Apple's pricing for the base M4 Macmini certainly puts its competitors to shame, as at $599 it's easily within the reach of most buyers. The only downside to this hardware is that you only get 256GB of storage, and it's not upgradeable unless you're proficient in micro-soldering techniques, which isn't the case for most Apple consumers. Storage management has to be extra responsible in this case, but one modder showed how easy it is to upgrade from 256GB to 2TB, provided you have the right tools and skills.
To avoid the "Apple tax," where you have to pay a hefty premium to upgrade storage devices, YouTuber and hardware modding expert dosdude1 taught himself how to micro-solder NAND flash memory chips on logic boards, sidestepping the tech giant's money-making tactic of soldering storage devices to earn hefty premiums. This time, he got the basic version of the M4Macmini. As we mentioned above, its storage capacity is only 256GB.
In the latest teardown video, we learned that the compact machine comes with a removable SSD module. The module has a storage capacity of 256GB and uses two 128GB NAND chips to ensure that the M4Macmini provides excellent read and write performance, which only means that modders need two 1TB NAND chips to upgrade it to 2TB.
While the process was successful, dosdude1 discovered that he had received a bad batch of memory chips, which forced him to perform a 1TB upgrade with two 512GB NAND memory blocks. If you want to configure the same 1TB storage device on the M4 Macmini but buy it from Apple's website, you will need to pay an additional $400, bringing the total price to $999.