Apple’s latest Mac mini is a bonafide success amongst critics, and now that it’s starting to roll out to customers, people are also falling in love with it.

Now that it’s in the hands of the public, some intrepid creators have taken it apart and discovered that the new mini has the same removable SSD setup as the Mac Studio from 2022. That being said, don’t expect it to be easily replaceable with any old NVME SSD because the part is still proprietary.

This is still a nice upgrade which makes the computer easier to repair since you don’t need to replace the full motherboard. For comparison, if you want to replace the SSD from an iMac or a MacBook, you need to replace the full mainboard or remove the drive and re-solder a new drive to the board, which is incredibly hard to do.

The main reason you can’t replace the drive in the M4 Mac mini or any Mac Studios is because Apple has placed the Nand controller on the mainboard, so users can’t just swap in off-the-shelf  SSDs even though they use the same NVME connection hardware. Some mad lads have figured out how to do it with the Mac Studio, but it takes a lot of hardware knowledge and that computer has an empty SSD slot, while the Mini doesn’t. That means even if you do change the drives, you’ll need to move the system software over to the new SSD somehow, which won’t be easy either.

Source: X user @ohgkg Via: Apple Insider