Benjamin Mayo, 9to5Mac:
Apple has lowered the cost of higher-end Mac solid state storage options, cutting the price in half for many of the configurations.
For example, the 4 TB SSD of the 512 GB 15-inch MacBook Pro used to cost $2800. It now costs $1,400. These savings are seen across the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac mini, and MacBook Air line.
Great stuff, read the post for more examples.
Note that a 1TB SSD upgrade for the MacBook Air is $600. That is a significant price drop, but consider that a 1TB PCIe SSD runs from $99 to $217 on Amazon.
I would love the chance to buy a 128GB MacBook Air and, as my budget allows, upgrade to a 1TB SSD in the future, something that has become impossible with tough-to-open machines filled with sticky tape and glue, not to mention soldered on components. Adding RAM and storage is one way to get more life out of older machines. This might not be in the best interests of Apple’s short term bottom line, but it certainly is better for my pocketbook and the planet.
My complaint, and most certainly echoed by others is that these “upgrades” are only available on these Macs, from Apple, not only at their pricing, but at the point of purchase – given that the Macbook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, and iMac Pro are all now “sealed box” machines. So a user must purchase the heaviest iron that they can possibly afford, or face relatively premature replacement of the machine when their needs outgrow it. This is all the more absurd, bordering on insulting, given the almost legendary build-quality and service longevity of Macs.
This is one reason why the new Mac Pro announcement was both impressive and disappointing. What about the modular professional Mac for the rest of us (mostly creative) pros who DONT work for Pixar, but have robust, but not 1% absolute top end computing needs. But would like to be able to update Ram, Storage, a graphics card.
My still faithfully humming 2010 Mac Pro – which I plan to update till I can’t – will at some point get overtaken and made obsolete by the inevitable OS or mission critical software update. At that point, I’ll have to decide on one of Apples sealed boxes (likely an iMac Pro), the heaviest configuration I can afford, or consider leaving the platform.
Small steps.
same here. I am a „pro“ user as in „i use my computer for professional media creation“. Those Macpros are great but far beyond my budget. People are often saying that the macpro/imac pro is a good machine for the money (actually, no one has said that about the macbook pros for a long time – maybe one reason they got cheaper again?). Sure, it is, but no normal user, doing things like 3D rendering, video editing, compositing and the likes needs or gains anything from top-shelf components like ECC Ram, supersuperfast SSDs or a throw-away monitor they can only use with the built in soldered and glued together PC (as in the imac, which can‘t even be used as a stand-alone monitor any more).
still, the culling of the macbook line and the cheaper SSDs are good signs – so are the reports of a new scissor-switch keyboard.
The real story here is that they didn’t do this in May when they upgraded the MBP. I just happened to buy mine less than 14 days ago, so I’m OK (if nothing else, I can return it, and reorder another one). But anyone who just bought a MBP got completely hosed. Not cool.
With all of the things about Apple that trigger people, the one thing that could take the pain away would be transparency. If they’re going to charge an arm and a leg for this stuff, and then randomly spec bump the GPU or knock down the price of storage, at least give us a head’s up, so we can make informed purchases. After all, we’ve stuck with Apple through all the BS and waiting (sometimes 6 years) for upgrades.
Or even just have a predictable upgrade cycle, like iPhone. “We’re not going to spoil the plot but you know that every year at WWDC, we’ll announce our new Pro machines. We can’t wait to show you what we’re working on.”
“I would love the chance to buy a 128GB MacBook Air and, as my budget allows, upgrade to a 1TB SSD in the future, something that has become impossible with tough-to-open machines filled with sticky tape and glue, not to mention soldered on components.”
This is also how they get you. The base prices don’t fluctuate much (save for the added gimmick emoji bar) year over year but as soon as you start upgrading, the price skyrockets.
The saying used to go, “buy the model with the most expensive processor you can afford at time of purchase, and then upgrade the rest later”. But now it’s a double whammy – not only can you not upgrade later but they massively inflate the pricing on upgrades at time of purchase. They have their cake and eat it too.
So instead of charging completely insane amounts for storage upgrades, now Apple merely charges extremely gouge-y prices.
Apple uses faster NVMe SSD, so throw out the $99 figure (for the cheapo stuff), but it’s still a 3x markup. Worse, starting with only 256GB of SSD in a “Pro” Mac, especially one that costs six grand and uses proprietary bays, saves Apple a few bucks and costs us many hundred to remedy. Hopefully, these are just the early benefits of Apple buying a stake in that Toshiba fab. I want to see more.
I am so tired of this narrative. Before lowering their prices, Apple’s SSD prices were completely out of whack. However, with the new prices, they are much closer to the retail prices. The idea that you can compare the SSD storage in a Mac with what you can buy from Amazon for $99 is insane. All SSD storage is not equal. The different varieties of SSD storage run at a huge range of speeds. The stuff you can buy for $99 at Amazon is an order of magnitude slower than what you get from Apple. There are some options that offer the same level of performance, like the Aura Pro X2 at Other World Computing. Those drives offer the same 3200 MB/S read speeds that you can get in Apple’s products. They are also priced significantly higher than the drives from Amazon.