WHY? This is literally the only thing that bothers me about Apple pricing. I get that you pay for the design, I get the quirks like introducing touch bar, everything. But I don't get why upgrading from a $50 to a $100 SSD adds 400 dollars.
In case you haven't realized you can buy comparable 1TB NVMe SSDs in today's market for around $100. I see the budget Intel 660p hit $80 for 1TB on sale, or high-end Phison E12 drives at $115 for 1TB on sale.
FWIW the 660p has significantly lower throughput (though not 6x by any stretch of the imagination), it's listed and benched around 1800 for reads and writes.
The listed performances are those are that of a 970 EVO (and the 970 EVO Plus improved on write speed, to almost par with read speed at 3500 and 3300).
The 1TB EVO Plus is $250 on newegg. Not as replacement for an existing 500GB, just retail price for the drive. The 2TB EVO is listed at $550, the 2TB EVO Plus is listed at $650.
Most current era laptops use NVMe. Bargain basement laptops might still use SATA, but lets not pretend that the MBP, while extremely fast, is at all unique.
Not to mention that it’s basically 4 SSDs on 4 PCIe buses.
Edit: I don’t really understand downvotes. SSD on recent Macbook Pros does connect to the northbridge via 4 PCIe lanes. And this is not what “but look I can the same for £50” SSD does.
So… they charge half the price Apple does, and if you don't want to pay it you don't have to care because it's a standard m.2 so you can swap it with a retail drive (at which point you have both the original and the replacement for 50% more storage at a lower price), which you can't do with a soldered Apple drive.
Looks like the test is done by just copying a large file and measuring the time it took. This, of course, gives some idea of performance, but they are quite many things that can affect the results.
On the original article[1] the table also shows results from a synthetic benchmark. This shows 2.6GB/s for Macbook and 1.2GB/s for Dell XPS. They also mention that it's a bit apple vs oranges, since different tools were used for the benchmark.
Your article is comparing against non workstation class laptops. Other laptops in the same class put two NVME SSDs in a RAID configuration for double the throughout.
This sort of "upgrade" nickel and diming is true of every laptop vendor, but Apple is definitely one of the worst. It's like their pricing structure is stuck in 2012
The SSDs they use really do cost that much though. Even if you got them from another manufacturer they'd be about that expensive. Apple don't use cheap SSDs...they use blazing fast, top of the line units not found on many other laptops.
If you have criticism, price isn't a valid one.
But you can definitely argue that they should have cheaper/slower options so that consumers who don't need blazing fast SSDs can still benefit from increased storage.
You can buy SSD with the same specs 3.2GB Read and 2.2GB Write for much cheaper. Samsung sells 970 EVO 1 TB m.2 for $300 [1] but you can even buy cheaper on amazon for less than $235. Keep i mind those +$400 was price for upgrade from 500GB to 1TB not the price of 1TB which is much much more.
For example Apple charges upgrading macbook pro 13 from 128GB (silly they even offer pro machine with such small SSD) to 1TB for..... $800! So in other words prices their 1TB SSD disk for ~$1000. It's insane.
Fair enough but Lenovo doesn't solder their SSD. Nothing prevents you from buying the cheapest option and upgrading yourself, e.g. Lenovo thinkpad X1 Extreme has even 2 SDD m.2 slots. You also don't have to max out you storage when buying because you can always upgrade it in the future once you need more storage or when SSD gets even cheaper few years later. On top of that those 2 m.2 slots allows you to put disk in raid 0 or use second one with optane memory once its cheaper and worth it.
Aren't those just the numbers for SATA connection vs. M.2 PCIe?
Apple doesn't manufacture SSDs, they buy them from the same companies that Dell, HP, Asus, etc... do. There isn't special Mac only models of those drives, it's all the same hardware in the end. The only advantage I see is that Apple was quick to switch to M.2 and macrumors cherry picked their competition to avoid PCs with M.2 SSDs.
Geekbench across OS's and motherboards is worthless, especially when they have different file systems. You need to look a the spec sheet for the actual hardware, or compare on the same machine with an aftermarket part.
I'm extremely skeptical that Apple has some magic SSD with 6.5x read/write speed of everyone else.
To make things worst, out of all the laptop vendor Apple is the only one with their own SSD controller, which is not a small percentage of BOM cost in SSD. And they are one of the few that gets favourable NAND pricing due to the volume they move with iPhone and iPad.
My favorite comment on this sort of thing was the claim that Apple uses components made from the powdered bones of unicorns. Sometimes I think that's not far off.
Apple now solders in the SSD into the motherboard. My guess is the cost of an entire motherboard with a larger SSD simply costs more to manufacture. Or their target audience doesn't really care about money - they care more about the "premium" experience that comes with the Apple brand.
Switching from 512MB to 1TB SSD: +$400
WHY? This is literally the only thing that bothers me about Apple pricing. I get that you pay for the design, I get the quirks like introducing touch bar, everything. But I don't get why upgrading from a $50 to a $100 SSD adds 400 dollars.