New Mac Mini's Storage Can Be Upgraded, But It's Not Easy

[gadgetfreak98]

I update my first post in this thread to reflect this, but here is what was just discovered about a major limitation by Apple if you Boot off an external drive as your Startup Drive on your Mac:

WARNING I was not aware of previously: If you boot off an external Startup Drive with your Mac, due to Apple's New Security, you can NOT run Apple Intelligence, and likely Apple Pay, and other security related things from your external Thunderbolt or SSD drive. See this video from a guy who just discovered this limitation:

Hmmm, that's disappointing to hear. So now back to my question: what if you keep the OS on the internal SSD and then put the home drive on the external SSD, done this way:

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

Will that retain the full functionality, while allowing the offloading of the major data hogging info to the external drive?

 

[tenthousandthings]

At the very end of the video, he mentions how much he paid for the NAND. It's 90 USD for the chips to do the 1TB upgrade and 160 USD for 2 TB. Would be interesting to know how much a professional repair shop would have to charge for the work to replace the storage chips.

Nobody is going to do this procedure to upgrade to 512GB. The 2TB option on the other hand is an interesting business case, considering the prices Apple charges. It could be a nice opportunity for professional electronics repair shops.

I don’t think the pricing for it has much to do with what Apple charges. Those are two different things, one is point-of-purchase, the other is not. The question isn’t “can you do it for less than Apple would have when your customer bought their Mac,” it’s more about the value of internal versus external storage. Your potential customers are weighing their options in relation to external storage. You can see that calculus taking place right here in this thread, as people discuss the pros and cons of internal versus various types of external storage. Thunderbolt 5 in the M4 Pro factors into that equation as well, not to mention 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

Let’s say you decide you can do the 2TB install for US $300, a very thin margin. $400 is probably more like it. Regardless, a large portion of your base of potential customers are people with 512GB storage, including all M4 Pro users. Can you really compete with a good 5TB Thunderbolt drive for less than $200? Or a 2TB USB-C drive for $100?

 

[weckart]

Well to be fair I think one could argue this as an AAPL shareholder looking for maximum margins and earnings... and until their spreadsheet shows massive numbers of customers not upgrading and choosing additional external storage they probably won't change.

This has been the story for a long time and, in a roundabout way, is my point. Apple's sole relationship with the customers is to extract maximum revenue from them by any means possible. It has long ceased to be a technology company with a vision. I just don't get the fanboys who aren't shareholders any more.

 

[npmacuser5]

Heck, you might even be able to do 4TB which would save you well over a grand.

A business that cannot afford the Apple Delta, one would wonder about that business.

 

[weckart]

BGAs are much easier! Scrape off the filler, warm up on a heat bed and hit with hot air and they come right off in a few seconds. Cleaning and reballing is dead easy as well.

Not many people know this but when you remove a DIP package you should really cut the legs off at the body of the IC and then desolder the pins, preferably with a vacuum desoldering iron (not a pump!). This stops the board getting overheated and the pads damaged which is difficult to repair.

Now do that to a whole board of DIPs. Urgh.

The difficulty with these upgrades is preprogramming the chips. You can probably do that easier if they are mounted on a carrier board though which is nice!

I had to replace the mosfets on a Mac SE a few years ago. I didn't have a professional desoldering unit and the manual solder pump I had was only any use on surface solder so there was a goodly amount of hardened solder left in the vias after I had got the mosfets out. I didn't want to risk traumatising the board by overheating it so I got a dremel and drilled the gunk out. Living dangerously but luckily it did the trick. Wouldn't want to have to repeat that trick with banks of DIPs.

 

[cjsuk]

I had to replace the mosfets on a Mac SE a few years ago. I didn't have a professional desoldering unit and the manual solder pump I had was only any use on surface solder so there was a goodly amount of hardened solder left in the vias after I had got the mosfets out. I didn't want to risk traumatising the board by overheating it so I got a dremel and drilled the gunk out. Living dangerously but luckily it did the trick. Wouldn't want to have to repeat that trick with banks of DIPs.

