It’s replaceable, it’s not upgradable.

Apple doesn’t use standard NVMe M.2 drives. The controller is built into the SoC rather than being on the storage device itself.

Why the downvotes? Apple silicon ARM is not the same ISA as any existing ARM. There's extra undocumented instructions and features. Unless you want to reverse engineer all that, and make your own ARM CPU, you cannot run (all of) macOS on an off the shelf ARM chip. Making it effectively "impossible".

I’m aware, but I have upgraded my 256GB to 2TB so not sure what you’re on about.
See: https://appleinsider.com/inside/mac-mini/tips/how-to-upgrade-the-ssd-in-your-m4-mac-mini

And: https://expandmacmini.com/

Expand Mac mini

Tired of limited Mac Mini M4 storage? Get a 2TB internal upgrade for just $259, saving you $541 versus Apple's price. Easy DIY install. Learn more!

Expand Mac mini (expandmacmini.com)

It’s pretty easy

And how much does Apple like that?

_

Very cool. Thanks!

Saving this for later.

Exactly this. ARM is killing Hackintosh, and it’s been talked about a while. Such a shame too.

Uh… didn’t this happen like 7 years ago when they stopped using intel chips? Also why not just buy a pc to do this diy-adjacent bullshit? Not like you can’t get Mac equivalent (or better) hardware for literally the same price these days. It’s not 2004.

I had a harder time getting a Macintosh going then just running Linux full time

it never ceases to amaze me the amount of time, energy and money apple spends engineering things to be worse for customers.

I did not find it that difficult, but there was a lot of up front homework to make sure you had a compatible hardware configuration due to needing hardware which was supported by the limited number of Mac configurations. I recall running into a problem where I wasn't getting a picture on my monitor and I could not figure out why since my video card was supported and the drivers were ok. The problem as it turned out? I had my monitor connected via DVI and macs had never supported DVI so there were no drivers. Once the install was done, it pretty much Just Worked. Linux installs are pretty easy these days but debugging problems can be very difficult. The hard part of the hackintosh was keeping up with upgrades, since they needed to be done manually (due to potentially breaking things).

In this case Apple also prioritizes performance.

Uh… didn’t this happen like 7 years ago when they stopped using intel chips?

I think they were still releasing updates for the non-Apple Silicon Macs, which meant Hackintosh was still possible.

Also why not just buy a pc to do this diy-adjacent bullshit? Not like you can’t get Mac equivalent (or better) hardware for literally the same price these days. It’s not 2004.

That’s what a Hackintosh is though. It’s running Mac on non-Apple hardware.

As I understand it, MacOS's desktop relies on GPU instructions that haven't been implemented in any non-MacOS hosted virtualization environment. So you can have a MacOS VM running on a MacOS host just fine, but you can't run a MacOS VM in a Linux host, even on official Mac hardware, at least if you want the actual desktop environment. The Asahi Linux people have mentioned it before.

It’s more cost effective to integrate the controller.

Being worse for customers is just a happy accident.