8 ms·

> What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices? The kind where Apple can make a 300

> What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices? The kind where Apple can make a 300% or more margin, knowing that people will still pay. Don't think Apple have ever sold SSD upgrades at anything remotely resembling competitive $/TB prices. Clearly they don't need too because people still buy their machines.

smnrchrds 6y ago
They learned their lesson and made storage, RAM, etc. non-user replaceable in newer versions. You used to be able to buy a Mac from Apple and upgrade its RAM at a reasonable price on your own. Not anymore.
- osrec 6y ago
  Why do their customers tolerate this?! I know some people love Apple (their hardware does look great), but this is extremely annoying.
  - rmorey 6y ago
    Because it’s the only supported way to run macOS
  - cpach 6y ago
    It is indeed annoying and expensive. I still prefer their OS/hardware combo over anything else on the market. YMMV.
  - enterprise1 6y ago
    Because not everyone can be a computer nerd. Apple has put a huge amount of real effort into direct outreach and support of their customers, really. Microsoft chased business. Apple chased people. Google is chasing its own tail. For the markup over the retail price of the SSD, someone else does the installation, validation, built dumb stupid restore and backup services to boot. Dell? Lenovo? Microsoft? Still ramming bloatware down your throat and persona non grata in malls or shopping centers, or wherever a digital nomad might be roaming. Apple built a hardware and software ecosystem for normies. Free from the Machiavellian incantations of pretentious experts with their opinions on memory layouts, how big their data is, when people just want to edit and backup files. People think the markup is worth it to avoid IT people. Can’t say I blame them. Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters. That’s why people pay the markup.
    - baddox 6y ago
      I agree with your overall idea, but not your sentiment. I think that plenty of computer nerds use Macs. It's still a popular platform for software developers and computer enthusiasts. There's no need for gatekeeping between "normies" and "computer nerds."
    - phaus 6y ago
      >Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters. I work at a network security company and a very small percentage fit your ignorant stereotype of them. Overall its the best group of people I have met in my entire life. You run into way more "Alpha bro sausage fests" when you hang out with "normies".
    - asveikau 6y ago
      You seem to be really angry at people who make choices different from yours. So much sarcasm and contempt for others here. Anyway, if you want to get into it... Microsoft dominated the consumer market in the 1990s. The same people you say who were not nerds and didn't care ... Didn't care to get an Apple machine either, they got whatever everybody else got, which were Wintel PCs. Most didn't care if something else had a nicer design or UI or was friendlier or more efficient. It was Win9x almost everywhere. I think this negates your "Microsoft went after businesses" hypothesis somewhat. They had total domination everywhere, and maybe got a little lazy or complacent and the lead eroded, at the same time Apple got Jobs back and grew as a consumer brand due to iPod etc. But Microsoft is still a major force outside of techie circles.
      - ogre_codes 6y ago
        > Microsoft dominated the consumer market in the 1990s. Microsoft dominated everything in the 1990s. Apple more or less lost it all. > Most didn't care if something else had a nicer design or UI or was friendlier or more efficient. Macs weren't very good in the 90s. They weren't fast, they weren't pretty, and they were quite expensive. The original iMac changed that in a fairly big way. It was more affordable and a lot more approachable than pretty much any other PC on the market and non-business consumers loved it. Every successive generation of the Mac has shaved of just a little bit more of the consumer end of the PC market. Then the iPad came along and completely crushed the low end Netbooks. So now Apple has much of the mid-low end consumer space with the iPad and the upper end of consumer space (and a big chunk of professionals who have the choice) with the Mac. Microsoft still truly owns corporate PCs and gamer space though.
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    Well, here's my reasoning why I'd happily pay Apple the price for the upgrades: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052506
  - 8ytecoder 6y ago
