Great point about the storage. That is another place where the repairability meme is really not helping. Moving the storage controller up into the host SoC is a good idea and the PC world should adopt it.

Apple's storage controller is not even a PCIe peripheral internally, so it's saving power and latency cutting out that interface, even when it's active.

I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around how this could work for PCs today.

I'm guessing Intel/AMD could integrate a single SSD controller that OEMs could use for a specially socketed SSD?

I'm not familiar enough with SSD controllers - but what limits would this introduce. I'm thinking they can't be totally generic - with any NAND chips, any layout, 1-4 chips and TLC or QLC NAND - any capacity etc. It strikes me it would be limiting - you would become restricted to a a small subset of SSDs, maybe not forwards compatible with newer NAND chips etc.

I'd think only the minority of PC Laptops would make sense to have this - ones with soldered SSDs - and I don't know many of these. So Intel/AMD would need a big push to integrate any controller. Maybe Windows ARM laptops, if the controller makes a big enough difference, will do this. I'm curious now if any Snapdragon devices are doing this already.