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Comment by n3k5 | Hacker News Reader

“SSDs across the line with quadruple the storage”

1/4 TB of storage in the $1800 model, 1/2 TB in the $2300 one. Ugh. (So before the lower-end one had 64GB? [Edit: Nope, 1 TB Fusion Drive, thanks smnrchrds!] That would be FULL just from installing the one game the press release mentions.)

What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices? Looking at the upgrade options (which aren't even available for the lower-end model), they charge $300 per TB.

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Don’t buy a desktop computer with non-user replaceable/upgradeable disks. In an air form factor I can buy the argument that it saves 50 grams or one mm of thickness. In a desktop it’s just ridiculous. Having any other standard than 2.5” or nvme is silly, and ideally a desktop even in the iMac form factor should have at least one empty 2.5” slot.

I don(t disagree but really a 1 TB nvme ssd is around 100e now, there is no reason for this kind of storage limits.

There's a great reason for it: profit! Apple knows their customers will pay because they don't have a choice - their computers are bought for them or their software only runs on macOS.

Yup. I've had my 2015 5k iMac apart a couple of times, and it's not for the faint of heart. Screen is glued on, takes a few hours, and for certain tasks the entire computer has to be taken apart. Nothing like the drive swap on my mom's ancient 2008ish (?) iMac where you just suction cup the screen off and the drive is right there.

I accidentally ordered the 'wrong' iMac (256gb SSD) which turned out to be the right option because the fusion drives seem to have issues. Had a 2TB SSD hanging off the back for the past 6 months until i finally went to install it internally. Sadly, if you didn't order your machine with a SATA drive, it doesn't have a SATA Cable -- hence having to disassemble the entire thing to get to the plug on the logic board that lets you add a drive.

> So before the lower-end one had 64GB?

No, the lower end ones came with "Fusion Drive", that was 32-128 GB of SSD merged with a 1TB HDD presented as a single disk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Drive

They dropped down to less than that in the middle, almost completely negating their benefit since everything something you needed would always end up on the slow spinny drive :/

The audacity they had selling spinning drives for personal computing in 2020.

Meh - my Mom's iMac has the 2TB fusion drive and it works surprisingly well. When I dual boot it into bootcamp with Windows you can tell the SSD caching is not there; it's pretty obvious. Sticking a 32GB SSD (formatted NTFS) and dedicating it to readyboost helps a bit, but it's still no where near as effective as fusion under Mac OS. Obviously being pure SSD would be better, but when she got it almost five years ago that much SSD - even third party - would have been cost prohibitive and it's still pretty expensive to get 2TB as all SSD.

I’ve been very happy with the 3TB Fusion drive in my 2014 27”, it’s hugely more performant than a bare hard drive. I’ll probably be getting a new one with a 4TB SSD, but that will make the new machine over a grand more expensive than my old machine was. These new SSDs had better be zippy.

> What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices?

The kind where Apple can make a 300% or more margin, knowing that people will still pay.

Don't think Apple have ever sold SSD upgrades at anything remotely resembling competitive $/TB prices. Clearly they don't need too because people still buy their machines.

They learned their lesson and made storage, RAM, etc. non-user replaceable in newer versions. You used to be able to buy a Mac from Apple and upgrade its RAM at a reasonable price on your own. Not anymore.

Why do their customers tolerate this?! I know some people love Apple (their hardware does look great), but this is extremely annoying.

Because it’s the only supported way to run macOS

It is indeed annoying and expensive. I still prefer their OS/hardware combo over anything else on the market. YMMV.

Because not everyone can be a computer nerd.

Apple has put a huge amount of real effort into direct outreach and support of their customers, really.

Microsoft chased business.

Apple chased people.

Google is chasing its own tail.

For the markup over the retail price of the SSD, someone else does the installation, validation, built dumb stupid restore and backup services to boot.

Dell? Lenovo? Microsoft? Still ramming bloatware down your throat and persona non grata in malls or shopping centers, or wherever a digital nomad might be roaming.

Apple built a hardware and software ecosystem for normies. Free from the Machiavellian incantations of pretentious experts with their opinions on memory layouts, how big their data is, when people just want to edit and backup files.

People think the markup is worth it to avoid IT people. Can’t say I blame them. Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters.

That’s why people pay the markup.

I agree with your overall idea, but not your sentiment. I think that plenty of computer nerds use Macs. It's still a popular platform for software developers and computer enthusiasts. There's no need for gatekeeping between "normies" and "computer nerds."

>Have you worked with the “professional” level IT crowd? Alpha bro sausage fest and foot fungus eaters.

I work at a network security company and a very small percentage fit your ignorant stereotype of them. Overall its the best group of people I have met in my entire life.

You run into way more "Alpha bro sausage fests" when you hang out with "normies".

You seem to be really angry at people who make choices different from yours. So much sarcasm and contempt for others here.

Anyway, if you want to get into it... Microsoft dominated the consumer market in the 1990s. The same people you say who were not nerds and didn't care ... Didn't care to get an Apple machine either, they got whatever everybody else got, which were Wintel PCs. Most didn't care if something else had a nicer design or UI or was friendlier or more efficient. It was Win9x almost everywhere.

I think this negates your "Microsoft went after businesses" hypothesis somewhat. They had total domination everywhere, and maybe got a little lazy or complacent and the lead eroded, at the same time Apple got Jobs back and grew as a consumer brand due to iPod etc. But Microsoft is still a major force outside of techie circles.

> Microsoft dominated the consumer market in the 1990s.

Microsoft dominated everything in the 1990s. Apple more or less lost it all.

