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Comment by frognumber | Hacker News Reader

Is the RAM and SSD upgradeable? The baseline model is 8GB / 256GB, and very reasonably priced at $600.

Upgrading to 24GB is a whopping $400, and to 1TB is another $400. The $700 baseline seems reasonable. $1500 for a minimum usable machine seems more than a little excessive.

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Apple's pricing is pretty interesting. On the low side they annoy with a hobbled option (256G storage); on the high side they price things to ask "do you _really_ want 2T ssd in this thing?" In the middle is the product they'd like to sell the most.

An $800 box with a power cord. Spend the same and get a therma-throttled cpu with iOS and display (iPad); a little more and get a monitor (MBA). Spend double and get a larger monitor with a keyboard and mouse (iMac).

Maybe the primary question is if the user is cloud first (minimal storage) or classic filesystem packrat (better buy big).

With a desktop device, the classic filesystem packrat might be best off just buying an external HDD with double-digit TB worth of storage and leaving it plugged in all the time.

Yeah. For a desktop system, I'm not sure there's a good reason to pay a big premium for a really big SSD.

Or a petabyte of NAS storage. It's not like you need millisecond access times to every terabyte of your data anyway.

That presupposes that the user knows how to deal with that. I did it for my wife’s current Mac Mini and never again. Photos is all janky and anything that causes an inconvenience is my fault.

So you're answering my question here with a no?

"Is it realistic to have an external drive for photos that integrates seamlessly with the native Photos app?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413791

Apple disagrees, and I would take Apple's advice over some random anecdote. There is no reason that an external photo library would be inherently worse than an internal one.

If that person actually did use a hard drive (not an NVMe SSD), then yes, the experience would probably be janky. I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well.

If someone uses an external SSD with equal or greater performance to the internal SSD, then it would naturally perform as well or better than the internal photo library would have. Apple was putting a ~3GB/s SSD inside the M1 Mac Mini, which is hardly cutting edge and can be matched by an external thunderbolt NVMe enclosure. $120 for the enclosure + $70 for the SSD is still way less than the $400 that Apple is charging, and it can actually be upgraded down the line. Or someone could get a 2TB SSD for $130 (+ $120 for the enclosure). Apple wants $800 for 2TB of storage!

Even if Apple upgraded to faster SSDs for the new M2 Mac Mini (which is not clear at all), 3GB/s would still perform exactly as well as it did on the M1 Mac mini's internal SSD, which is to say... it would perform plenty well.

Thanks for the tips!

> I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well.

Apple's software is garbage so I'm sure you're correct, but modern hard drives can do several hundred MB/s of throughput. How is that not fast enough for a freaking photo application? For Apple not to test/support this use case is inexcusable.

Modern external hard drives are more like 120MB/s, not "several hundred" MB/s, last I checked, but that's only for sequential access.

Scanning and accessing a photo library is extremely random I/O and has nothing to do with the peak sequential throughput. Hard drives are awful at random I/O.

If Apple kept proper indexes and thumbnails somewhere (especially somewhere fast, like on an SSD), maybe it would be fine, but I have heard some bad things about Apple Photos on hard drives, so they might not be doing things optimally.

The pain many people experience with using external hard drives and Apple photos is photos building that index and those thumbnails. Huge amounts of io that apparently need to be rebuilt constantly [1]. Probably also happens on SSDs, but you can’t tell because you can’t hear.

1. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251365140 And many, many like it.

"I understand that the way I set things up doesn't jive with your workflow. So I'm going to just step back, and let you take care of things exactly how you like. Just keep in mind that I'll be hands off no matter what."

A lot of people use Mac Minis as headless home servers, and for that use case I think the starting configuration is just fine and well-priced.

As I mentioned here[0], it is worth considering using an external, upgradeable SSD instead of paying Apple's exorbitant prices for more internal storage on a Mac mini. For a laptop, you would definitely want to upgrade the internal storage.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34413582

This is not a worthwhile solution. The jacks on mac laptops are prone to fail after a few years of regular use in my experience. I have to imagine usb-c ports are even more fragile than type a.

The point is that you wouldn’t be removing it… ever. It would be your primary OS drive, sitting on the table forever with your Mac mini desktop. How would you wear out a port by leaving something plugged in?