    Apple supports their hardware (both repairs and software updates) for much longer than anyone else ever. While I have no qualms about opening up my Dell desktop, I wouldn't dare touch a laptop. Laptops, even before Apple soldered the components in, were extremely fragile. My Sony Vaio for example had a broken key and the only option was to replace the entire keyboard. In essence, I'd rather go with a company that will fix my hardware even if they charge me for it. Rather than a company (like HTC/Sony) where I have to wait many many weeks if at all and software upgrades cut off in under two years.
    - gowld 6y ago
      But apple laptop repairs are basically the price of a new machine, and they've had severe quality problems for a few years. May as well but a new Dell every 2 years for half the price
      - simonh 6y ago
        And give up MacOS, Photos, iMovie, Time Machine, a bunch of Mac only apps and those 5K displays? Yeah.... not happening.
  - baddox 6y ago
    I used to build gaming PCs for myself and friends, salvage laptops from parts picked up at auction, etc. But I'm no longer interested in doing that. I'd much rather just buy the computer I need and not fuss with it. I think both of those "modes" are completely valid, and it's great that there are many options on the market for people in both groups. Is it perhaps "annoying in theory" that I couldn't upgrade my Mac's hardware if I wanted to? I suppose so. But I'm never going to want to do that, so I don't experience any practical annoyance. I suspect my experience matches the overwhelming majority of Apple's customers and potential customers.
    - paulcarroty 6y ago
      > But I'm never going to want to do that, so I don't experience any practical annoyance. It seriously looks like finding an excuse.
      - simonh 6y ago
        Before switching to Macs I used to build my own machines. You want to know how many times I upgraded any of them? Never. Seriously, I specced them out quite generously and never needed to, they lasted as long as I intended them to. Now I’m a Mac user it’s the same thing. I’ll spec out a 27” with plenty of headroom and Ill be done.
        paulcarroty 6y ago
        > You want to know how many times I upgraded any of them? Never. I did it several times. Seriously, upgrade is advantage. Some of Apple fanboys can deny it, but better to have that possibility. And Apple SSD specs in 2020 makes me laughing. But I'm not whining, you want mac - be ready to pay premium price or spend time with hackintosh. It's just business.
        simonh 6y ago
        Oh come on, Toms Hardware did a roundup of desktop SSDs a few months ago. The iMac drives beat all but one of them, the Sabrent Rocket and that comes in at £750 for a 4TB card. So sure Apple storage is pricey, and if you’re willing to compromise on performance you can get something that looks equivalent for a lot less, or something actually equivalent for a bit less. But there are a lot of other things about Apple gear you can’t get anywhere else full stop, at any price.
  - vondur 6y ago
    I agree it is. I still build all my desktop PC's for myself. I've been doing it for over 20 years, and will do so in the future. Back in the day you could really upgrade Mac's. I had a PowerMac 7500 in which I had upgraded the CPU, storage, memory and Video Cards, even the older MacPro's you could do this. I think you can upgrade the CPU's on the newer Mac Pro's although, it's a decent amount of work to do so.
  - veets 6y ago
    I have tried linux on a laptop and the battery life was abysmal (it was an older Thinkpad X1). With macos (which I don't particularly like) I get a solid dev experience and reliable battery life. Plus, their hardware is untouchable IMO. I have a linux desktop that works well, but I can't always work on it unfortunately.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I can't remember the last time I upgraded the memory/disk in one of my computers. It really is a non-issue for the majority. There are other issues that are much more important to me.
- snapetom 6y ago
  The iMac and Mac Pro has user upgradeable RAM. https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    You are right. But you used to be able to do that to any Mac. And I fully expect the ARM Macs to get rid of this feature. Though I would be happily surprised if they don't.