I died inside a little reading that but well done if you did it without mutilating anything too bad

 

[majkom]

Hmmm, that's disappointing to hear. So now back to my question: what if you keep the OS on the internal SSD and then put the home drive on the external SSD, done this way:

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

Will that retain the full functionality, while allowing the offloading of the major data hogging info to the external drive?

yes, it works, os and apss installed on internal, home folder on external, it works no problem

thats actually what i will do, i am not going to pay apple tax anymore.. so since now, only base models of anything i buy - iphone, mac, whatever else, older I am more I find it easy to not overpay.. one day, cook will be gone and hopefully they will stop crippling products just to push users to those unholy priced upgrades

 

[neomorpheus]

i am not going to pay apple tax anymore

This is something that Apple needs to be careful about.

You can abuse your customers base so much before they finally get enough and leave.

At one point, only the rabid cult members will be left….and even those can get fed up of the abuse.

I am one of them. Been a fan since the Apple ][ days, but at this point, the only reason left to purchase anything from them is because of my career, since i need to know how to manage and use them.

So they will get the bare minimum from me.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I am one of them

Me too

The RAM & Storage gouging (particularly the latter) have kept me from buying/keeping an Apple Silicon so far ... now a full 4 years in

 

[adamw]

Hmmm, that's disappointing to hear. So now back to my question: what if you keep the OS on the internal SSD and then put the home drive on the external SSD, done this way:

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

Will that retain the full functionality, while allowing the offloading of the major data hogging info to the external drive?

Updated my original post with your recommendation for people to find it easier. Thanks for coming up with this solution!

 

[cjsuk]

Me too

The RAM & Storage gouging (particularly the latter) have kept me from buying/keeping an Apple Silicon so far ... now a full 4 years in

I think this is a little self-flagellation.

If you're using a desktop mac, just get the ass end one and plug an external disk into it and put your stuff on that.

Or if price is really such a problem, delete some stuff and stop costing yourself so much on storage!

 

[neomorpheus]

I think this is a little self-flagellation.

If you're using a desktop mac, just get the ass end one and plug an external disk into it and put your stuff on that.

Or if price is really such a problem, delete some stuff and stop costing yourself so much on storage!

That is simply sad to read.

 

[cjsuk]

That is simply sad to read.

It's not really. I think people's expectations and demands are the sad bit.

Everything I have ever done is on that disk. That's 206Gb used which will fit on the ass end mac mini.

• 80 years span of photos scanned and taken (12,500 photos, 710 videos)
• Everything my 3 kids have ever done.
• Lightroom spanning the last decade of RAWs
• 8 gig of documents spanning 35 years of software engineering, mathematics and academic work and running two businesses.
• All the software I need to do the three disparate roles I have which is a large chunk of stuff in homebrew, O365, LaTeX etc.

And all that stuff runs quite happily in the 16Gb of RAM of the base machine. It even worked fine on the 8/256 M2 Mac Mini I had before.

The majority of the problems people have are either hoarding, disorganisation, fear or very specific technical requirements. The latter is extremely rare and most people over purchase.

Hell I overpurchased storage here. I can probably clean some stuff up and I doubt I'll add another 30 gig in the next 3 years.

I paid £599 for the machine (yay to academic discount thanks to my daughter). I am selling my M1 MBP to a colleague for £800 as I don't use it as a laptop. Even if I bought it new full price that is about £0.73 a day over 3 years for something I spend easily 7-8 hours a day in front of. A bargain! And it'll probably last longer and you can sell it for a chunk of that then anyway (about 50% depreciation).

I would have to buy a 14900k or a 9950X to get even near that single core performance on a PC and that and the board to stick it in costs as much as the whole mac and you have to suffer windows/linux as part of the privilege.

Trick is to actually buy what you need, not what you think you need.

 

[turbineseaplane]

I think this is a little self-flagellation.

If you're using a desktop mac, just get the ass end one and plug an external disk into it and put your stuff on that.

Or if price is really such a problem, delete some stuff and stop costing yourself so much on storage!

