Apple solders storage back onto the new Mac mini, kills upgrade path
Apple's new M6 and M5 Pro Mac minis have reversed one of the more consumer-friendly decisions the company made with their predecessors. Teardown specialists at Expand Mac Mini confirmed that the NAND storage chip on the latest models is soldered directly to the logic board, eliminating any possibility of an aftermarket upgrade. The M4 and M4 Pro Mac minis had used a pop-out module that allowed buyers to purchase the base 256GB configuration and swap in a larger drive later for far less than Apple's own storage upgrade pricing, a workaround that saved users hundreds of dollars. That option is now gone entirely.
The situation is made worse by a second discovery affecting the base M6 model specifically. Benchmarks from AAPL Ch. show the entry-level 256GB variant uses a single NAND chip rather than the two chips found in higher-capacity configurations. The result is roughly half the read speed of the 512GB model, with the 256GB version posting around 3,217 MB/s compared to approximately 6,371 MB/s on its sibling. The base model is still faster than the M4 Mac mini in raw read performance, but buyers paying a premium for additional storage are getting quicker speeds on top of the extra capacity. For most of the Mac mini's history, from the M1 through the M3, soldered storage was simply the norm, making the M4 generation a brief and notable exception rather than a new direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment