Not sure about Fusion Drive but you do raise a good point about heat. Still though, all they’ve changed is the connector, the heat problem still exists.
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Affordable Third-Party Mac Studio Storage Upgrades Coming in 2025
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Not sure about Fusion Drive but you do raise a good point about heat. Still though, all they’ve changed is the connector, the heat problem still exists.
You had no choice before.
In fond times gone by I would always buy the base (or beefed up CPU) iBooks/MacBooks/iMacs and upgrade ram and storage right away which would generally equate to around $1000 saving and give me better performance than Apple could provide even with a BTO model.
But If I'm buying a Studio today and can now afford to quadruple my memory or upgrade the CPU to Ultra for that $1000 saving that a third party SSD provides. Damn right I'll go with the third party SSD.
Thunderbolt 3/4 drives are less than half the speed of the internal drives.
Thunderbolt 5 external drives come much closer to native internal drive speeds.
Also:
- Not available until January.
- Uses one of the Thunderbolt ports.
- Clutter
Sure if your share portfolio is doing well and the boss comes through with the overtime.
Currently... but there's nothing stopping someone building a TB5 DAS that runs at almost 10 GBps, *faster* than any current internal Mac hard drive.
I chuckled. Over a grand for a literal hack that you don’t know if it will work after the next OS X update.
There are people who hate Apple because it is incredibly wealthy and/or because their products are expensive and those people have trouble affording them.
It's just class warfare by another name. It's why you see these silly memes talking about "Timmy just wants to make his shareholders happy," thus making him look like a child pleasing his corporate paymasters.
It's not really the way things work, but some people are so filled with hate and self-righteousness against "them" (people with more than them), they'll spew anything.
Apple is really easy to understand--their products are expensive but not overpriced and in the right machine, the base prices are ACKCHYUALLY a solid value.
But Apple does not play in the low end margin spaces and unfortunately, that's where many users are, financially speaking.
No, you cannot have phenomenal battery life, phenomenal build quality, power, little heat AND a 1/2 terabyte of storage for $999.00 new, because Apple doesn't compromise on anything.
They have to cut something to make margins and they are not willing to give you crappier speakers and a lesser screen in exchange for your 512 GB of ssd.
Windows OEM's sure will, and are a worse experience because of it.
Apple has always been a luxury good competitively priced with similarly built machines--the only difference is Apple is not willing to be competitive in the low end of the market.
Jobs said this many, many times, so for people to hate on Cook for doing the same thing Apple did under beloved Steve Jobs is sort of funny. See,
Personally, I think the products are soulless under Tim Cook, but I do not see him as some greedy mannequin being jerked around by shareholders and investors (and someone cynical, like me, would tell you Apple's "environmental" initiatives are used to blunt some of the criticisms noted above--"100% carbon neutral?" Really? Not possible, unless you think "carbon offsets" and "credits" are real things--Apple's environmental initiatives are about saving money on packaging and transport and reuse of old parts).
1. They haven't.
2. It'd be big and still external (To house multiple SSD's).
3. It'd probably be even more expensive than this elegant internal solution as an extremely niche product.
Secondly these upgrades are for pre-Thunderbolt 5 machines anyhow (for now).
There's nothing special about the boards, their components or NAND on the Apple version. No reason to think that these would ever stop working regardless of updates.
Currently the only Intel TB5 controller for external peripherals, the JHL9480, has been tested in the 1st batch NVMe enclosures. The sequential speed limit seems to be 7000MB/s or so on both Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850X. This is close but still slightly under the usual speed these SSDs get when put onto a gen4 PCIe PC logic board. So in may be in 1 year or 2 this will still be the bottle neck for a single TB5 bus.
One may say you can use more than one TB5 bus and then do software RAID to break through that bottle neck. At this point you may as well get a Mac Pro with PCIe storage cards for this purpose, to reduce points of failure and regulate power better, but this is a few times more expensive than a typical Mac Studio setup.
So yes, this 3rd party internal SSD upgrade is a pretty viable option for very some specific cases.
That is clearly the most important question that needs to be confirmed.
The last ATP podcast suggested that these NANDs are proprietary for Apple, with some Apple IP logic in the NAND dies themselves.
IF that is the case, there is almost zero chance of 3rd party upgrades will ever be elegant, but are rather be a legally grey hack that can't be scaled enough to matter.
The future external solutions, even if they max out at around 7000 MBps, still seems the more elegant and scalable desktop solutions.
Laptops will always be more complicated, of course.
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I’m not an expert so I don’t know, but aren’t these components tied to a particular id, serial number, or registration/activation of some sort? Kind of how apple can tell whether you installed a genuine display or not. Can’t Apple just push an update that disables all components that are not genuine?
I don't believe we have any evidence of cryptographic parts pairing for Mac storage, though certainly Apple *could* do something like that if they wanted to.
What if you don't need 2 TB of internal storage at first, but a year down the line you do? I ran into this exact issue with my MacBook. I then picked up a Lenovo laptop with upgradable storage so I would never have to deal with this again.
So far as I can tell from watching alot of video on the matter since some people started soldering blank NANDs - no.
Could future Macs have serialized storage? I guess so - but don't think there would be a way to brick any Macs that are already out there sold without this "feature".
And with Apple's promise of not limiting the performance of third party parts, I can't see this being a problem in the future unless they introduce some kind of unnecessary pairing chip on the modules which the right-to-repair folk would go nuts over.
Well if Apple want to they could encode the amount on RAM and SSD size into the serial number and then limit the system from recognizing more than that value. That way they could still be in technical compliance with right-to-repair and 3rd parts but still thwart user upgrades. That way the SSD can be replaced but it could NOT be upgraded to a larger capacity.
Sneaky and evil but feasible.
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The NANDs are usually Samsung or SanDisk chips, there is nothing literally proprietary on the chips. What's keeping 3rd party solution like this news is the contrived implementation that Apple chose for the desktop Macs daughter board approach.
That is why the ATP discussion was surprising.
Time will tell if the ATP source are right that the chips have Apple IP in them.
I know! Remember the PowerBook G3? You could simply lift the keyboard and easily upgrade memory, replace the HD or install an Airport card.
Everything was user-replaceable in days gone by. I had a Bronze PB G3 upgraded with a Sonnet G4 CPU upgrade card and dual hot swap batteries. If I remember right you didn't even need a screwdriver to get to the CPU.
Many trade-offs for:
- weight,
- thickness,
- robustness,
- thermal environment,
- almost none of those darn fragile moving parts.
Personally I don't have a problem with parts soldered if it makes things smaller, lighter and faster (like unified memory). Soldered SSD's and RAM outside of ultra thin notebooks though was a dick move when there was no space constraints and no performance increase.
Re storage: I agree, the tradeoffs are really not worth it.
Re memory: I think Apple's high-end SoC GPU memory bandwidth needs might defend the choice for on-package memory.
PolySoft is the worst. I placed my order with them for a SSD upgrade back in April 2025. I still do not have the SSD kit and the owner, Gilles, just keeps pushing me off. First he said they had some batch problem, and it would ship August 1st..Now 15+ emails later, he won't even respond and has $1500+ of my money. I would recommend no one do business with him. On top of that, there's some "batch issue" where drives are failing early and he's having problems. I wouldn't pay this kind of money to someone based out of France like this. Buyer Beware.
Oh man, that's too bad. Thanks for the warning. But why does being based out of France have anything to do with it?