I’m not talking about laptops. I specifically said that.

Regardless, USB-C has the springs in the cable, not the port (unlike Lightning), so the port should never fail with regular use anyways, but you may need to replace the cable at some point. You may need to clean the port out eventually, since gunk build up could make the connection feel looser with enough cycles, but then it should be fine again after cleaning. But again, I’m not talking about a laptop where you would be removing and reattaching the drive constantly, so this is completely off topic.

From https://www.anandtech.com/show/8377/usb-typec-connector-spec...

1,500 connect/disconnect cycles for A

5,000 for the Mini

10,000 for micro and type-c

What about when the laptop on your lap slides slightly off and the connector is now being torqued against your leg and the couch? Factor in the use from plugging it in and out, then also the wear and tear from a laptop being a mobile computer, and those cycles will diminish a lot sooner than what was extrapolated from lab testing.

Not upgradable. But "minimum usable" all depends on usage - for a lot of users, 8GB / 256GB is sufficient, especially in office or education.

Nope, soldered.

Nope, in the same package as the CPU and GPU.

>>> Is the RAM and SSD upgradeable?

>> Nope, soldered.

> Nope, in the same package as the CPU and GPU.

The SSD certainly isn't in the same package as the CPU and GPU, so your comment is simply wrong, given the question that was actually asked. Whether the RAM is on-package or not is irrelevant to the question asked further upthread. It is soldered. Neither the RAM nor the SSD can realistically be upgraded after the fact. That's the answer to the question.

I don't understand the purpose of your comment.

The SSD controller is part of the SOC, so you're both half-right.

True, but it is a rather lame excuse for soldering the SSD, considering Apple's SSDs have not really performed better than anyone else's SSDs for a long time. Moving the controller into the SoC is a cost saving measure for Apple, but none of the cost savings are passed onto the consumer.

Something as huge as the Mac mini could easily have a regular m.2 NVMe socket. Apple could presumably still do their proprietary thing with direct NAND access through the same physical socket, while still letting you swap in your own SSD that brings its own controller... but this would interfere with their goal of profiting from crazy upgrade pricing.

For Mac Studio, the NAND actually was socketed; it just used a proprietary connector instead of letting you bring your own SSD, so it still offered no aftermarket upgrade path to extend the life of these machines.

Integrating the ssd controller into the soc allows for it to scale with the process used for the soc and also removes what is essentially a multicore system from being an external, potentially compromised unit. This way there is never any chance unencrypted data is written to the flash.

Not the best reason but it's there. Thunderbolt 4 is fast enough to attach external flash anyway.

> This way there is never any chance unencrypted data is written to the flash.

That has nothing to do with the SSD controller. The OS never has to send unencrypted data to the SSD in the first place. Offloading encryption to SEDs (self encrypting drives) is probably more helpful in server environments where you have dozens of disks and mind-bogglingly large amounts of data flowing around, but SEDs are completely uninteresting for consumer applications, and if Apple is integrating the SSD controller directly into their SoC, then it's effectively no different from using an integrated crypto accelerator prior to sending data to an external SSD controller.

Fair point, accepting the nitpick: packaged.

Welcome to Apple pricing.

If you max out the configuration of an M2 Pro mini with upgraded

     12-core M2 Pro processor
     19-core GPU
     16-core Neural Engine
     32GB memory
     8TB storage 
     10Gb ethernet
     4 Thunderbolt ports

it costs $4,099, which is exactly the same price as a base configured Ultra Mac Studio with

     20-core M1 Ultra processor
     48-core GPU
     32-core Neural Engine
     64GB memory
     1TB storage
     10Gb ethernet
     6 Thunderbolt ports

or two base configured Max Mac Studios with

     10-core M1 Max processor
     24-core GPU
     16-core Neural Engine
     32GB memory
     512TB storage
     10Gb ethernet
     4 Thunderbolt ports

So, clearly, Apple doesn't want to sell maxed out M2 Pro minis with 8TB SSD because an M1 Ultra Studio will likely beat the M2 Pro, or at least match it with more resources, and two M1 Max Studios will wipe the floor with both the M1 Ultra Studio and M2 Pro mini.

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