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Comment by Bishonen88 | Hacker News Reader

1TB SSD increase costs $800. 2TB SSD increase costs $2000 (from 2TB to 4TB).

Apple tax hits hard.

For reference, 1TB NVMe SSDs retail for $600+ and 2TB NVMe SSDs retail for $1700+. Lower-priced 2TB NVMe SSDs will probably come out soon, driving the cost down hard.

Apple is famous for paying less for hardware than any other manufacture so I don't see how MSRP is pertinent.

MSRP is what the customer can expect to pay, so gp is probably thinking of it from the consumer's perspective.

Publicly traded corporations do not extend savings created from economies of scale to their costumers - they extend them to their shareholders.

They may, if competing on price, but that is a decision for C-level executive suite with direction from the Board.

Sure. But, from his numbers, if you were buying it at MSRP as a consumer, the $800 upgrade would cost you around $1100.

Except that if there are problems with the ssd and it was built in, it’s covered by the Apple warranty.

So it's both cheaper and covered by Apple warranty (which tends to be quite good). Your point being?

It's not cheaper. $2000 is the price difference to go from the 2TB upgrade to the 4TB from Apple. $1100 is the price difference to go from 2TB to 4TB if you paid retail.

Apple is getting all of the profit that a retailer would, plus an additional $900 profit on top of that.

With the money you save you can self insure because the SSD isn't guaranteed to fail.

What numbers are you looking at? I don't see how you follow this:

> 1TB NVMe SSDs retail for $600+ and 2TB NVMe SSDs retail for $1700+.

with this:

> It's not cheaper. $2000 is the price difference to go from the 2TB upgrade to the 4TB from Apple. $1100 is the price difference to go from 2TB to 4TB if you paid retail.

I misread the above post as prices for 2/4TB SSDs instead of 1/2 TB SSDs. My bad.

The real difference between Apple and DIY is $300. On their configuration page, Apple's prices are +$800 to go to the 2TB SSD, and +$2800 to go to the 4TB SSD. That's a $2000 price jump to add 2TB. If I did it myself I could add 2TB for $1700. That means that Apple gets all the profit that a retailer would, plus $300.

A $300 premium is still a little gougey from Apple considering it takes them all of five seconds to slap the extra SSD in on the assembly line.

Is it 2x2TB or 1x4TB, though? Obviously, it'd be cheaper to do 2x2, but there's a decent chance you're actually getting 1x4 on the iMac.

The biggest NVME drive I can find is 2TB. Apple might be offering a 4TB option, but isn't that less good? You lose all your data at once instead vs losing half.

I doubt they are hurting for real estate with that screen size, it might just be better to add another M.2 spot on the board. Then they wouldn't have to push manufacturing limits to source a 4TB drive and can get higher yield 2TB drives.

But not if you consider they have to honor the warranty.

Most SSD manufacturers offer a warranty that is included in the price of the drive. The Samsung 950 PRO warranty is 5 years or 400 terabytes written.

Apple honoring the warranty costs them more than just the replacement costs of the drive. They have to deal with disassembling and reassembling, logistics, customer dissatisfaction and more.

And a year from now when those prices have been cut in half, Apple will still be charging the same amount.

A year from now there will be a modular Mac Pro.

Did Apple say that? Or are you making a prediction?

Schiller told Gruber "it is, by definition, a modular system":

https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

I remember they mentioning it during the iMac Pro announcement. I think it was Phil Schiller.

Indeed. I still can’t believe Apple pre-announced it a year in advance, so out of character for them: https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives

Well, they don't have any currently well-selling model whose sales would get ruined by the Osborne effect, and the pre-announcement may keep a few customers from defecting to Windows, Linux, or Hackintoshes.

I guess... if $449 is "$600+"...

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682014...

Well, to be fair, I was looking at the 960 Pro rather than 960 Evo. Maybe Apple will go for lower-quality components, maybe.

For comparison, 1TB NVMe SSD is $450 on Amazon, rated at 3,200 MB/s reads and 1,900 MB/s writes.

There are cheaper ones, at $290, rated at around ~$530MB/s reads and writes.

I doubt that many professionals will experience much difference between these in most applications, as most are now CPU-bound.

530MB/sec is what you would expect from a SATA3 SSD. Are you sure you're looking at the right product?

Right. No difference at all. If you're editing hours of high resolution video, you're going to notice the difference.

Video is one of a few examples when a faster SSD could make a difference. Any non-trivial operations you do on the video will still be bound by the CPU. 530MB/s is enough to completely read a 5GB video into RAM in under 10 seconds. That's orders of magnitude faster than you can edit it and then render it.

NAND SSDs have stopped improving.

Smaller lithography processes impact write cycles negatively.

The write cycles shrink faster than the capacity grows.

The same applies to storing multiple bits within a single cell via multiple voltage levels. MLC, TLC and QLC all require more accurate voltage measurements which become less and less reliable as the voltage drops with each write.

The only remaining way to increase capacity without downsides is by adding more layers.

After that there is no option other than switching away from NAND.

I had a similar issue deciding to upgrade my newest MacBook Pro. It was $400 to upgrade from something like 500GB to 1TB. I'm speechless with some of these decisions from them.

$2400 for an extra 96 GiB of RAM is even worse.

Does anyone know if these at least are nvme?

Yeah they are all nvme

Fully loaded price in the UK is £12,927.98

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