Mac Mini M4 and Mac Studio storage upgrade service

If you have looked at buying a new Mac, iPhone or iPad at any time in the last 10 years you’ll probably have noticed… How can I put this delicately? Apple price storage upgrades so that they make shareholders very very happy and consumers very very sad.

They’ve been able to do this because in 2016 they started soldering the storage modules directly to the motherboard rather than using the universal and much much cheaper M.2 modules. Storage upgrades became impossible on do newer Macs, you just had to pay the “Apple Tax” if you wanted a bigger hard drive. Apple would argue that soldering the storage to the logicboard had security advantages, I would argue it let them charge a 400-800% markup on storage or force more people to subscribe to higher capacity iCloud plans. Whatever the reason, new machines got very expensive very quickly if you wanted more storage.

Then something slightly curious happened. Apple released the Mac Studio and it had removable storage modules. Ok, they used Apple proprietary modules and Apple wouldn’t sell them to anyone at sensible cost, but they were once again a theoretically replaceable part. Fast forward to 2024, the Mac Mini M4 launched and once again they had a removable storage module.

The Mac Mini M4 has been a very very popular machine, as the base model offers I would argue the best price to performance of any current computer, be it Mac or PC. It’s a brilliant piece of hardware and cheap as well. Well, it’s cheap until you want to upgrade the storage. At time of publication, Apple will charge you £800 for a 2TB upgrade. For comparison a high quality 2TB M.2 drive should cost around £150 or less.

So what do you if need lots of storage but have a limited budget? You have two options.

Firstly you could get an external Thunderbolt case and drop an M.2 drive into it. You’ll be looking at under £300 all in for a 2TB drive. Downsides are you can’t really sleep the machine any more as the drive will disconnect. The SSD may get very very warm during extensive write operations, leading to the potential for premature hardware failure. So carefully look for a Thunderbolt drive with a big heatsink and ideally an active cooling fan, especially if you do video or audio work. I personally prefer the Acasis Thunderbolt TBU405PROM1 enclosure as it has a small fan on/off switch, allowing me completely silent operation unless I need to thrash the heck out of the SSD. You might also struggle getting your Home folder moved to the external drive, which means some things like iCloud Photos, iCloud Drive won’t work. I’d say it’s a good solution for people who basically need the drive to store “a bunch of bulky stuff” like audio, photos or video, but don’t need that data to integrate deeply with iCloud.

The second option only applies to Mac Mini and Mac Studio. If you have one you can get a compatible storage module fitted by Sweet-Apple. I’d say it’s only really worth doing if you’re looking at a 1TB or larger module. Typically you’ll be paying approximately 50% of the Apple storage upgrade cost, which equates to saving £400 on a 2TB upgrade at date of publication. Once fitted you’ll notice no difference compared to a “genuine” Apple part – you’ll just have more storage and a few more quid in your pocket.

So if you already have a Mac Studio, Mac Mini M4, or you’re thinking of buying one and don’t want to feel you’re getting scalped by Apple, please don’t hesitate to give me a call on 01380 830224 to discuss prices, timescales and options.