The brand new Mac Mini takes a small step in the direction of upgradeable storage

Apple’s redesigned Mac Mini M4 has ditched the earlier M2 machine’s SSD that was soldered to the logic board, as confirmed by teardowns like this one posted on X exhibiting it has a single detachable SSD module. It’s not Apple’s first desktop pc to go on this course, as we noticed comparable modules within the Mac Studio and Mac Professional.

Nevertheless, as famous by MacRumors, it’s most likely just like their storage with solely the NAND chips on board and the controller continues to be embedded within the SoC, tightly proscribing any doable DIY improve or restore choices.

In a second video clip, additionally sourced from Douyin, the Chinese language model of TikTok, the individual replaces the NAND chips on the board with bigger ones that take it as much as 2TB. In accordance with the one that reposted them, they have been capable of get it working, just like what we’ve seen from Mac hackers like Dosdude upgrading the storage on the Mac Studio. It additionally exhibits how the Mac Mini’s WiFi chip and antenna are mounted instantly on the again of its air consumption on the underside of the machine.

The opposite factor we’ve discovered is that the bottom Mac Mini’s module has two 128GB NAND chips as an alternative of a single 256GB one, which suggests we don’t count on to see a efficiency bottleneck in comparison with the beforehand launched base mannequin M-Sequence Macs. Apple returned to 2 128GB chips on the M3 MacBook Air launched final April.