Teardown of the M4 Mac mini reveals a huge surprise

Thanks to a video posted on social media showing the inside of the new Mac mini, we now know it has modular storage and the 256GB base model uses two 128GB chips. This is good news for tech enthusiasts who were disappointed with the M2 Mac mini’s single 256GB chip since it caused slower SSD speeds.

Two chips allows for parallel reading and writing so jobs can get done faster, but it’s important to note that the difference isn’t noticeable for most day-to-day tasks. The problem only applied to 256GB models and was primarily a pain point for enthusiasts — but it’s still nice to know that Apple is willing to listen to customers sometimes (not always, though).

Partial teardown of M4 Mac Mini /w 16GB RAM & 256GB SSD. Interesting revealation: Wifi chip & antenna on the back of bottom air intake. SSD on a daughter board. And even the base 256GB version comes in two chips. No compromise in speed. Theoretically also end user upgradable. pic.twitter.com/vA2vQwkl7J

— ＨＧ 阿聻 𓆣 𓇽 (@ohgkg) November 8, 2024

The modular storage means that the chips aren’t soldered to the motherboard either, which almost sounds like users should be able to remove and replace them easily — but that’s not quite the case. While it’s easy to remove them, trying to swap them out for something else opens up a whole other can of worms.

To put it simply, Apple silicon SSDs aren’t self-contained devices like typical SSDs, so you can’t just swap it out and expect everything to work the same as before. Whether this reason is a good enough excuse for Apple’s terrible upgradability and repairability practices is another question, however.

The new Mac mini isn’t the first device to correct this mistake — the M3 MacBook Air also switched back to two chips instead of one — so it’s good to know the fix is happening across the Mac lineup.