We can reasonably expect

1) external storage to become faster and cheaper every year (subject to constraints around interface)

2) more and more digital assets to be cloud-native, e.g. photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer

So I'm less worried about storage than some. If Asahi Linux achieves Proton-like compatibility with games [0], then we're getting closer to the perfect general purpose game console.

[0] https://asahilinux.org/2024/10/aaa-gaming-on-asahi-linux/

With Thunderbolt 5, once external SSD enclosures supporting it exist, there should be zero performance penalty for external vs internal storage speed, finally. Then you can built a 1PB array, if you want.

M4-based mac mini's (256GB storage) have Thunderbolt 4.

If you need/require Thunderbolt 5, you'll have to step up from $599 to $1399+ for the M4 Pro-based mac mini's.

Cloud storage is still painfully slow compared to local.

We can expect different storage solutions by product depending on how fast things need to be. It doesn’t need to be lightning quick to load a frame in a movie, for instance, which is why streaming dominates there.

Latency is a big problem for cloud gaming, and not likely to be solved any time soon.

Yeah exactly my thoughts. I have been trying all kinds of services since 2010 and it always comes back to that. Even with very fast fiber, there is no realistic way to get the latency into desirable territory. It makes a large amount of games borderline unplayable and a whole lot extremely annoying.

Basically, the only thing half-working are slow paced story games and slow strategy games (mostly turn based), which ironically require little ressource most of the time (so why pay for cloud service ?!).

Like most things "cloud" conceptually it is seductive but in practice extremely compromised.

i think M4 support in Asahi is quite a ways out

Indeed. Realistically if anything, one should consider the “physical world” hassles with permanent external storage arguably more than performance ones:

• Risk of accidental unplugging.

• Contacts may become wonky over time → see above.

• The need to sacrifice a port (or the portion of one in the case of a dongle).

• Enclosures tend to have annoying IO lights.

• Takes a bit of space.

All of these can be solved, especially when dealing with a desktop that stays in place. Paradoxically, there was never a better time to be modest with internal storage.

Although I will say:

> photos stored exclusively on icloud and not on your computer

Over my dead body :) If there’s one thing I’ll always happily carve out SSD space for, it’s local copies of my photo library!

It’s a desktop, so plugging in a USB external hard drive isn’t too painful or expensive.

Dockers can’t run off external drives.

Which is a Linux and Windows technology anyway, so better buy something that offers first class support for them.

> Which is a Linux and Windows technology anyway

This is quite possibly the dumbest comment I have ever read on Hacker News. Congratulations!

That's an interesting claim. An external drive is just another block device. Is this something you experienced?

Why? Thunderbolt is PCI-E. There shouldn't be any difference between TB attached storage and adding disks to a desktop tower.

That's news to me, who's doing it right now on my imac m1.

This doesn’t seem to be true, and I don’t even get what it would change if it were true. Developers aren’t the target demographic of the base version with low storage.

Docker on Mac works fine on external drive. I moved the storage volume on a rotating USB 3 drive.

Since macOS is a UNIX system, can’t you just use a symlink to the external drive or is there something specific about Docker that prevents this?

Docker in macOS (at least the useful one) just runs in a Linux VM, and I don't see why you couldn't run a VM off an image on an external drive. Maybe the UI doesn't let you select that location?

Sure it can!

It's a major hassle and if you are going to get a small box to plug in all kinds of other small box around it with a web of cables, you might as well get a bigger box and put it all inside...

mini-ITX case start around 3L nowadays...

This is a conscious tactic so X% of customers say yes to using iCloud storage

Apple offering expensive upgrades for storage and memory pre-dates the existence of iCloud storage by decades. It was entirely standard before MobileMe, or Apple offering any kind of "cloud" services.

Apple just charge a lot of money for upgrades, even did when it was trivial to do them yourself, and they're not going to change once they made it impossible to do any kind of internal upgrade.

You could upgrade pretty much all(?) Macs yourself back in those days, though