I give OWC about two months before they start offering Studio SSD replacements.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Mac Studio Teardown Indicates That SSD Storage May Be Upgradeable
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Cui bono? What is there to gain from having the SSD modules be chained to the machine?
The content of them is already encrypted by the secure element and/or T2 chip, so that you can't remove them from the machine and read them elsewhere, but that doesn't mean that they have to be proprietary.
Apple Silicon Macs to date have not had any removable storage possibly because the industrial design has dictated that they be very flat (with the possible exception of the mac mini).
My own personal opinion is that someone inside Apple got religion about the fact that SSDs are a wear item and eventually need to be replaced. Not making them modular means a lot more ewaste down the road. That, and by making the storage modular, the number one variable in customer ordering no longer requires different motherboard SKUs.
That should be the end of the story. If Apple users were SMART, they wouldn’t buy them and Apple would reverse course and stop making products that weren’t upgradable/serviceable… but thanks to iPhone, the CORE USERBASE has shifted from creative professionals who want power and flexibility, to soccer moms and teenagers taking 50,000 photos
In my 2012 MBA the space is about as tight and you can (albeit just barely) fit an adapter and a full length card
Different issue. SSDs do have a limited TBW lifetime. I was asking why a soldered SSD would be less reliable.
There is a lot of such storage. External NAS units, Thunderbolt raid devices. I'm seeing ~4 Gbs read/write rates to NAS, ~6 Tbs to thunderbolt RAID.
If they do nothing in the interests of their customers then the customers won't buy. If you read the books about early Apple it was never about the money.
I really do wonder why anyone who isn't an Apple shareholder or employee is an apologist when it comes to soldering storage and RAM. I love Apple products and the ecosystem, but I resent this strongly. The Mac Studio is a small step in the right direction, not only having a socketed SSD, but a spare socket to boot. The pity is that it is hard to get to, and proprietary, so you can't just pop in extra memory yourself.
Last edited:
This bodes the questions:
Since soldered SSD on motherboard is faster, should getting the right amount needed for the foreseeable future be done, causing lock in? Apple has proven on multiple platforms it’s always faster for read/write speeds the external or expandable internal storage had been for years now.
Instead of petitioning or lobbying Apple not to have soldered chips, should storage suppliers never a) lock into contracts of ONLy suppolying proprietary connectors for replaceable storage and, b) never to ONLY supply to Apple but also direct to the customer.
Both are beneficial to Apple (a) for costs (initial and warehouse storage space in various regions, along with more uniformity with now 2 desktop systems and to the end user (b) for availability & cheaper.
“But we've all been using computers before and have experienced how our storage needs grow over time. Can people seriously not anticipate their needs a mere 3-4 years into the future? Is there really THAT much uncertainty?”
I’d say this was MORE so in the past. Now with home raids being THE best expandable storage solutions as well as cloud storage services, depending on your needs, physical storage expandable, speeds/reliability and business security restrictions/needs of public va private ownerships.
I can tel you unfortunately you’ve paid way too much. That said as I mentioned above speeds on board is best.
The real consideration is long term reliability. Anyone else notice AC+ is reduced to 12mths on the Mac Studio?!
Re-visiting this, with SSD swap and TBW ratings getting more internal storage may be best.
That’s form facter size and chip connection, I highly doubt it is 2230 though.
Maybe if you’re in defence sector. But second tier stuff, ie finance, we run in amazon and pass all the relevant compliance audits. Just dealing with SOC 2 at the moment…
The answer is both.
Cloud storage gives you protection against your backup failure. Backup gives you protection against cloud failure.
Regarding SSD reliability and TBW I don’t keep my computers past when AppleCare runs out. I’ve never got anywhere near 10% of TBW on standalone disks even running a full stack development environment on a workstation for 5 years historically. I choose what I need up front x2 to sink any future load.
If I get a problem, I’m never running a computer which is out of any warranty cycle. What is more important to note is that there’s only one vendor at play here. If you build a custom PC and it something goes wrong 2 years down the line, have fun trying to work out what is broken and which vendor RMA policy you’re going to have to argue with. The same happens if you stick a third party SSD in a Mac. I rather like walking into an apple store and just getting the whole thing swapped out with a stock config myself.
What I have found though is that the limiting factor of the computer is never the storage these days. It’s always the battery, the charger cable, the software and whatever the gorilla owning it manages to do to it.
If I get a problem, I’m never running a computer which is out of any warranty cycle. What is more important to note is that there’s only one vendor at play here. If you build a custom PC and it something goes wrong 2 years down the line, have fun trying to work out what is broken and which vendor RMA policy you’re going to have to argue with. The same happens if you stick a third party SSD in a Mac. I rather like walking into an apple store and just getting the whole thing swapped out with a stock config myself.
What I have found though is that the limiting factor of the computer is never the storage these days. It’s always the battery, the charger cable, the software and whatever the gorilla owning it manages to do to it.
