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It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly t

by rtkwe 2y ago

It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly the 8TB drive on the Pro is at least in line with the top of the line 8TB NVMe SSDs you can buy though there are cheaper options at about $600 vs the $1200 Apple is charging.

wongarsu 2y ago
That's regular Apple pricing for you. Great deals on the baseline models, but insane margins on the upgrades that make them usable. And of course the ability to upgrade the devices yourself has been phased out in the name of performance and power efficiency
- angoragoats 2y ago
  At least on the storage side, Apple's parts are neither more performant nor all that much more power-efficient than a standard, replaceable SSD.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  in the name of [share price] performance and [market] power efficiency
- pantulis 2y ago
  Edit: sorry, answered to the wrong post.
- wtallis 2y ago
  I just checked some Dell prices: $730 to upgrade an XPS desktop from 512GB to 4TB (Apple charges $1200), or $508 to upgrade an Optiplex tower from 256GB to 2TB QLC, or $654 to upgrade it from 256GB to 2TB TLC (Apple charges $800). Scalping on upgrade pricing is something all the PC OEMs do.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Yeah, but the 5 minute job of installing a cheap retail SSD in that Dell machine yourself is still an option which Apple has removed from all but the Mac Pro, which offsets any SSD savings by being $3000 more expensive than an equivalently specced Mac Studio.
    - wtallis 2y ago
      Right. The repairability argument is the reasonable discussion to have. The silly pricing games are more of a red herring.
      - rtkwe 2y ago
        I think it's more relevant with Apple because they've removed all the competition for basically all upgrades to their devices by either soldering things to the board or bundling them into their SOC. When there's no alternative their prices become the only option.
        jsheard 2y ago
        The Mac Studio technically still has socketed SSDs, which presumably cuts costs by not having to manage a separate motherboard SKU for every SSD capacity, but they went out of their way to design a proprietary SSD module format rather than just using the standard...
        rtkwe 2y ago
        Kind of, they were socketed NAND cards and the controller lived on the mainboard, so as far as getting out of the problem of Apple entirely setting the prices for everything it's not relevant. As far as I'm finding no one managed to find a way to create a compatible card to create an avenue for DIY upgrades. I've found a few upgrades but they consist of buying an entire second Mac Studio to harvest the drive from.
        2y ago
- matheusmoreira 2y ago
  Apple's silicon is good but I don't see what's so special about all the other stuff. Looks like they just solder components to the motherboard instead of using industry standard interfaces.
  - throwaway48476 2y ago
    *industry standard physical interfaces. The electrical interace is bog standard.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  Phased out in the name of profit efficiency. Despite what marketing will tell you the SSD is industry standard NVMe and the RAM is standard LPDDR5.
angoragoats 2y ago
> I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive It's worse than that -- 4TB gen 4 drives can be had for well under $300, sometimes $225-250, and that's for buying a drive outright, not "trading up" from a 256GB device. I think it'd be more accurate to say that you can get double the capacity for a _quarter_ of the price.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  I was ballparking it based on my recent buy of a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and inflated the price a little in my head to closer to $400 than the $330 it actually was. I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  Very much so. When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD. Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB). I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5. Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.

by rtkwe 2y ago

wongarsu 2y ago

That's regular Apple pricing for you. Great deals on the baseline models, but insane margins on the upgrades that make them usable. And of course the ability to upgrade the devices yourself has been phased out in the name of performance and power efficiency

angoragoats 2y ago
At least on the storage side, Apple's parts are neither more performant nor all that much more power-efficient than a standard, replaceable SSD.
Y_Y 2y ago
in the name of [share price] performance and [market] power efficiency
pantulis 2y ago
Edit: sorry, answered to the wrong post.
wtallis 2y ago
I just checked some Dell prices: $730 to upgrade an XPS desktop from 512GB to 4TB (Apple charges $1200), or $508 to upgrade an Optiplex tower from 256GB to 2TB QLC, or $654 to upgrade it from 256GB to 2TB TLC (Apple charges $800). Scalping on upgrade pricing is something all the PC OEMs do.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Yeah, but the 5 minute job of installing a cheap retail SSD in that Dell machine yourself is still an option which Apple has removed from all but the Mac Pro, which offsets any SSD savings by being $3000 more expensive than an equivalently specced Mac Studio.
  - wtallis 2y ago
    Right. The repairability argument is the reasonable discussion to have. The silly pricing games are more of a red herring.
    - rtkwe 2y ago
      I think it's more relevant with Apple because they've removed all the competition for basically all upgrades to their devices by either soldering things to the board or bundling them into their SOC. When there's no alternative their prices become the only option.
      - jsheard 2y ago
        The Mac Studio technically still has socketed SSDs, which presumably cuts costs by not having to manage a separate motherboard SKU for every SSD capacity, but they went out of their way to design a proprietary SSD module format rather than just using the standard...
        rtkwe 2y ago
        Kind of, they were socketed NAND cards and the controller lived on the mainboard, so as far as getting out of the problem of Apple entirely setting the prices for everything it's not relevant. As far as I'm finding no one managed to find a way to create a compatible card to create an avenue for DIY upgrades. I've found a few upgrades but they consist of buying an entire second Mac Studio to harvest the drive from.
        2y ago
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Apple's silicon is good but I don't see what's so special about all the other stuff. Looks like they just solder components to the motherboard instead of using industry standard interfaces.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  *industry standard physical interfaces. The electrical interace is bog standard.
throwaway48476 2y ago
Phased out in the name of profit efficiency. Despite what marketing will tell you the SSD is industry standard NVMe and the RAM is standard LPDDR5.

angoragoats 2y ago

> I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive It's worse than that -- 4TB gen 4 drives can be had for well under $300, sometimes $225-250, and that's for buying a drive outright, not "trading up" from a 256GB device. I think it'd be more accurate to say that you can get double the capacity for a _quarter_ of the price.

rtkwe 2y ago
I was ballparking it based on my recent buy of a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and inflated the price a little in my head to closer to $400 than the $330 it actually was. I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.
FireBeyond 2y ago
Very much so. When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD. Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB). I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5. Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.