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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
by 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 agoAt 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 agoin the name of [share price] performance and [market] power efficiency
- pantulis 2y agoEdit: sorry, answered to the wrong post.
- wtallis 2y agoI 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 agoYeah, 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 agoRight. The repairability argument is the reasonable discussion to have. The silly pricing games are more of a red herring.
- rtkwe 2y agoI 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 agoThe 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 agoKind 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.
- throwaway48476 2y agoGiles from Polysoft is manufacturing 3rd party mac studio nand cards. There is still a problem sourcing nand because apple doesn't let the owm sell to anyone but them.
- rtkwe 2y agoI thought I had seen something about that but couldn't find the actual boards mentioned for sale. Sounds even worse though because it should be possible but Apple being Apple has ensured there's no source for Giles or other companies to perform repairs.
- matheusmoreira 2y agoApple'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 agoPhased 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.