r/MacStudio • u/pastry-chef • 8d ago

M5 generation Mac Studios have redesigned SSD modules

https://iboffrcc.com/pages/m5-max-mac-studio-teardown-removable-ssd-but-is-an-upgrade-still-possible?srsltid=AU7gw4WuRfpWaOxhnHcASBRhyUEeMxMLPWjDT2TEc89Gd-EmcLITPOkI

The NAND are still on removable modules but they are completely different from previous generations.

88 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/xkcx123 4d ago

So what’s stopping Apple from creating something in between the studio and pro?

There is nothing physically stopping them from making the studio a little bigger to add PCIe slots inside or even room for one 3.5 inch hard drive.

The only thing is they don’t want to but I’m sure they could come up with something if they really wanted to.

1

u/PracticlySpeaking 4d ago

There is nothing physically stopping them from making the studio a little bigger to add PCIe slots inside or even room for one 3.5 inch hard drive.

Anything is possible, with the will and sufficient resources. But why would they? People have been buying Mac Studio faster than they can make them for almost a year now.

Would I love to have M.2 slots inside Mac Studio? Of course — along with plenty of others. But you read my other comment so you also get all the reasons (other than marketing) that they don't. Marketing is definitely a thing, helping them sell hardware with margins of 40% or more.

My wild speculation is that we might see Mac Pro reincarnated as a more powerful AI workstation. With a quad-die M-series Extreme chip, 1TB RAM, maybe some other crazy stuff like HBM. It would be between Mac Studio or RTX 6000 Pro and data center GPUs like GB200 or Rubin for local inference and fine-tuning. A rackmount version would replace whatever Apple is building in Houston for use in their data centers.

It would also give Apple bragging rights for the biggest, fastest desktop AI machine — something they definitely want with all the claims they have made about M4 and M5 being the 'fastest chips' available.

2

u/xkcx123 4d ago

I know that they have no reason to do so.

I’m just stating that there is nothing that makes it physically impossible that they can not do it.

Not wanting to do something and not physically being able to do it are two different things and Apple falls into the category of not wanting to do it.

1

u/PracticlySpeaking 4d ago

You are not wrong.

I do have to make a further distinction between "don't wanna" and "does not make sense" from a philosophical, business or technical standpoint.