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

I was quite pleased with the iBoff 2TB SSD I got for my M4 Mini. It's sad how badly Apple has some of us conditioned with the pathetic amounts of storage they include. I haven't had a Mac with more than 512GB of storage, basically, ever? And recently I was on my Mini, digging through some old backups, and hesitated as I normally would downloading a 40GB zip from my NAS, because "oh geeze this is 40GB plus another 40 after decompression, do I have enough space?" because 80GB is normally 15% of my Mac's storage space. Then I remembered, oh yeah, heaps of storage, this'll only cost me 4% of the total. I bought this Mac with the 256GB base SSD knowing I could upgrade, and nearly 40% of the drive was taken up out of the box.

It's pure robbery on Apple's part. Completely beyond the pale now. Their ridiculous RAM and storage prices were never that big of a deal back in the PowerBook/early Macbook Pro days, because you could always opt out if you were a tiny bit handy with a small screwdriver (my 2008 unibody lets me swap storage with *1* screw, swap a battery with zero!). Now? It's unforgivable. I don't care about soldered RAM, I get it, but it is despicable charging as much as the entire computer to upgrade the RAM a paltry 16GB.

There's profit, and there's actively making your entire product experience worse in pursuit of profit. Having to constantly hem and haw over oh god oh geeze do I have enough local storage for this basic task, having to juggle external storage and copying files back and forth (since plenty of their own shit doesn't work if its installed on an external SSD), or constantly deleting and redownloading larger apps, makes the product experience worse. Full stop. At the very least every Mac they sell should have 512GB, if not a TB, stock. I'm tired of acting like SSDs are some insanely expensive luxury like it's 2008 again.

cant you just install macOs on your own hardware or are they typically Apple in that department as well?

Are you familiar with Hackintosh? That's what people did with Intel based platforms. Apple Silicon put an end to the Hackintosh.

Hackintosh still exists. macOS 16 will be officially the last x86 supporting release.

But I think it's point, the performance of Hackintosh is terrible for many reasons as its all a hackjob.

I ran Hackintoshes for many years. Performance on a $1500-2000 Intel platform was always extremely good (certainly better than any Mac I was willing to shell out for and sometimes better than any Mac that was sold).