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Finally time to upgrade my 2017 i7. For over 1 year the battery meter has said "Service Recommended" and in the last 2-3 months multiple key caps are literally

Finally time to upgrade my 2017 i7. For over 1 year the battery meter has said "Service Recommended" and in the last 2-3 months multiple key caps are literally falling off and regularly get jammed while I try to type. I figure the 16" with M3 Max and 64 GB is a good machine that will last me 5-6 years but I'm not sure if I should pony up for the 2TB storage upgrade. I just pray this revision won't have some unexpected problems. I'm actually glad it seems to only be a spec bump so I won't be taking on any new tech. Hopefully any issues have been shaken out from the M1 and M2 releases.

brailsafe 3y ago
It's harder than ever to be excited to spend money on an upgrade, despite the overall machine being better than ever. RAM and SSD upgrades are comically expensive in Canada, maybe the former of which being slightly more justifiable. $500 for the ram upgrade $750 to ugrade from 512gb to 2tb, so really I'd be paying something like $1000 on just basic storage. It's kind of insulting.
- zoogeny 3y ago
  Yes, totally agree, which is why I'm waffling over the upgrade. From 1TB to 2TB is $500 CAD extra. It is just so insanely out of line with the actual cost of the memory. I'm looking at Amazon NVMe SSD and a decent looking 2TB drive is in the range of $150 CAD! I don't care how high quality whatever it is they are using is ... that is ridiculous markup. And since everything is soldered nowadays it isn't practical to buy and install oneself. My current HD is 500 GB and I have ~140 GB free. But I've also turned up the iCloud offloading feature, stored larger media files like videos on an external SSD and a few times gone through folders removing files to clean up space. I suppose if I want to play around with ML models then I should just bite the bullet and get more space. Fair play to Apple knowing how to squeeze every last cent out of their wannabe pro users.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    I priced out a 14" and chose the minimum options that enable 64gb, and it comes to $4974 before tax with 512gb of storage. 512 to 1TB is that aforementioned $250 extra, or the $750 extra for 2TB, bringing it to nearly six grand before tax. Going from 64gb to 128gb adds an additional $1000. A lot of that price comes from the required upgrade of the base model cpu to the best cpu. I'll give them some credit and say that a very mid-tier upgrade from my 16gb ram intel mbp 13" to the now baseline 18gb 14" wouldn't be excruciatingly expensive and probably a great machine, but ram is being eaten up harder and faster than ever. At minimum, as a non-ML (unemployed) software dev, the 36gb is minimum I'd expect to be practical over the next 5 years

brailsafe 3y ago

It's harder than ever to be excited to spend money on an upgrade, despite the overall machine being better than ever. RAM and SSD upgrades are comically expensive in Canada, maybe the former of which being slightly more justifiable. $500 for the ram upgrade $750 to ugrade from 512gb to 2tb, so really I'd be paying something like $1000 on just basic storage. It's kind of insulting.

zoogeny 3y ago
Yes, totally agree, which is why I'm waffling over the upgrade. From 1TB to 2TB is $500 CAD extra. It is just so insanely out of line with the actual cost of the memory. I'm looking at Amazon NVMe SSD and a decent looking 2TB drive is in the range of $150 CAD! I don't care how high quality whatever it is they are using is ... that is ridiculous markup. And since everything is soldered nowadays it isn't practical to buy and install oneself. My current HD is 500 GB and I have ~140 GB free. But I've also turned up the iCloud offloading feature, stored larger media files like videos on an external SSD and a few times gone through folders removing files to clean up space. I suppose if I want to play around with ML models then I should just bite the bullet and get more space. Fair play to Apple knowing how to squeeze every last cent out of their wannabe pro users.
- brailsafe 3y ago
  I priced out a 14" and chose the minimum options that enable 64gb, and it comes to $4974 before tax with 512gb of storage. 512 to 1TB is that aforementioned $250 extra, or the $750 extra for 2TB, bringing it to nearly six grand before tax. Going from 64gb to 128gb adds an additional $1000. A lot of that price comes from the required upgrade of the base model cpu to the best cpu. I'll give them some credit and say that a very mid-tier upgrade from my 16gb ram intel mbp 13" to the now baseline 18gb 14" wouldn't be excruciatingly expensive and probably a great machine, but ram is being eaten up harder and faster than ever. At minimum, as a non-ML (unemployed) software dev, the 36gb is minimum I'd expect to be practical over the next 5 years