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I don't expect them to, but I don't not expect them to, if that makes sense -- it feels like an "all bets are off" kind of thing to me. The industrial design of the iMac is likely to finally change when it goes ARM, and it doesn't strike me as impossible that they'll make it slightly more open, or at least not make it worse. On the one hand, Apple loves to eliminate options and lock things down, both for quasi-defensible reasons like simplifying product lines and for less defensible ones like increasing profit margins (and making everything obsessively thinner, like they're in the grip of some industrial design anorexia). On the other, their most recent hardware design changes have often shown response to customer complaints (e.g., replacing the butterfly keyboard with an improved iteration of the "Magic" keyboard) -- and, if they really intended to lock down the Mac like iOS, the move to ARM and the sweeping UX changes in macOS Big Sur would almost certainly have been when that happened. The fact that it hadn't happened makes me considerably more skeptical it's going to. (I'm also more skeptical now that iOS will ever be allowed to blossom into a full general-purpose OS, but that's a different topic.) As an aside, I'm not sure whether adding the T2 chip would make it more complicated to use a third-party SSD. It's my understanding they function as the SSD controller and do some kind of wonky things, but I am not taking the time to look that up and could be completely wrong. :)
    - caycep 6y ago
      I feel like they are taking a page out of consoles, at least if the iPad's influence is to be felt on future Macs. Relatively rigidly defined hardware specs and the apps are designed to take that into account.
- avianlyric 6y ago
  Franky I don’t think people upgrading their own machines ever played into this. I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time. If you’re someone who didn’t want to pay the Apple premium before they took user upgrades away, it seems a little unlikely you’ll be happy to stomach them after. Rather you would just do without (of course there will be some who do upgrade, but I suspect they’re in the minority).
  - hellofunk 6y ago
    > I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time. Yes exactly. The premium on my time has been gradually edging out in my priorities. I'd rather pay a little extra to have something already there than spend the same amount in my own time instead. It's a fair tradeoff. "But there's not much time involved, it's a ripoff," say many. But there is time involved for people who don't regularly upgrade computers. Figuring out what to buy, the best place to buy it, then the process of doing the upgrade yourself (if it's possible) is not a trivial amount of time unless you do this often enough. Let's say you can upgrade a hard drive in 2 hours total, which is conservative -- the total time of researching what to buy, reading how to install it, ordering it, opening the package, putting in the drive, configuring the stuff you need to do, if necessary. Even at two hours, for my wage, that's about $200 of my time. I'd rather just spend the $200 or even a little more to not deal with it. And in reality, for me at least, it would take more than 2 hours of my time all-in anyway.
    - tjoff 6y ago
      One example, just so you know how much you are being ripped off... Yes, this is actually a trivial amount of time even if you do it once a decade. Last time I checked buying 32 GB of ram for the imac was about $175, apple took $850 to upgrade from the base 8 GB to 32 GB... Replacing them wouldn't take many minutes. (Or - you could buy 64 GB for $350 (something apple didn't even offer, I guess the uint32 would overflow)).
gambiting 6y ago
The only ones that had anything close to reasonable prices were the 2012-2013 MacBook Airs. The base one came with 128GB(which was decent at the time) and upgrading to 256 or 512 wasn't a lot more than those drives cost at retail.
- snapetom 6y ago
  Throughout its history, Apple went back and forth between reasonable memory upgrades and ridiculous memory upgrades. They seem to have settled on a general trend recently - if the user can do it, like in a Mac Pro or iMac, charge a ridiculous amount. If it's not user accessible memory, like in a portable, charge a more reasonable (but admittedly still on the expensive side) for memory upgrades. I bought a tricked out iMac last year and the only thing I didn't upgrade was the memory. Got 32 GB from Other World Computing at the same time for a much more sane price.
centimeter 6y ago
Apple NVMe disks are fast as hell - faster than any other single disk else I’ve used, outside of the dell NVMe disks we have in some of our servers that cost like $3000 each. I can also trash whatever disks Apple is using for years without ever running into failure, whereas I’ve blown out the wear leveling on plenty of “affordable” SSDs.
samtheprogram 6y ago
The iMac competes via its 5K display and having macOS in general. Remember that Apple’s comparable offerings for this tier display were priced at $1299, in the same price range as many 5K displays. The $1800 price point isn’t hard to grasp once you consider the display. EDIT: I previously compared to / referenced possibly sub-$1000 5K monitors, but it seems the ones I was looking at in that range were actually 4K.
