People upset at the Mac Studio’s lack of upgradeable storage are victims of their own expectations, not of Apple
As YouTubers have received, and taken apart, their new Mac Studios, some of them are frustrated by what they’ve discovered.
The Mac Studio has been on sale since last Friday, and reviews have been flooding out, both from journalists and influencers that Apple picked to be early testers, as well as people who bought them with their own money to bring us just the kind of fascinating take-apart videos that I’m going to be discussing today. And the reviews are mostly extremely positive. People are amazed at how well Apple’s UltraFusion technology works. That’s the seemingly magic technology that allows Apple to mesh two M1 Max chips into one M1 Ultra with seemingly no loss of bandwidth. And these machines are blazing fast. Most of us don’t need the kind of power the Mac Studio offers, but for those who do, all but the highest-end Mac customers are going to be very happy.
Of course the nerdiest among us were all waiting for take-apart videos so we could learn just how Apple assembled these Macs. One of the earliest, if not the first, came from the excellent Max Tech channel (from which the above image was sourced). And it was from there that we learned that the flash storage (the part of the computer where your files actually live) isn’t soldered to the logic board, but instead plugs into a little port, leading many to speculate that the storage was user-upgradeable.
YouTuber Luke Miani took it a step further and actually tried taking a storage module from one Mac Studio and add it to the empty slot on another Mac Studio, only to learn that doing that bricks the Mac. He followed that up with a second video in which he details a whole bunch of unsuccessful steps he took to fix the problem, including using Apple Configurator 2 to attempt a DFU restore. All that technical jargon to say that despite some advanced troubleshooting, he was unable to get a Mac Studio with another Mac Studio’s storage module to boot. Miani’s conclusion is that Apple is acting in an explicitly user-hostile way by including the port but preventing user-upgradability. Linus Sebastian ranted about this on his podcast, a snippet of which was released as a video with the incindiary title, “Apple PURPOSEFULLY hid this.” (Emphasis his.)
But these reactions are the result of bad expectations, not some finger-tenting villainy by Apple. If you expected the Mac Studio to be in any way user-upgradeable, you don’t understand Apple and you were approaching the Mac Studio with bad expectations. Full stop. That doesn’t mean that Miani and Sebastian are wrong to wish Apple had made the Mac Studio user-upgradeable. That’s entirely a valid desire, but not one that this product was meant to satisfy. This Mac is squarely what the 2013 Mac Pro and the Power Mac G4 Cube were before it: purpose-build, compact desktop Macs whose priority was to serve creative users who need a significant amount of computer power, but aren’t interested in modular computer hardware.
Frankly, if you highly prioritize an upgradable desktop computer, you’re probably best going to be served by a Windows-based PC. Windows desktop computers have always been highly modular, function-over-form devices. Only the Mac Pro has been truly modular (outside of the aforementioned 2013 “trash can” Mac Pro era). It remains to be seen how modular the Apple Silicon version of the Mac Pro will be, but the current Mac Pro is squarely positioned to serve extremely high-end customers who can afford to build a machine that might cost $20,000.
The reality is that people like Miani and Sebastian are part of a very small community of computer users (relatively speaking) who prioritize upgradeability so highly. That doesn’t make them wrong, and I can easily make the case for why a modular Mac makes sense. But we all need to understand that not everyone shares our priorities.
So why does the Mac Studio have those non-soldered connectors for the storage module? To make them quick to repair by a certified Apple technician like your friendly neighborhood Genius at an Apple Store. That’s it. If it wasn’t clear by the form factor that Apple chose for the Mac Studios where the screws to remove the bottom plate are hidden behind a tight-fitting rubber “foot,” just look at the completely unshielded power supply inside. Apple didn’t feel the need to bulk up the Mac Studio’s enclosure with more power supply shielding because they never intended for the device to be opened outside of a rare repair need.
Also, the reason why the Mac Studio becomes bricked when you installed another Mac Studio’s storage module is because of data encryption, not some vicious desire on Apple’s part to keep people from upgrading their own Mac. Apple’s onboard system-on-a-chip (in this case an M1 Max or M1 Ultra) has a component called a Secure Enclave. This does a few things including securely storing your Touch ID and Apple Pay data. But it also stores proprietary keys for the storage hardware so that those modules are “encrypted at rest.” That means if you tried to remove the storage module and boot it up in some other hardware, you’d be unable to do so. This helps keep your data incredibly secure.
Whether you consider the Mac Studio’s design priorities to be appropriate or infuriating comes down to personal preference. If you absolutely want a module personal computer, it’s not the right product for you. But if you want a compact, powerful Mac system and have no interest in cracking your computer open, it’s going to be a great machine for you.