Apple has gone back to soldering storage into the Mac mini, ending the short window when the compact desktop had a removable SSD module. On both the new Mac mini M6 and Mac mini M5 Pro, the NAND chips are fixed directly to the logic board.
Expand Mac mini, a company that makes third-party storage upgrade kits, opened up both new machines this week and confirmed the change. There’s no slot and nothing to swap, the same setup Apple used on the Mac mini M1 through M3.
The Mac Mini M4 Briefly Made Storage Upgrades Possible
When Apple redesigned the Mac mini around the M4 chip in November 2024, teardowns found the storage sitting on a small removable module instead of soldered flat to the board. Even the base 256GB configuration used two 128GB NAND chips rather than one, which kept its speeds level with pricier configurations instead of falling behind the way the previous M2 model’s single-chip base storage did. The controller still lived inside Apple’s own chip, so a straight swap-in upgrade was never simple.
Even so, repair shops were soon desoldering the original chips and replacing them with higher-capacity ones, in one documented case taking a Mac mini from 256GB to 2TB and pushing read speeds from 2,000MB/s to 3,300MB/s. Companies including Expand Mac mini built a business around offering that same kind of upgrade to owners closer to home.
Apple never marketed that storage as upgradable in the first place; the modular design only surfaced through independent teardowns after launch. The Mac Studio uses a similar non-soldered setup, and its storage controller is built into Apple’s own chip too, which is why one YouTuber’s attempt to swap SSDs between two Mac Studio units left the machine refusing to boot.
Expand Mac mini says it told customers in August it would extend support to the new machines once real hardware was in hand to test. Having now opened up both models, the company’s message is simple: Mac mini M4 and M4 Pro owners keep full support since nothing about their machines has changed, while anyone with a new Mac mini M6 or M5 Pro shouldn’t buy a storage module at all, since it won’t fit. That leaves the new Mac mini closer in spirit to the iPhone and MacBook, where storage has always been a checkout-time decision with no aftermarket fix.
The Mac mini M6 and M5 Pro launched alongside the Mac Studio M5 Ultra on September 22, starting at $899, the same price as the outgoing Mac mini M4.
Our Take
Soldered storage on a desktop still feels like a step back, even with the one-generation exception considered. The M4 Mac mini’s modular design was never an official upgrade path from Apple, so this isn’t Apple reversing a stated feature, it’s a small workaround closing because Apple redesigned the board around a different chip.
Anyone who wants more storage on the new Mac mini needs to configure it at checkout, since there’s no aftermarket fix this time.