- localhost 6y ago
  It’s like buying a 5k display and getting a subsidized computer. There’s ~1 5k monitor on the market today (LG)? I wonder how expandable this is? Buy the bottom end machine with the CPU you want and upgrade SSD and RAM? I would imagine SSD is upgradeable but RAM soldered onto the mobo?
  - pvarangot 6y ago
    On Apple laptops "SSDs" are also soldered PCIe flash memory chips or something like that, so maybe on this very thin desktop computer they will also be doing that.
  - bluedino 6y ago
    27" iMacs have typically featured 4 memory slots in an easily accessible panel on the back: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#install1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#install1
    - abrowne 6y ago
      And https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ (click 27-inch) says > four SO-DIMM slots, user accessible
      - localhost 6y ago
        Thanks. Hopefully the SSD is accessible too. I have a ~2010 iMac 27" and I had to pull of the front glass of the monitor and disassemble half the computer to replace the HDD with an SSD. That was a gigantic PITA.
BurningFrog 6y ago
> people still buy their machines Sure, but more would buy at lower prices. That said I don't doubt that Apple has researched this a zillion ways, and this price point is there for solid reasons.
- baddox 6y ago
  > Sure, but more would buy at lower prices. Well, sure, that's just the law of demand. If Apple's goal was simply to ship the most products as possible in the short term, they would sell them for a penny until they ran out of money.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    True. My only point was that "people still buy" is not much of an argument. In hindsight, I didn't contribute anything of value to the discourse by that...
    - baddox 6y ago
      "People still buy and Apple is wildly successful" is a pretty decent argument though.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Same can be said about other exclusive brands.
- taywrobel 6y ago
  Apple intentionally prices a lot of customers out of their market. Their monetary strategy relies on it, oddly enough. If they sold to more people, they’d run into many more issues being seen as a monopoly. Tim Cook spelled it out pretty clearly to Congress when he testified last week; Apple does not have majority market share in any market they’re in. Not in smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or wearables. And they don’t want to have more market share. The inflated prices and being seen as a “luxury brand” is a great way for them to continue making a huge profit while restricting market share to the point that they can skirt around most monopoly law. The downside there is to maintain growth, they need to continually push into new markets, which they’ve been doing about once every 5 years (desktops -> laptops -> phones -> tablets -> wearables -> automotive/AR?)
byset 6y ago
As I see it it's basically price discrimination. Apple wants a certain profit margin for the model as a whole. Yet for customers who will never pay prices that will give Apple that full margin, they offer a model at a low price point with a compressed margin, but with a painful aspect that will encourage customers who can pay to go with a higher priced unit — here, the painful thing is the small SSD size. So the idea that the minimal-SSD model is somehow the "real" price and Apple is selling SSD space at an exorbitant markup, isn't quite right. You could almost think of it as Apple offering a discount if you'll go with the smallest SSD, so they can capture more of the market while still keeping their average profit margins high. If Apple charged "competitive $/TB prices", the small-SSD option would likely be more expensive, rather than the larger-SSD options being cheaper.
- rhizome 6y ago
  I think it's simpler than all that: any FRU gets a 5x price hike.
- byset 6y ago
  To add to that, it allows them to advertise that "prices start at..." and give an unrealistically low price, which is manipulative, to be sure.
- kccqzy 6y ago
  Perhaps that's true for people who buy personal Macs, but in several companies I've worked for, the companies that buy Macs for work almost always use the smallest SSD option: you don't need a lot of local storage, since most files will be in company-managed storage systems.
  - byset 6y ago
    Sure, there will always be customers for whom the low-price option is perfect. Outlet malls are another form of price discrimination, as they offer lower prices for those willing to travel further to get the lower prices. But there will always be some people happen to live next to the outlet mall.
- 6y ago

