Hacker News Reader

The slides explicitly mentioned PCIe support. They just don’t make any M1 machines with standard slots yet.

The iPhone talks to its storage through NVMe, which is based on PCIe, suggesting to me that they already have the infrastructure.

The slides shows an external "Thunderbold controller" chip. Seems like something they would have hanging off a PCIe bus.

Minor point: they could be talking to the controller itself over some other internal bus.

But as TB is PCIe this comment isn't intended to contradict your core point.