed" to be better, but I've never seen anyone prove or disprove whether Apple's custom SSDs designs are better than standard or not or whether it's just a gimmick to over charge.
Good point. I have restored my system off Time Machine using this external media drive setup, but it's not hard at all to point the Music or TV or Photos to the location of its library once you've done the migration.
I can't remember how I did it in Migration Assistant, but I might have just skipped those apps completely and done it manually after everything else was done. Actually have a new iMac M4 on its way to me next week, so I'll get a chance to refresh my memory
Chiming in. When I “defend Apple”, it has nothing to do with Apple specifically. I could fill in the blank with any company, or group or person for that matter. What I defend is a company’s freedom to create and use any business model they wish, so long as it is not deceptive, illegal, or forces harm. None of these being the case for Apple’s upgrade pricing.
I also defend people’s freedom to complain about anything and everything, so long as they don’t make false or inaccurate assertions in the process. But unfortunately in this forum, people make every assertion conceivable whether true or false, forthright or incomplete, in their quest to prove that their opinion is objective fact.
Maybe a little exaggeration...
If you want the almost exhaustive list (I'm sure I'm leaving things out):
I have three monitors hooked to a computer and a dock so that's 9 cables for monitors (power, plus 2x video cables). I have an external webcam (2 cables so I can switch between computers as needed) and a usb powered light for video conferencing (another cable). I also have a USB microphone for higher quality recording when needed. I have a cable available to charge my keyboard and to use as the connection for my desktop Windows computer (bluetooth and wifi/dongle connections are not reliable to my computer even with upgraded components -- but bluetooth to my Macs works perfectly). Headphones (cabled), wired speakers and subwoofer, headphone amp with DAC and amp for my speakers -- a total of about 9 cables (including speaker wire). Add in the UPS, a wifi extender, a 2.5 gbps ethernet router, and my fiber optic router, plus some charging cables, and a PiHole device and it's a bit of an organized chaos. Most cables are organized, but there are a lot and I can't keep everything completely organized because I need some things portable (mic, webcam, light, etc).
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I was jesting,
Ok. Not simple, but not that complicated in grand scheme of things, and plenty of scope to simplify I would say. All the best.
Incorrect. The $550 8 TB drive was for the bare drive. The one with a heatsink was $600 and still usable on most PCs.
Edit: the PlayStation 5 uses a non proprietary nvme m.2 connector. Any PCIe 4.0 drive will work on PS5 and any drive meant for PS5 will work on a PC that supports PCIe 4.0.
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Just be sure you're backing it all up. I limit my local storage to just the essentials (1TB) so it is much easier to backup my device to my NAS where it gets backed up again for 3-2-1.
Glad MR is covering PolySoft’s project, finally! I look forward to cheaper internal storage upgrades in my next desktop Mac.
That's not a lot of profit margin for a custom SSD. I would imagine that price is wholesale, $300 is more likely.
Great advice and essential practise!
Everything is backed up to multiple external drives that are rotated offsite and locked in security safes. Also
Multiple different cloud providers. Moat critical work is cloned to a hot standby machine incase of system failure. Albeit yhe backup device is older model with less storage. But has all the must have survive a few days waiting on replacement. So almost zero downtime in event of any loss or failure. These tings are tools and the data are our currency so anything less is not an option.
Ok I get it. You can continue to pay a hefty premium for storage upgrades directly from Apple for peace of mind. Meanwhile other more tech savvies would get the opportunity to hop on to this offer and upgrade their internal storage for a more reasonable price without losing performance and whatnot.
If Apple wants to shut it down, we will know very very soon. They don’t need any customer to protect themselves for them, ever.
That’s a lot of management for your data. It would be a dream setup for everyone but reality is murkier, as it always is, unless maybe if someone’s entire digital footprint can be consolidated into just a 2TB or so hard drives, including photos, video, documents etc etc.
No. Maybe it is for you, but some of us don't want a whole spiderweb of more drives, cables of various lengths and power bricks cluttering up our desktops. Some of us don't have the space for it, some find it hugely distracting and inefficient. Some just prefer a computer to be a clean contained thing like they saw in Apples advertisement. Some users transport their studio to their office & back everyday so it doesn't get stolen, some need to move it from office to boardroom, presentation area, or art installation of the week, and having it all contained without needing a pile of external drives is a real advantage. And not everyone is ready on day 1 to spend the maximum for max storage from apple, or to pay double the going rate per TB for storage by adding a superfast superexpensive thunderbolt connection to the price tag. And not everyone has the same needs when they buy the machine as they do 6 months or 9 months later, and resent there not being options for upgrades. And some people don't like paying all that maximum for storage that wears with a finite lifespan that you can't replace with anything but what you bought the machine with on day 1 because isn't it fun to make people lose 20% of the value on a multi-thousand dollar purchase selling it and then make another multi-thousand dollar purchase of the same machine with a bigger ssd, instead of just buying the bigger ssd and plugging it in.
That's why. All of that is why.
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