smnrchrds 6y ago

They learned their lesson and made storage, RAM, etc. non-user replaceable in newer versions. You used to be able to buy a Mac from Apple and upgrade its RAM at a reasonable price on your own. Not anymore.

osrec 6y ago
Why do their customers tolerate this?! I know some people love Apple (their hardware does look great), but this is extremely annoying.
- rmorey 6y ago
  Because it’s the only supported way to run macOS
- cpach 6y ago
  It is indeed annoying and expensive. I still prefer their OS/hardware combo over anything else on the market. YMMV.
- enterprise1 6y ago
  Because not everyone can be a computer nerd. Apple has put a huge amount of real effort into direct outreach and support of their customers, really. Microsoft chased business. Apple chased people. Google is chasing its own tail. For the markup over the retail price of the SSD, someone else does the installation, validation, built dumb stupid restore and backup services to boot. Dell? Lenovo? Microsoft? Still ramming bloatware down your throat and persona non grata in malls or shopping centers, or wherever a digital nomad might be roaming. Apple built a hardware and software ecosystem for normies. Free from the Machiavellian incantations of pretentious experts with their opinions on memory layouts, how big their data is, when people just want to edit and backup files. People think the markup is worth it to avoid IT people. Can’t say I blame them. Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters. That’s why people pay the markup.
  - baddox 6y ago
    I agree with your overall idea, but not your sentiment. I think that plenty of computer nerds use Macs. It's still a popular platform for software developers and computer enthusiasts. There's no need for gatekeeping between "normies" and "computer nerds."
  - phaus 6y ago
    >Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters. I work at a network security company and a very small percentage fit your ignorant stereotype of them. Overall its the best group of people I have met in my entire life. You run into way more "Alpha bro sausage fests" when you hang out with "normies".
  - asveikau 6y ago
    You seem to be really angry at people who make choices different from yours. So much sarcasm and contempt for others here. Anyway, if you want to get into it... Microsoft dominated the consumer market in the 1990s. The same people you say who were not nerds and didn't care ... Didn't care to get an Apple machine either, they got whatever everybody else got, which were Wintel PCs. Most didn't care if something else had a nicer design or UI or was friendlier or more efficient. It was Win9x almost everywhere. I think this negates your "Microsoft went after businesses" hypothesis somewhat. They had total domination everywhere, and maybe got a little lazy or complacent and the lead eroded, at the same time Apple got Jobs back and grew as a consumer brand due to iPod etc. But Microsoft is still a major force outside of techie circles.
    - ogre_codes 6y ago
      > Microsoft dominated the consumer market in the 1990s. Microsoft dominated everything in the 1990s. Apple more or less lost it all. > Most didn't care if something else had a nicer design or UI or was friendlier or more efficient. Macs weren't very good in the 90s. They weren't fast, they weren't pretty, and they were quite expensive. The original iMac changed that in a fairly big way. It was more affordable and a lot more approachable than pretty much any other PC on the market and non-business consumers loved it. Every successive generation of the Mac has shaved of just a little bit more of the consumer end of the PC market. Then the iPad came along and completely crushed the low end Netbooks. So now Apple has much of the mid-low end consumer space with the iPad and the upper end of consumer space (and a big chunk of professionals who have the choice) with the Mac. Microsoft still truly owns corporate PCs and gamer space though.
- hellofunk 6y ago
  Well, here's my reasoning why I'd happily pay Apple the price for the upgrades: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052506 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052506
- 8ytecoder 6y ago
  Apple supports their hardware (both repairs and software updates) for much longer than anyone else ever. While I have no qualms about opening up my Dell desktop, I wouldn't dare touch a laptop. Laptops, even before Apple soldered the components in, were extremely fragile. My Sony Vaio for example had a broken key and the only option was to replace the entire keyboard. In essence, I'd rather go with a company that will fix my hardware even if they charge me for it. Rather than a company (like HTC/Sony) where I have to wait many many weeks if at all and software upgrades cut off in under two years.
  - gowld 6y ago
    But apple laptop repairs are basically the price of a new machine, and they've had severe quality problems for a few years. May as well but a new Dell every 2 years for half the price
    - simonh 6y ago
      And give up MacOS, Photos, iMovie, Time Machine, a bunch of Mac only apps and those 5K displays? Yeah.... not happening.
- baddox 6y ago
  I used to build gaming PCs for myself and friends, salvage laptops from parts picked up at auction, etc. But I'm no longer interested in doing that. I'd much rather just buy the computer I need and not fuss with it. I think both of those "modes" are completely valid, and it's great that there are many options on the market for people in both groups. Is it perhaps "annoying in theory" that I couldn't upgrade my Mac's hardware if I wanted to? I suppose so. But I'm never going to want to do that, so I don't experience any practical annoyance. I suspect my experience matches the overwhelming majority of Apple's customers and potential customers.
  - paulcarroty 6y ago
    > But I'm never going to want to do that, so I don't experience any practical annoyance. It seriously looks like finding an excuse.
    - simonh 6y ago
