4 ms·

Apple might have chosen cheeper SSDs to lower prices - which in principle think is a good idea on the entry level laptop, even cheap SSDs are plenty fast - why

by _ph_ 7y ago

Apple might have chosen cheeper SSDs to lower prices - which in principle think is a good idea on the entry level laptop, even cheap SSDs are plenty fast - why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? Current market prices for SSD are between 150 and 300€/tb. For SSD upgrades in the MB Air, Apple is charging 240€ for each upgrade step. That means prices between 1920€/tb (128->256g) and 480€/tb (512g->1t). Even the price for the last step would consider an extremely healthy margin, but what about the other steps? And let's not talk about the 240€ for the 8g memory upgrade.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
>why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? The answer to "why are they charging this much for so and so" is always "because a sufficient number of people are willing to pay it."
jschwartzi 7y ago
I just bought a 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD for $110.00 off Amazon. It's about 1Gbit/sec slower than the next price point but it's about 2 or 3 times as fast as my existing SATA SSD. The next-highest price point was a 3Gbit/sec 1TB SSD for about $150.00.
- imtringued 7y ago
  Those have gigabytes per second not bits. SATA 3 has 6gbit/s.
- josteink 7y ago
  It’s 3GigaBYTES/s, not Gigabits/s. Nvme drives really are massively faster than their SATA counterparts.
  - jschwartzi 7y ago
    Oh shit. Well then that's cool.
asark 7y ago
Apple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts. These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their prices are hugely inflated.
- danieldk 7y ago
  Also interesting is that the SSD in the base model is still the same size as the SSD in the base model of the MacBook Air Mid 2013. Sure, the SSDs became faster, but it is quite insane that a model that is six years newer still comes with the same capacity (at roughly the same price). Other than that, it seems like a great laptop for its price. It's nice that the 'budget' models now have retina as well.
  - wtallis 7y ago
    Minimum disk capacity requirements haven't really grown in quite a while. An OS plus a web browser still fits in 128GB with lots of room to spare. 128GB of flash now accounts for a much smaller portion of the machine's BOM, but the entry-level capacity itself still makes sense.
- bduerst 7y ago
  The $1K aluminum monitor stand is symbolic in that regard, even though it's not even hardware.
  - _ph_ 7y ago
    I hope it isn't software :). But yes, it is not even electronic.
- awinder 7y ago
  Apple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin apple wants, and they make it up by making ram/ssd upgrade carry higher profit margins). For the life of me, I can't / won't understand why Apple does this. It's a needlessly obtuse move on their part. It's the kind of thing that makes you start soldering ram & ssd to the motherboard in order to protect your biz pricing model; wouldn't it be easier to re-evaluate that biz model?

by _ph_ 7y ago

lotsofpulp 7y ago

>why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? The answer to "why are they charging this much for so and so" is always "because a sufficient number of people are willing to pay it."

jschwartzi 7y ago

I just bought a 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD for $110.00 off Amazon. It's about 1Gbit/sec slower than the next price point but it's about 2 or 3 times as fast as my existing SATA SSD. The next-highest price point was a 3Gbit/sec 1TB SSD for about $150.00.

imtringued 7y ago
Those have gigabytes per second not bits. SATA 3 has 6gbit/s.
josteink 7y ago
It’s 3GigaBYTES/s, not Gigabits/s. Nvme drives really are massively faster than their SATA counterparts.
- jschwartzi 7y ago
  Oh shit. Well then that's cool.

asark 7y ago

Apple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts. These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their prices are hugely inflated.

danieldk 7y ago
Also interesting is that the SSD in the base model is still the same size as the SSD in the base model of the MacBook Air Mid 2013. Sure, the SSDs became faster, but it is quite insane that a model that is six years newer still comes with the same capacity (at roughly the same price). Other than that, it seems like a great laptop for its price. It's nice that the 'budget' models now have retina as well.
- wtallis 7y ago
  Minimum disk capacity requirements haven't really grown in quite a while. An OS plus a web browser still fits in 128GB with lots of room to spare. 128GB of flash now accounts for a much smaller portion of the machine's BOM, but the entry-level capacity itself still makes sense.
bduerst 7y ago
The $1K aluminum monitor stand is symbolic in that regard, even though it's not even hardware.
- _ph_ 7y ago
  I hope it isn't software :). But yes, it is not even electronic.
awinder 7y ago
Apple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin apple wants, and they make it up by making ram/ssd upgrade carry higher profit margins). For the life of me, I can't / won't understand why Apple does this. It's a needlessly obtuse move on their part. It's the kind of thing that makes you start soldering ram & ssd to the motherboard in order to protect your biz pricing model; wouldn't it be easier to re-evaluate that biz model?