I would prefer to not "delete some stuff" -- My main machine needs 2TB at all times to allow for all the files I like to keep as well as to have enough room for scratch usage (large downloads, projects & video processing & versioning)

 

[turbineseaplane]

The majority of the problems people have are either hoarding, disorganisation, fear or very specific technical requirements.

Let's maybe tap down the broad assumptions about "the problems" people may have

It's probably more appropriate and polite if we speak for ourselves about our own usages and let others decide for themselves about their own usage requirements

 

[cjsuk]

With respect, I wasn't looking for any suggestions here

I'm also not looking to "delete some stuff" -- My main machine needs 2TB at all times to allow for all the files I like to keep as well as to have enough room for scratch usage (large downloads & video processing & versioning)

Yeah I'm not saying that at all. I have an external 2TB disk for scratch as well. Most of my stuff is sparse datasets though and generated then disposable but the option is there should I start blasting thousands of RAWs out for example and want to keep them.

What I am saying is that the perspective of price gouging is mostly wrong. You can stuff what you need on the outside (apart from RAM) if that's a problem.

If it is a problem then you either need to pay up for the storage, reduce your usage to what you are willing to pay or move off. The constant whining about price gouging is quite frankly tiring because it solves no problems. Do Apple care? Nope!

 

[cjsuk]

Let's maybe tap down the broad assumptions about "the problems" people may have

It's probably more appropriate and polite if we speak for ourselves about our own usages and let others decide for themselves about their own usage requirements

Correct. I have data on this from about 5500 mac users though (our customers, which is a fairly representative sample of the population surprisingly) and I the last time I checked it 95% of people were under 120 gig of used storage.

Windows users used a lot more (sample size around 41000). Was around 190Gb. I suspect most of that was piles of rotting windows updates though.

 

[bobone]

With expandable storage and new smaller form factor, also power-efficient CPU and hardware accelerated AV1 decoding, the M4 Mac mini might be the best HTPC (media computer). Wonder if there’s any good Mac software for that.

just in case you're being serious:
Plex
Emby
Channels
Jellyfish
and I'm sure etc....

I've run all four of those, and still run Plex and Channels for now.

 

[tenthousandthings]

yes, it works, os and apss installed on internal, home folder on external, it works no problem

thats actually what i will do, i am not going to pay apple tax anymore.. so since now, only base models of anything i buy - iphone, mac, whatever else, older I am more I find it easy to not overpay.. one day, cook will be gone and hopefully they will stop crippling products just to push users to those unholy priced upgrades

The Apple tax has always been there, as long as I can remember, certainly long before Cook replaced Jobs. If you wanted Apple to upgrade your memory and storage, it would cost about double what it would if you did it yourself. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is you can no longer do it yourself. The industry itself has changed, and Apple, as usual, is on the front edge of the curve. It’s unfortunate that they have not adjusted their upgrade pricing to reflect that change, but dropping those prices to industry-standard levels wouldn’t mean much, around 25% less for memory, maybe 50% less for storage.

The approach you’re using is exactly what Apple is saying you should do. Their engineers don’t think you should be putting everything on an internal drive. That’s the old approach. The new approach, the way of the future, is this. We may not like it, we may be kicking and screaming, but there are plenty of customers who will just say, oh, okay, that sounds good, I’ll do it that way. I’m one of them. I bought a 128K Mac in 1984. I’m fine with this approach.

 

[turbineseaplane]

Their engineers don’t think you should be putting everything on an internal drive. That’s the old approach. The new approach, the way of the future, is this. We may not like it, we may be kicking and screaming, but there are plenty of customers who will just say, oh, okay, that sounds good, I’ll do it that way. I’m one of them. I bought a 128K Mac in 1984. I’m fine with this approach.

Nothing about it is an engineering best practice.

It is a financial move

And if the argument is that it’s not a financial move then let’s bring that storage pricing down 50% and see what happens. That pricing still allows for a ridiculously healthy margin for them on those upgrades.

But what they’re doing right now is highway freaking robbery.