      Before switching to Macs I used to build my own machines. You want to know how many times I upgraded any of them? Never. Seriously, I specced them out quite generously and never needed to, they lasted as long as I intended them to. Now I’m a Mac user it’s the same thing. I’ll spec out a 27” with plenty of headroom and Ill be done.
      - paulcarroty 6y ago
        > You want to know how many times I upgraded any of them? Never. I did it several times. Seriously, upgrade is advantage. Some of Apple fanboys can deny it, but better to have that possibility. And Apple SSD specs in 2020 makes me laughing. But I'm not whining, you want mac - be ready to pay premium price or spend time with hackintosh. It's just business.
        simonh 6y ago
        Oh come on, Toms Hardware did a roundup of desktop SSDs a few months ago. The iMac drives beat all but one of them, the Sabrent Rocket and that comes in at £750 for a 4TB card. So sure Apple storage is pricey, and if you’re willing to compromise on performance you can get something that looks equivalent for a lot less, or something actually equivalent for a bit less. But there are a lot of other things about Apple gear you can’t get anywhere else full stop, at any price.
- vondur 6y ago
  I agree it is. I still build all my desktop PC's for myself. I've been doing it for over 20 years, and will do so in the future. Back in the day you could really upgrade Mac's. I had a PowerMac 7500 in which I had upgraded the CPU, storage, memory and Video Cards, even the older MacPro's you could do this. I think you can upgrade the CPU's on the newer Mac Pro's although, it's a decent amount of work to do so.
- veets 6y ago
  I have tried linux on a laptop and the battery life was abysmal (it was an older Thinkpad X1). With macos (which I don't particularly like) I get a solid dev experience and reliable battery life. Plus, their hardware is untouchable IMO. I have a linux desktop that works well, but I can't always work on it unfortunately.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I can't remember the last time I upgraded the memory/disk in one of my computers. It really is a non-issue for the majority. There are other issues that are much more important to me.
snapetom 6y ago
The iMac and Mac Pro has user upgradeable RAM. https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  You are right. But you used to be able to do that to any Mac. And I fully expect the ARM Macs to get rid of this feature. Though I would be happily surprised if they don't.
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    I don't expect them to, but I don't not expect them to, if that makes sense -- it feels like an "all bets are off" kind of thing to me. The industrial design of the iMac is likely to finally change when it goes ARM, and it doesn't strike me as impossible that they'll make it slightly more open, or at least not make it worse. On the one hand, Apple loves to eliminate options and lock things down, both for quasi-defensible reasons like simplifying product lines and for less defensible ones like increasing profit margins (and making everything obsessively thinner, like they're in the grip of some industrial design anorexia). On the other, their most recent hardware design changes have often shown response to customer complaints (e.g., replacing the butterfly keyboard with an improved iteration of the "Magic" keyboard) -- and, if they really intended to lock down the Mac like iOS, the move to ARM and the sweeping UX changes in macOS Big Sur would almost certainly have been when that happened. The fact that it hadn't happened makes me considerably more skeptical it's going to. (I'm also more skeptical now that iOS will ever be allowed to blossom into a full general-purpose OS, but that's a different topic.) As an aside, I'm not sure whether adding the T2 chip would make it more complicated to use a third-party SSD. It's my understanding they function as the SSD controller and do some kind of wonky things, but I am not taking the time to look that up and could be completely wrong. :)
  - caycep 6y ago
    I feel like they are taking a page out of consoles, at least if the iPad's influence is to be felt on future Macs. Relatively rigidly defined hardware specs and the apps are designed to take that into account.
avianlyric 6y ago
Franky I don’t think people upgrading their own machines ever played into this. I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time. If you’re someone who didn’t want to pay the Apple premium before they took user upgrades away, it seems a little unlikely you’ll be happy to stomach them after. Rather you would just do without (of course there will be some who do upgrade, but I suspect they’re in the minority).
- hellofunk 6y ago
  > I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time. Yes exactly. The premium on my time has been gradually edging out in my priorities. I'd rather pay a little extra to have something already there than spend the same amount in my own time instead. It's a fair tradeoff. "But there's not much time involved, it's a ripoff," say many. But there is time involved for people who don't regularly upgrade computers. Figuring out what to buy, the best place to buy it, then the process of doing the upgrade yourself (if it's possible) is not a trivial amount of time unless you do this often enough. Let's say you can upgrade a hard drive in 2 hours total, which is conservative -- the total time of researching what to buy, reading how to install it, ordering it, opening the package, putting in the drive, configuring the stuff you need to do, if necessary. Even at two hours, for my wage, that's about $200 of my time. I'd rather just spend the $200 or even a little more to not deal with it. And in reality, for me at least, it would take more than 2 hours of my time all-in anyway.
  - tjoff 6y ago
    One example, just so you know how much you are being ripped off... Yes, this is actually a trivial amount of time even if you do it once a decade. Last time I checked buying 32 GB of ram for the imac was about $175, apple took $850 to upgrade from the base 8 GB to 32 GB... Replacing them wouldn't take many minutes. (Or - you could buy 64 GB for $350 (something apple didn't even offer, I guess the uint32 would overflow)).

