There is a kickstarter trying to make 3rd party modules, its unknown if they'll work aswell. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/polysoftservices/studio...
Their install guide is interesting http://www.polysoft.fr/StudioDrive/MacStudio_SSD_test_note.p...
Very cool ! I'm happy this comes from fellow french men. Of course, this comes still at a pretty high cost and you need to have the tools to do it but it's pretty usual for the "hackers" to have those things around anyway.
In any case even with all the added complexity/cost from different providers you still come out 2 times cheaper than Apple, which is completely crazy considering they definitely don't pay the NAND modules as high and don't need to pay for a special reverse engineered board.
This is what leaves a very bad taste in mouth with Apple stuff. Even with all the absurd amounts of money they are making on base devices they still can't help themselves and price basic stuff in a predatory way.
Everyone would be completely fine with a little bit of markup, but it currently is at an insane level.
I’m a backer and can’t wait to receive the 8TB upgrade!
I had to buy an off the shelf M1 Studio due to a hardware failure, so I couldn’t wait for the lead time for one with more RAM and storage. It has been borderline unusable due to so many things requiring local storage — can’t even symlink to an external NVMe. (Many apps, but also Backblaze metadata and iMessage attachments)