That’s probably just insane people. I dealt with them regularly when I was a solution architect years ago.
We had a know it all engineering team in the defence sector who refused to use the asset management system over their paper system because the building and therefore paper had physical security. I walked onto the factory floor as I had clearance and stole two index cards from a filing box on the table and walked out. This caused a company wide panic because the equipment associated could no longer be located. They started using their “internal cloud” system the following Monday.
On both the iMac Pro and the Mac Pro, those socketed SSDs already were controller-less and do not involve NVMe in any way.
If the m.2 only consists of NAND flash and nothing else as the T2 SoC is the one acting as NVMe controller I don't really understand the immense bump in price when you go past 1TB storage on the Mac Studio or Apple systems in general? Sounds like a really great and cost-effective way for Apple to go about things. Still their pricing is some of the most expensive in the business. I suppose one of the issues is NAND flash production, as these boards are so small they need each NAND cell to contain additional capacity instead of Apple simply tossing additional NAND cells on the board? Then again, why limit to this small size and not allow for something bigger so they could offer 4TB and 8TB without doubling and quadrupling the amount of capacity per NAND cell. i would normally but much cheaper to opt for having 4x 1TB NAND cells instead of going for 2x 2TB NAND cells. Obviously if you start running out of space you can't just toss additional lower capacity NAND cells at the problem to increase the total amount of capacity, but to me it looks like Apple is pretty much causing this limitation themselves? At least for the Mac Studio there should be ample opportunity to make sure they have enough space for a much longer board giving them the opportunity to at least double the amount of NAND cells per board. It might be a result of limited space within other products like the MacBook Air/Pro and Apple wanting to optimise production by reusing the same boards across all the Mac's.
Maybe you don't have the budget for your desired storage level at time of purchase, and would like to add drives over time as your budget allows.
Without removable drives, if you have an SSD failure your whole computer can be tossed in the trash. When my MBP's drive fails it will take an expensive repair to replace the soldered SSD, expensive enough to where replacing my computer with a new one might make sense despite the cost being high, as opposed to just dropping in a new SSD.
Maybe you bought one memory level, but over time your clients and work changes to where having more RAM is useful.
Due to the M1 design soldered RAM I get, but the Mac Studio has proven that SSDs do not need to be soldered or integrated into the board to achieve greater performance.
If Apple's RAM and SSDs prices weren't exorbitant it wouldn't be as much of a big deal.
Last edited:
This new Mac Studio is a very poor design internally from a maintenance standpoint, because of that totally exposed power supply. You could literally be risking death if you don’t properly and carefully remove, or dissipate any stored electricity in it and remove it before trying to plug anything into that NVME socket. I’ve seen some idiots suggest to not remove the power supply or do anything with it, the one with all those high powered capacitors nestling right above the socket waiting for your hands to touch them. I’ve heard Apple engineers have special shields they clip onto the exposed power supplies first.
Plus to get to the fans and heat sink to clean them out you have to disassemble the entire computer, including taking every port out.
Plus to get to the fans and heat sink to clean them out you have to disassemble the entire computer, including taking every port out.
Yeah, pay Apple's ridiculous upgrade prices for memory and storage now, or wait for more reasonable after-market prices. ?♂️
I’ll take more bandwidth and a faster connection between cpu and memory any day above the ability to replace and upgrade parts myself.
As someone else pointed out, if you think you might need more in the future, buy it upfront, it will also increase the value if you sell it down the road.
If you really need more storage, get an external ssd, move 70% of not immediately used stuff on that, and leave your internal space for current tasks. I’ll never store all my projects in my computer to just be there, idly wasting space and slowing things down.
Still miss modularity ?, build your own computer bro.
Yes there is that. But those fans are going to need to be cleaned somehow Otherwise performance could suffer.
Pro's using Macs with only one internal SSD are most certainly going to use external storage for scratch disks for video/photo editing, sample libraries, DAW session audio, etc. An internal disk should only be used for macOS, apps and light documents. You don't want to create bottlenecks, or potentially corrupt your OS. Using an internal drive for any frequent editing is going to put unneeded stress on that drive.
Honestly, this feels like "chip shortages hitting Apple so they had to make it cheaper for them to repair" more than a user friendly move. Still better than nothing.
Anyhow, anyone with the budget for such a machine should also have a NAS to store their files, with backups. In fact, almost everybody should... but nobody listens, then they call me crying they lost their stuff when their laptop/phone broke or got stolen.
Anyhow, anyone with the budget for such a machine should also have a NAS to store their files, with backups. In fact, almost everybody should... but nobody listens, then they call me crying they lost their stuff when their laptop/phone broke or got stolen.
I've looked at ifixit's guide and there looks to be a little more headroom. You can fit an adapter and medium sized card easily. You just don't have that option with the Studio as the card is short already.