gambiting 6y ago

The only ones that had anything close to reasonable prices were the 2012-2013 MacBook Airs. The base one came with 128GB(which was decent at the time) and upgrading to 256 or 512 wasn't a lot more than those drives cost at retail.

snapetom 6y ago
Throughout its history, Apple went back and forth between reasonable memory upgrades and ridiculous memory upgrades. They seem to have settled on a general trend recently - if the user can do it, like in a Mac Pro or iMac, charge a ridiculous amount. If it's not user accessible memory, like in a portable, charge a more reasonable (but admittedly still on the expensive side) for memory upgrades. I bought a tricked out iMac last year and the only thing I didn't upgrade was the memory. Got 32 GB from Other World Computing at the same time for a much more sane price.

centimeter 6y ago

Apple NVMe disks are fast as hell - faster than any other single disk else I’ve used, outside of the dell NVMe disks we have in some of our servers that cost like $3000 each. I can also trash whatever disks Apple is using for years without ever running into failure, whereas I’ve blown out the wear leveling on plenty of “affordable” SSDs.

samtheprogram 6y ago

The iMac competes via its 5K display and having macOS in general. Remember that Apple’s comparable offerings for this tier display were priced at $1299, in the same price range as many 5K displays. The $1800 price point isn’t hard to grasp once you consider the display. EDIT: I previously compared to / referenced possibly sub-$1000 5K monitors, but it seems the ones I was looking at in that range were actually 4K.

