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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that the controller is integrated into the SoC.

You can actually replace the storage on Apple desktops but it’s a bit of a pain and isn’t as cheap as m.2 2280 drives.

I don’t really know why Apple does this when their solution doesn’t seem to offer an obvious advantage. They aren’t faster than existing solutions or anything like that.

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Vendor lock-in increases their profit margins. If people could purchase a 128GB Mac mini and install their own 2TB drives they wouldn't make as much money.

Longer traces and contact connectors require more power and generate more heat to maintain the same level of signal integrity as shorter traces and soldered connections. All modern Apple hardware is downstream of its phone division. They don't make a specialty PC that runs a very different O/S (macOS instead of Windows) anymore, they make a scaled-up phone that runs a slightly different O/S (macOS instead of iOS) now.

The SSDs inside the desktop Macs are socketed so there’s no difference in contact traces.

There’s definitely a big difference in storage architecture since the storage controller is on the SoC, and likely for the reasons you mention.

I'm not saying it was ever necessary for any of the computers (except maybe the passively-cooled MacBook Air), but that it was necessary for the phones, and so that design was carried over to the computers. There was a considerable gap (18 months) between the release of the M1 Mac Mini, the first Apple Silicon computer, and the release of the M1 Mac Studio, the first Apple Silicon computer with replaceable storage. I'm sure that time wasn't all spent on developing the storage socket, but much of it probably was spent on adapting to and utilizing the larger power and thermal budgets more generally.

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