Upgrading an M4 Pro Mac mini's storage for half the price

Not worth the hassle and the faffing. Just pay Apple their tax. Your time is far more valuable. And if it’s not then you have bigger fish to fry.

That is a sensible attitude, but some of us welcome an excuse to get out the box of tools and take something physical apart.

Apple won't upgrade the storage for you aftermarket, as far as I'm aware. There's no tax you can pay them to take your current machine and bump the spec.

Frankly, this is exactly the sort of head-up-ass attitude that will end with Apple being smacked around by investigatory commissions like what happened to John Deere and Microsoft.

Dunno... $500 for 30 minutes of fun work?

To be fair, I did this upgrade and actually ended up wasting several hours because the first SSD failed after a few weeks.

I'd rather start with replaceable batteries in smartphones.

> Your time is far more valuable.

Damn I wis--

> And if it’s not then you have bigger fish to fry.

You make it sound like anyone in tech that isn't making giant piles of money screwed up their career.

And if I take that literally, wouldn't I have to be making at least a thousand dollars an hour?

You can replace the battery on an iPhone yourself these days. Apple's terrible design makes the process involve shipping specialized hardware to your joke, for which you need to hand over a good chunk of change in collateral to be able to use, but it can be done.

My suspicion for their shitty process is that it was set up purely so Apple can tell regulators "see, consumers can't be trusted to replace their own batteries, look what it takes", but they do offer a programme for it.

The stupidest part about the whole thing is that the official URL looks like a total scam: https://selfservicerepair.com/en-US/home

> Apple won't upgrade the storage for you aftermarket

Not only that, they won't repair devices with third-party hardware. If my Mini has an issue, I'll have to remove the new SSD and reinstall the OEM one before I drop it off. I experienced this when tried to get my 2012 MacBook Pro fixed (wet keyboard).

They did the replacement, but I learned how to do it myself, including replacing the keyboard again, another SSD upgrade, and eventually a battery upgrade.

This should even hold for non-US salaries? This is a machine that enables you to work for about four years. What’s that 200k € in /median/ EU wages. Penny pinching. The thing is that consumer and prosumers vary and everybody wants to drive a Porsche to work And to leisure.

Not blaming anyone for wanting a machine like this. Trying to point out that tech has become so accessible that we all aspire to have a supercomputer as our daily driver.

When I was young a PC (xt and on) would set my dad back about a monthly wage. What I see is a huge compression of the price range. But the upper part of the range still exists (training LLM is not much different from the central computer at universities in the 70s/80s).

> This is a machine that enables you to work for about four years. [...] Penny pinching.

But that wasn't the argument. In "your time is more valuable", the time is what it takes to remove a dozen screws, replace a card, and format it. Plus any increased risk of data loss, but that should also be quite small if it exists. So for saving hundreds of dollars or more, your expected time is like an hour if you have backups (you'd better have backups!), hard to say for sure if you don't.

I think an EU salary of 200k/year is at least uncommon if not outright rare and definitely not median. At least in the tech space, maybe in finance it's more common.

It was also more expensive than Apple’s authorized repair last time I checked.

Right...so $500 + the risk of having to spend hours to deal with problems rather than taking it to an Apple store and having them deal with it (assuming you live close enough to one).

Obviously, the tradeoffs are different for everyone.

GP suggested 200k over 4 years, which is pretty reasonable.

That makes far more sense in that case. Though I would have to clarify that 200k/year is attainable in terms of total compensation, just not salary per year on average.

Or just avoid Apple products to save money and time

I better get the skillet out then.

Although yes I didn't buy a Mac because of this.

It's always a joy reading comments like his, having not touched a Mac in 6 years and saved myself weeks of troubleshooting in the process.

My time is more valuable. That's why I don't waste it researching Apple's arbitrary price-optimal solution so I can write and debug Linux software in a VM.