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akamel

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.

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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-...

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.

That's outdated now.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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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