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

(www.jeffgeerling.com)
420 points speckx | 1 comments | 11 Jul 25 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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wpm ◴[11 Jul 25 15:34 UTC] No.44533351[source]▶
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.

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skeezyboy ◴[11 Jul 25 15:50 UTC] No.44533574[source]▶
cant you just install macOs on your own hardware or are they typically Apple in that department as well?
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dylan604 ◴[11 Jul 25 15:53 UTC] No.44533628[source]▶
Are you familiar with Hackintosh? That's what people did with Intel based platforms. Apple Silicon put an end to the Hackintosh.
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delfinom ◴[11 Jul 25 15:58 UTC] No.44533699[source]▶
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.

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1. jmb99 ◴[11 Jul 25 19:39 UTC] No.44536114{3}[source]▶
Performance was very, very good in my experience. Benchmarks normally took a 10% hit vs their equivalents on windows, but being able to run macOS on arbitrary consumer hard made performance incredibly cheap. My first proper bang-for-buck machine was an i7-4790k with an R9 270x GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a combination of SSD and HDD storage. Total cost was around $1300 CAD if I remember correctly, which is absurdly cheap compared to what you’d have to pay at the time for a Mac with that performance. I also ran macOS on a 2x E5-2670 machine with 64GB of RAM, as well as a 2x E5-2697 v2 machine, and an i9-12900k machine with an RX 6950XT GPU, all of which were incredible value compared to an off-the-shelf Mac. It’s only recently that Macs are catching up to hackintoshes performance-to-dollar wise, because Apple Silicon is very, very good. Once I get my WRX90 workstation hackintoshed it should give the Mac Studio and Mac Pro a run for their money, but not for much longer if Apple drops support for x86 after macOS 16.