localhost 6y ago
It’s like buying a 5k display and getting a subsidized computer. There’s ~1 5k monitor on the market today (LG)? I wonder how expandable this is? Buy the bottom end machine with the CPU you want and upgrade SSD and RAM? I would imagine SSD is upgradeable but RAM soldered onto the mobo?
- pvarangot 6y ago
  On Apple laptops "SSDs" are also soldered PCIe flash memory chips or something like that, so maybe on this very thin desktop computer they will also be doing that.
- bluedino 6y ago
  27" iMacs have typically featured 4 memory slots in an easily accessible panel on the back: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#install1 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#install1
  - abrowne 6y ago
    And https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ (click 27-inch) says > four SO-DIMM slots, user accessible
    - localhost 6y ago
      Thanks. Hopefully the SSD is accessible too. I have a ~2010 iMac 27" and I had to pull of the front glass of the monitor and disassemble half the computer to replace the HDD with an SSD. That was a gigantic PITA.

BurningFrog 6y ago

> people still buy their machines Sure, but more would buy at lower prices. That said I don't doubt that Apple has researched this a zillion ways, and this price point is there for solid reasons.

baddox 6y ago
> Sure, but more would buy at lower prices. Well, sure, that's just the law of demand. If Apple's goal was simply to ship the most products as possible in the short term, they would sell them for a penny until they ran out of money.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  True. My only point was that "people still buy" is not much of an argument. In hindsight, I didn't contribute anything of value to the discourse by that...
  - baddox 6y ago
    "People still buy and Apple is wildly successful" is a pretty decent argument though.
pjmlp 6y ago
Same can be said about other exclusive brands.
taywrobel 6y ago
Apple intentionally prices a lot of customers out of their market. Their monetary strategy relies on it, oddly enough. If they sold to more people, they’d run into many more issues being seen as a monopoly. Tim Cook spelled it out pretty clearly to Congress when he testified last week; Apple does not have majority market share in any market they’re in. Not in smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or wearables. And they don’t want to have more market share. The inflated prices and being seen as a “luxury brand” is a great way for them to continue making a huge profit while restricting market share to the point that they can skirt around most monopoly law. The downside there is to maintain growth, they need to continually push into new markets, which they’ve been doing about once every 5 years (desktops -> laptops -> phones -> tablets -> wearables -> automotive/AR?)

byset 6y ago

As I see it it's basically price discrimination. Apple wants a certain profit margin for the model as a whole. Yet for customers who will never pay prices that will give Apple that full margin, they offer a model at a low price point with a compressed margin, but with a painful aspect that will encourage customers who can pay to go with a higher priced unit — here, the painful thing is the small SSD size. So the idea that the minimal-SSD model is somehow the "real" price and Apple is selling SSD space at an exorbitant markup, isn't quite right. You could almost think of it as Apple offering a discount if you'll go with the smallest SSD, so they can capture more of the market while still keeping their average profit margins high. If Apple charged "competitive $/TB prices", the small-SSD option would likely be more expensive, rather than the larger-SSD options being cheaper.

rhizome 6y ago
I think it's simpler than all that: any FRU gets a 5x price hike.
byset 6y ago
To add to that, it allows them to advertise that "prices start at..." and give an unrealistically low price, which is manipulative, to be sure.
kccqzy 6y ago
Perhaps that's true for people who buy personal Macs, but in several companies I've worked for, the companies that buy Macs for work almost always use the smallest SSD option: you don't need a lot of local storage, since most files will be in company-managed storage systems.
- byset 6y ago
  Sure, there will always be customers for whom the low-price option is perfect. Outlet malls are another form of price discrimination, as they offer lower prices for those willing to travel further to get the lower prices. But there will always be some people happen to live next to the outlet mall.
6y ago