Mac Studio Update – Image Courtesy of Polysoft
16 Facebook x.com Reddit
Last updated 1 day ago
All it takes is opening up your Mac Studio and voiding your warranty, but it's proven that you can Upgrade to an 8TB SSD for less than half of what Apple is asking.
Now may not be the best time to buy a Mac Studio, as it’s likely that the M5 version could be just a few months away. But there will never, ever be a good time to pay Apple’s prices for an SSD upgrade, because they’re way too steep.
You may just not have to. We’ll see what happens when this gets into the hands of more users, but a successful Kickstarter campaign from Polysoft offered SSD upgrades for the M1 and M2 Mac Studio models.
This is similar to the same upgrade that YouTuber dosdude1 did in August 2024. In that case, the upgrade used Polysoft’s recommended solution, but it required precision and skillful soldering.
Polysoft has since launched its own Kickstarter campaign for pre-made SSD upgrade cards. These could then be inserted directly into the Mac Studio, with little experience or confidence required.
It’s a fascinating piece of work from French firm Polysoft, but you just want to know how much it costs. Unfortunately, that’s where the problem may arise — the campaign has now ended, and there’s no way to buy an upgrade.
But usually a Kickstarter campaign is followed by a regular sale of everything that’s been built. It will be at a higher price than Kickstarter backers paid, but at this time the makers haven’t said if that will happen or what the prices will be.
So you might be intrigued and disappointed. But if you were able to get on Kickstarter, you could buy 2TB for around $340.
A 4TB upgrade was offered for $865. The maximum 8TB upgrade you’d want would cost around $1,015 for the M1 Mac Studio, or $950 for the M2.
By comparison, if you bought an SSD upgrade from Apple at the same time you bought the Mac Studio, you’d pay a lot more. Apple charges $600 for 2TB, $1,200 for 4TB, and $2,400 for 8TB.
How it works
The Kickstarter campaign page has full details of how Polysoft created the SSD replacement that would work with the Mac Studio, and you can tell it was painstaking. It involved sanding down the upgrade boards made by Apple to determine exactly how they were made.
It was that level of detail that made the difference, the makers say. They point out that others have tried to upgrade the Mac Studio and failed, while their version has been used by creatives across France.
What they made was a circuit board that houses the SSD and matches Apple's own system. Users who hacked their Mac Studio could then pull out the Apple SSD board and plug in a Polysoft replacement.
There’s no way to save any SSD that Apple installs. And makers say that only SSDs of the same size that Apple sells will work, so you can’t have a 3TB drive, for example.
It’s unclear what users do once the drive is installed. The drives are apparently empty, so users have to install macOS on them and possibly format the drives.
Risks vs. Benefits
So getting a new SSD up and running in your Mac Studio can be a painstaking task. The fact that you have to open up the Mac Studio’s case might be a deterrent — although once you remove the rubber base, the case only uses regular screws.
And then there’s the fact that Apple is unlikely to encourage you. When asked if this voids the warranty, the makers say “technically no, legally yes.”
It all comes down to the fact that you're not using Apple parts when upgrading your Mac Studio. That's enough that Apple would probably refuse to do any repairs.
The price is low compared to Apple, but it's far from a typical purchase that you can chalk up to experience. But, okay. That's 8TB for less than Apple would charge you for 4TB.
Remember that thought
It's true that at the time of writing, the Kickstarter campaign has already ended. The company raised three times the expected amount, raising $97,000. It's also true that the makers have not announced plans to sell more after the campaign ends.
There is one more opportunity that will make you stand up.
“It’s too early to say for sure,” the makers write on their campaign page, “but we’ll likely launch another campaign to sell SSD modules for the Mac mini M4 and M4 Pro once we have a working prototype for those models!”
Just keep in mind that, in addition to voiding the warranty on any of these Macs, you’ll never get AppleCare coverage once you do this.
Follow AppleInsider on Google News
