iFixIt and others have already posted videos showing that the flash storage is now upgradable.
> M4 Mac mini Teardown - UPGRADABLE SSD, Powerful, and TINY
I wonder if 3rd parties will start selling them. If the memory controller is in the cpu, there’s no reason for the little board housing the ssd to have any proprietary chips…
At the moment it's only the best computer ever made, but too expensive if you want any sort of storage.
We've already seen videos from the usual suspects showing that people who are sufficiently skilled with a soldering iron can replace the flash chips in the modules with higher capacity chips, in addition to replacing the whole module.
Sure, but I don't think soldering skills is exactly what I'd have in mind when I think "upgradeable".
However, there is a real opportunity for those who do have soldering skills to make a quick buck here.
You could pretty easily buy the cheap base model M4 and resell it as a custom upgrade build, as long as you were clear that the SSD was no longer stock.
It's not an easy solder job and they are picky about what NANDs they work with and how they're configured. It's better than soldered to the board but not by much.
Given the price Apple charges for the high end upgrades, it's worth your time to buy the base model, do the uograde, and sell the upgraded unit.
For instance, here's a Mac Studio being upgraded to 8 TB.
You could do the same with many other laptops and even some phones out there - buy from a 3rd party who has resoldered the corresponding parts. The replaceable modules brought you nothing.
Even the economic motive you mention is actually just because Apple overcharges for storage, and has nothing to do with the replaceable modules. As long as there is no cheap 3rd party source of these, a replacement module ecosystem makes no economic sense (someone will always have to bring in his device for resoldering, or you lose the price of one good working base model).
> Anobit appears to be applying a lot of signal processing techniques in addition to ECC to address the issue of NAND reliability and data retention. In its patents there are mentions of periodically refreshing cells whose voltages may have drifted, exploiting some of the behaviors of adjacent cells and generally trying to deal with the things that happen to NAND once it's been worn considerably.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/5258/apple-acquires-anobit-br...
You can't just swap the module out.
Again I have no proof, but there must be reasons he claims they have to be blank NANDs
If you are building new SSDs, it makes sense to be certain that used NAND chips aren't slipping into your supply chain.
They do have a limited number of write cycles that they are good for, after all.
So to expand storage in an M4 Mac, you indeed need to desolder the flash chips and solder in new ones.
It is a swappable part. Which means much more attainable servicing for flash failure or exhaustion, and possibly even upgrading storage in the future.