atonaldenim

This is cool, I hadn't heard about this before. Valve recently gave away Half-Life for free or very cheap, can't remember, but yeah the Mac version on Steam is 32-bit only which won't work on any Mac OS after Mojave / Catalina. So combining those official Steam Half-Life assets with this upgraded 64-bit version should make Half-Life playable on modern MacOS, very cool. Gotta try that out soon!

AppleInsider said:

There's been a lot of complaints about terrible Wi-Fi with the new under-mounted docks -- now you know why.

Great article Mike, thanks for sharing your experiences. This is the first I’m hearing about wifi problems with a hub sitting under a Mac Mini. That sounds like a good subject for an article, if it’s true! I think a lot of people are interested in those hubs and it would be really good to know if they should be avoided, or redesigned.

Glad you covered this project, it mostly got missed by the Apple news ecosystem. Hopefully the early adopters of these Mac Studio storage upgrades will find that it does work well, some of the skeptics can be reassured, and the Mac Mini version they're working on next will get even more attention.

Personally I've upgraded the RAM and SSD in basically every Mac I've ever owned that allowed it, and it's always been a very positive experience for me, and that's mostly been buying used PC parts on eBay, never something officially Apple-branded and usually not even specifically designed for Macs. I've even upgraded the CPUs in old Mac Pros, the ability to do DIY upgrades long after purchase can keep older machines useful for many more years. I really look forward to improving the future upgradeability of Apple Silicon Macs, as their great performance should mean they could remain useful for at least a decade, if not two.

In this particular case, the fact that the Apple Silicon will remain the SSD controller "brains" and the storage upgrades are just "dumb" NAND storage chips that are controlled by the Apple chips, this seems like it should be an even more foolproof piece of hardware. All previous Mac SSD upgrades prior to Apple Silicon used their own SSD controller chips not made by Apple, and they mostly worked well nevertheless. For the 10+ years of SATA to AHCI to NVMe generations of SSD hardware, "just put an SSD in it" was the default advice given for how to breathe new life into an old Mac. Let's hope that "just put a bigger SSD in it" can continue to be good advice for the next 10 years!

jvm156 said:

you can get 4tb NVME drives for $250 If ya time it right

Yes, and warning to Mac Mini buyers looking for external storage - for now it's best to avoid Sandisk Extreme / Pro external USB SSDs due to many reports of hardware failures over the past 2 years on those models.  (Also avoid Western Digital SSDs, same company different labels.)  Sandisk used to be my go-to recommendation, but now I recommend the Samsung T7 Shield or T9 instead as similarly high performance, decently priced SSD options. (The claimed extra speed of the T9 is not possible on a Mac, both T7 and T9 run about the 10Gbps USB 3.2 limit and no faster.)

If you're willing to spend a little more, a USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 or 5 SSD will offer 2-3X faster speeds than USB 3.2 too.

Great review, Mike, as usual!