Mac Studio teardown suggests an upgradable SSD
Earlier this week, YouTuber MKBHD had stated on Twitter that it was near impossible to open a Mac Studio, which is not a surprise for GPU and RAM upgrades on an Apple device. However, it is concerning when you think about the thermals, preventing users from extracting the fans and cleaning them out.
Max Tech host Yuryev, however, took upon the challenge to open the Max Studio and look at the state-of-the-art hardware that powers the Mac Studio. In his latest teardown video, at around the 5 minutes and 46 seconds mark, he was able to disassemble the aluminium chassis, revealing two SSD ports nestled beneath the power supply unit.
It is not the RAM slot either, as it is contained within Apple’s SoC, alongside the GPU. On the official website, the company had clearly stated that the Mac Studio was not user-accessible and that any upgrades would have to be configured at the time of purchase. default, it comes with 512GBs superfast storage, offering up to 7.4GB/s sequential read and write speeds, and can be configured up to 8TBs.
At a further point in the video (8:24), he reveals the new M1 Ultra chip and tries plugging in a Mac Pro SSD, as the connectors seemed alike. Unfortunately, it was too big and the pins were a bit off, preventing it from fitting into the enclosure.
“Apple said that the Mac Studio is not user-accessible. Just like they talked about with the MacBook Pro. Most of the time, it means it’s just soldered in, but that also gives us a clue that it could be upgraded. It’s just not the user. You’re going to have to take it in to Apple, just like you had to do with the iMac Pro to get things like your RAM upgraded,” he said in the video.
Apple’s Mac Studio is aimed at creators who want the best hardware to power their work, channelling energy from the new M1 Max and M1 Ultra processors – offering up to 20 cores of CPU. Both variants come with 32GBs and 64GBs of unified memory respectively, with storage sizes starting from 512GB. The base model starts at Rs 1,89,900, and Rs 1,70,910 for education, while the Ultra version starts at Rs 3,89,900.
