Apple Solders Mac Mini Storage and Closes Cheap Upgrades

Expand Mac mini opened the new M6 and M5 Pro desktops on September 22 and found the NAND soldered to the logic board. The third-party SSD swaps that undercut Apple’s $500 jump from 256GB to 1TB are gone. Apple collects that premium again; the shop that sold the cheaper cards does not.

Can You Upgrade the M6 Mac Mini SSD?

No. There is no storage slot in the M6 Mac mini or the M5 Pro Mac mini. Expand Mac mini, which sells add-on modules for the 2024 M4 and M4 Pro, said both new machines arrived that day, and on both of them the NAND is soldered onto the logic board, the same way it was on the M1 and M2 minis.

No slot means nothing to swap, and very little room left for us. In August we said we would extend our coverage once we had tested real hardware. This is the result, and not the one we hoped for.

Expand Mac mini, blog post, September 22, 2026

The company told M6 and M5 Pro owners not to buy its cards. They will not fit. M4 and M4 Pro owners keep full support. Apple’s own used-parts page, published September 21, already told the same story in a quieter way: the 2024 mini still lists an SSD Module, and the new model does not.

Apple Now Collects the Storage Premium

Apple’s August 25 launch set the M6 Mac mini at $899 with 16GB of memory and 256GB of storage, and the M5 Pro at $1,699 with 24GB and 512GB. Education pricing is $799 and $1,599. The M6 can be built to 32GB of memory and 2TB of storage. The M5 Pro can be built to 64GB and 8TB.

Those extra gigabytes now have to be paid at checkout. Expand’s M4 1TB module priced at $300 sat $200 under Apple’s $500 charge to take a new mini from 256GB to 1TB. Its 2TB card is $420. Apple asks $1,000 for the same jump. That is a $580 gap on 2TB, and it is no longer available on the new chassis.

FACTORY STORAGE VS THE M4 ADD-ON

The M4 Pro line uses a different board. Expand sells that one at $420 for 2TB and $650 for 4TB, and the two families are not interchangeable. The new minis take none of them. Anyone who wanted the $899 box and a later internal bump now either pays Apple or lives with 256GB.

Expand’s Modules Will Not Fit the New Boards

The shop had said in August that it would cover the new minis after it tested real hardware. September 22 was that test. The photos it posted show flash packages sitting on the board, with no daughter card and no connector to pull.

Mac mini M6 / M5 Pro have updated design to have the SSD NANDs soldered onto the motherboard 🫠

Not what we are hoped for!https://t.co/SF5v8Acw8I pic.twitter.com/rkbnT1kVhV

— Expand Mac mini (@expandmacmini) September 22, 2026

In a follow-up, the company joked that it would need borrowed soldering skill to go any further, and still called support for the M6 and M5 Pro unlikely. A chip-off job is not a $300 module. It is a board-level repair with a high chance of killing the machine, and it is not a product Expand is offering.

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• Expand Mac mini: There is no slot, so its cards will not fit, and support for the M6 and M5 Pro looks unlikely.
• Board-level repair view: NAND can still be moved with hot-air work and a DFU restore, which is a specialist job, not a user upgrade.

For a buyer, those two views land in the same place. The cheap, documented swap that existed on the M4 is closed. Apple takes the storage sale. Expand keeps a business on the older machines and loses the new ones.

The 256GB Drive Is the Slow One

The lock-in has a second cost on the cheapest SKU. The base M6 uses a single NAND package. Configs at 512GB and up use more than one, which is how Apple gets more sequential speed. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test figures posted with the teardowns put the gap in plain numbers.

BLACKMAGIC DISK SPEED TEST

The 256GB M6 reads at about half the 512GB M6’s rate. Against the M4 256GB box it is only about 15% faster on reads, even though Apple’s launch note said the new mini offers up to 2x faster storage than the M4. That 2x claim is the dual-package drive. The $899 machine does not ship it.

So the config most likely to be bought as a later-upgrade plan is also the slow one, and it can no longer be swapped. Johny Srouji, Apple’s chief hardware officer, called the mini the company’s most versatile Mac when the M6 was unveiled. Versatile still describes the ports and the chip. It no longer describes the drive.

One Generation of a Removable Drive

The M4 mini, released in 2024, was the break. Teardowns found a proprietary card that was not a PC M.2 stick, because the controller sits in Apple silicon, but it came out after one screw held the M4 module. iFixit scored that machine 7 out of 10 for repair. A small aftermarket formed around the card, with Expand using the same NAND vendors Apple specifies and quoting about 30 minutes for a careful install.

HOW THE MINI’S DRIVE CHANGED

1. 2020 to 2023: M1 and M2 Mac minis ship with NAND soldered to the logic board. No user swap.
2. November 2024: The M4 and M4 Pro minis use a removable proprietary module. Third-party cards follow.
3. August 25, 2026: Apple unveils the M6 and M5 Pro minis, starting at $899 and $1,699, and says storage is up to 2x faster.
4. September 21, 2026: Apple’s used-parts table for the new mini leaves SSD Module blank.
5. September 22, 2026: Units go on sale. Expand opens both models and finds soldered NAND again.

The removable card lasted one hardware generation. Memory was already soldered across that whole stretch. Storage was the one internal part a buyer could still change, and only on the 2024 mini, and only with the right card.

Mac Studio Still Lists a Replaceable SSD

The split inside Apple’s own desktop line is now sharp. The 2026 Mac Studio repair guide still shows removable SSD modules. Those modules are serialized to the machine and to a specific connector, so they are not a commodity M.2 you order from a PC shop, but a failed Studio drive can still be pulled. The mini’s repair manual, listed as LQRHBW and dated September 21, does not walk through an SSD swap.

Apple’s parts page makes the same cut in a table. The 2024 mini still supports a used SSD Module. The M6 and M5 Pro column is empty on that row, while the rest of the chassis stays on the list.

USED APPLE PARTS ON THE NEW MINI

• Still listed: Antenna boards, audio board, battery, bottom cover, fan, front USB-C ports, housing, power button, power supply, speaker, Wi-Fi antennas.
• Dropped: SSD Module off the used-parts list for Mac mini (M6 or M5 Pro).
• Still listed on the 2024 mini: SSD Module, plus the same chassis parts.

A dead drive on the new mini is a logic-board problem. That raises the repair bill and makes data recovery harder, because the flash is no longer a part you unplug. Apple has not issued a separate note on why the slot vanished. The parts list and the opened boards are the record.

External Storage Is the Path That Remains

The ports are the leftover upgrade. The M6 keeps three Thunderbolt 4 ports. The M5 Pro moves to Thunderbolt 5. An enclosure or a hub with a drive in it will add space after purchase, and accessory makers already sell mini-shaped docks that swallow an SSD. That is extra cable, extra power, and a volume that is not the boot disk unless you go out of your way to make it one.

The M6 still has a 12-core CPU and 12-core GPU, Neural Accelerators in each GPU core, and a Dual 16-core Neural Engine. Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6, and 2.5Gb Ethernet are standard, with 10Gb as a paid option. None of that changed because the NAND was soldered. The machine that arrives for $899 is fast in every way except the one the base SKU quietly halves, and except the one you can no longer fix later.

Buyers who already hold an M4 or M4 Pro mini can still fit the aftermarket cards. Buyers of the new silver box pick storage once, at Apple’s price, and keep it.