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Comment by nothis | Hacker News Reader

I checked their store out of curiosity.

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.

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Because they don't use slow SSDs.

The read / write speeds on the SSD in the Macbook Pro are insane.

see: https://www.macrumors.com/2018/07/13/2018-macbook-pro-fastes...

we are talking at least 6x what other laptops use.

I don’t doubt they are faster than other laptop SSDs, but those results look quite suspicious.

They are not 'suspicious' they really are that fast compared to the standard cheap SSDs.

It's the difference between cheap SATA SSDs and expensive NVMe PCIe SSDs.

Search for comps on any online retailer and you'll see how expensive and fast those are.

> It's the difference between cheap SATA SSDs and expensive NVMe PCIe SSDs.

> Search for comps on any online retailer and you'll see how expensive and fast those are.

$250 for a 1TB 970 EVO Plus. Which has better write throughput.

Here is what Lenevo charges for a similar upgrade using a slightly slower SSD

https://imgur.com/a/ug87MaI

That 250$ more to upgrade to the 1tb from the 512gb.

the retail price of the upgrade is 450$

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.

You are moving the goal posts of the original comment.

OP said it's a 50$ upgrade.

It is not.

It's a 450$ retail price and 250$ sale price for a slightly slower SSD.

Yes, companies make money when they do things for you.

> OP said it's a 50$ upgrade.

And OP was wrong, that doesn't make you right:

> They are not 'suspicious' they really are that fast compared to the standard cheap SSDs.

They're not that fast compared to SSDs retailing for half the price of the upgrade.

> Search for comps on any online retailer and you'll see how expensive and fast those are.

I did and they're not.

> It's a 450$ retail price and 250$ sale price for a slightly slower SSD.

No matter how much you hate it, it's still a $250 retail price: https://www.newegg.com/samsung-970-evo-plus-1tb/p/N82E168201... And a $125 upgrade: https://www.newegg.com/samsung-970-evo-plus-500gb/p/N82E1682...

Not to mention those are retail prices, not wholesale prices. Which includes Retailer or Distributor's margin.

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.

[1] https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/2018-macbook-pro-benchmar...

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.

More problematically, it also has serious latency degradation issues when working outside the SLC cache: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13078/the-intel-ssd-660p-ssd-...

That's outdated now. Most high end PC laptops use NVMe drives, and good NVMe drives are only slightly slower than the apple proprietary drives.

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.

And in those workstation class laptops (that use NVMe PCIe SSD), do you only pay 50$ more to upgrade from 512gb to 1tb?

No one is saying those SSDs are Apple exclusive, they are however expensive.

It's about $100 more to go from 512 GB to 1 TB, and these are better than what Apple puts in their machines. https://www.mrmemory.co.uk/ssd-upgrades/lenovo/thinkpad/p1

That's not how much Lenovo actually charges.

They charge 450$ retail and 250$ on special for a slightly slower SSD

https://imgur.com/a/ug87MaI

"On special." This is merely typical price for a reseller. The point is that Apple is overcharging at least 2x compared to competitors.

If you are surprised that Apple charge more, welcome to the real world.

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.

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.

Most NVMe drives use 4 lanes.

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.

A fast 1TB NVMe SSD costs $105, and that's retail. So your narrative doesn't make much sense. 10x cost can only be explained by profit margins.

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.

Here's how the 2018 Macbook's SSD stacks up against the competition: https://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2018/07/macbookprossdt...

That's why there's such a huge price difference. Not because they're randomly picking high upgrade prices to screw customers.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-st...

As I posted elsewhere in this thread; Lenovo charges 450$ retail and 250$ on special for a similar upgrade.

https://imgur.com/a/ug87MaI

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.

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.

Sadly, this is basically true of every major OEM. It's just you generally have recourse to make the change yourself.

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.

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