 

[majkom]

The Apple tax has always been there, as long as I can remember, certainly long before Cook replaced Jobs. If you wanted Apple to upgrade your memory and storage, it would cost about double what it would if you did it yourself. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is you can no longer do it yourself. The industry itself has changed, and Apple, as usual, is on the front edge of the curve. It’s unfortunate that they have not adjusted their upgrade pricing to reflect that change, but dropping those prices to industry-standard levels wouldn’t mean much, around 25% less for memory, maybe 50% less for storage.

The approach you’re using is exactly what Apple is saying you should do. Their engineers don’t think you should be putting everything on an internal drive. That’s the old approach. The new approach, the way of the future, is this. We may not like it, we may be kicking and screaming, but there are plenty of customers who will just say, oh, okay, that sounds good, I’ll do it that way. I’m one of them. I bought a 128K Mac in 1984. I’m fine with this approach.

Actually that changed, now you aint paying double but rather 10x the price of market price… damn, if you upgrade ssd/ram a bit (m4, 32/512) will cost you like 2 base models (m4, 16/256). Man, this is robbery🤷‍♂️

 

[MilaM]

Let’s say you decide you can do the 2TB install for US $300, a very thin margin. $400 is probably more like it. Regardless, a large portion of your base of potential customers are people with 512GB storage, including all M4 Pro users. Can you really compete with a good 5TB Thunderbolt drive for less than $200? Or a 2TB USB-C drive for $100?

I won't disagree with you. I'm certain most users will just buy an external drive to offload data that does not fit on the internal drive.

There are good reason though to prefer having large enough storage as part of your boot drive. The most important one in my opinion being, that you will need two external drives to make backups. Off course a lot of Mac users just don't do backups, even if they should.

 

[thebart]

This is something that Apple needs to be careful about.

You can abuse your customers base so much before they finally get enough and leave.

At one point, only the rabid cult members will be left….and even those can get fed up of the abuse.

I am one of them. Been a fan since the Apple ][ days, but at this point, the only reason left to purchase anything from them is because of my career, since i need to know how to manage and use them.

So they will get the bare minimum from me.

I just got here with the M1. I'm not leaving. But I'm also not recommending other PC users to switch. And I'm not buying new because I know the base RAM and SSD aren't enough for me, and the value proposition quickly evaporates with the sightest spec bump. I buy used where the markup is a tiny bit more reasonable.

Can I afford to buy new and pay the Apple tax? Yes. I just refuse to do it on general principles. Yes I realize I may be cutting my nose to spite my face and Apple still profits from my buying used. But eff it, this is what I can do. And I'm not buying anything else from Apple

 

[ProbablyDylan]

A business that cannot afford the Apple Delta, one would wonder about that business.

There's a difference between being able to afford something and being willing to spend on it. A business could afford to spring for expanded storage, but unwilling to.

I'm firmly in the "able but unwilling" camp.

 

[farmboy]

You simply confirmed my post.

I find zero logic on your response.

So I ask, why the devotion to a trillions dollar corporation to the point that you are not only justifying their price gouging but also turns you into a white knight, so you go out to attack other people that don't blindly worship that company?

Because as it is, I can't comprehend such behavior.

There is no "devotion" or "blind worship" to a corporation, and I haven't "justified" their pricing, I'm just stating the fact of how commerce works--nobody is compelled to make products cheap, they offer them at prices that they expect will be able to sell. If the market says otherwise then they don't sell. People vote with their wallets. These things are not a compulsory purchase so there is no robbery.

I haven't "attacked" you either, as you have other posters by negative characterization. Nor am I any kind of a white knight.

You have a few options when a product you want is too expensive in your mind: buy it anyhow, don't buy it, buy something else, complain/ask for a discount, or wait for the price to drop. This has been true for thousands of years, whether an atlatl or a pot of grain.

My usual preference, probably honed by 12 years of Catholic education, is to wait it out, as I indicated previously. It works for me and I save a ton of money. I don't know what your preference is, but you should do it in a way that reduces your cognitive dissonance. Don't worry, be happy.