> Most didn't care if something else had a nicer design or UI or was friendlier or more efficient.

Macs weren't very good in the 90s. They weren't fast, they weren't pretty, and they were quite expensive. The original iMac changed that in a fairly big way. It was more affordable and a lot more approachable than pretty much any other PC on the market and non-business consumers loved it.

Every successive generation of the Mac has shaved of just a little bit more of the consumer end of the PC market. Then the iPad came along and completely crushed the low end Netbooks. So now Apple has much of the mid-low end consumer space with the iPad and the upper end of consumer space (and a big chunk of professionals who have the choice) with the Mac.

Microsoft still truly owns corporate PCs and gamer space though.

Microsoft is definitely not a major force outside of tech circles.

Apple alone sells about the same amount of phones+tablets than all of the personal computers sold in the world (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-01-1...) and it only has 13% market share.

The PC market is tiny compared to the mobile market.

Well, here's my reasoning why I'd happily pay Apple the price for the upgrades: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24052506

Apple supports their hardware (both repairs and software updates) for much longer than anyone else ever. While I have no qualms about opening up my Dell desktop, I wouldn't dare touch a laptop. Laptops, even before Apple soldered the components in, were extremely fragile. My Sony Vaio for example had a broken key and the only option was to replace the entire keyboard.

In essence, I'd rather go with a company that will fix my hardware even if they charge me for it. Rather than a company (like HTC/Sony) where I have to wait many many weeks if at all and software upgrades cut off in under two years.

But apple laptop repairs are basically the price of a new machine, and they've had severe quality problems for a few years.

May as well but a new Dell every 2 years for half the price

And give up MacOS, Photos, iMovie, Time Machine, a bunch of Mac only apps and those 5K displays? Yeah.... not happening.

I used to build gaming PCs for myself and friends, salvage laptops from parts picked up at auction, etc. But I'm no longer interested in doing that. I'd much rather just buy the computer I need and not fuss with it. I think both of those "modes" are completely valid, and it's great that there are many options on the market for people in both groups.

Is it perhaps "annoying in theory" that I couldn't upgrade my Mac's hardware if I wanted to? I suppose so. But I'm never going to want to do that, so I don't experience any practical annoyance. I suspect my experience matches the overwhelming majority of Apple's customers and potential customers.

> But I'm never going to want to do that, so I don't experience any practical annoyance.

It seriously looks like finding an excuse.

Before switching to Macs I used to build my own machines. You want to know how many times I upgraded any of them? Never. Seriously, I specced them out quite generously and never needed to, they lasted as long as I intended them to. Now I’m a Mac user it’s the same thing. I’ll spec out a 27” with plenty of headroom and Ill be done.

> You want to know how many times I upgraded any of them? Never.

I did it several times. Seriously, upgrade is advantage. Some of Apple fanboys can deny it, but better to have that possibility.

And Apple SSD specs in 2020 makes me laughing. But I'm not whining, you want mac - be ready to pay premium price or spend time with hackintosh. It's just business.

Oh come on, Toms Hardware did a roundup of desktop SSDs a few months ago. The iMac drives beat all but one of them, the Sabrent Rocket and that comes in at £750 for a 4TB card.

So sure Apple storage is pricey, and if you’re willing to compromise on performance you can get something that looks equivalent for a lot less, or something actually equivalent for a bit less. But there are a lot of other things about Apple gear you can’t get anywhere else full stop, at any price.

But Apple is supposed to be marketed towards people who don't care about specs.

Why did it suddenly become important in your example?

According to who? Everybody cares about value for money. Specs aren't the only reason a product is valuable though, of course. I pay a mark up on Apple gear because of the value I get from the software and customer service, but I still need effective tools and that means up to scratch spec-wise.

I agree it is. I still build all my desktop PC's for myself. I've been doing it for over 20 years, and will do so in the future. Back in the day you could really upgrade Mac's. I had a PowerMac 7500 in which I had upgraded the CPU, storage, memory and Video Cards, even the older MacPro's you could do this. I think you can upgrade the CPU's on the newer Mac Pro's although, it's a decent amount of work to do so.

I have tried linux on a laptop and the battery life was abysmal (it was an older Thinkpad X1). With macos (which I don't particularly like) I get a solid dev experience and reliable battery life. Plus, their hardware is untouchable IMO.

I have a linux desktop that works well, but I can't always work on it unfortunately.

I can't remember the last time I upgraded the memory/disk in one of my computers. It really is a non-issue for the majority. There are other issues that are much more important to me.

The iMac and Mac Pro has user upgradeable RAM.

https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/

You are right. But you used to be able to do that to any Mac. And I fully expect the ARM Macs to get rid of this feature. Though I would be happily surprised if they don't.

I don't expect them to, but I don't not expect them to, if that makes sense -- it feels like an "all bets are off" kind of thing to me. The industrial design of the iMac is likely to finally change when it goes ARM, and it doesn't strike me as impossible that they'll make it slightly more open, or at least not make it worse.

On the one hand, Apple loves to eliminate options and lock things down, both for quasi-defensible reasons like simplifying product lines and for less defensible ones like increasing profit margins (and making everything obsessively thinner, like they're in the grip of some industrial design anorexia). On the other, their most recent hardware design changes have often shown response to customer complaints (e.g., replacing the butterfly keyboard with an improved iteration of the "Magic" keyboard) -- and, if they really intended to lock down the Mac like iOS, the move to ARM and the sweeping UX changes in macOS Big Sur would almost certainly have been when that happened. The fact that it hadn't happened makes me considerably more skeptical it's going to. (I'm also more skeptical now that iOS will ever be allowed to blossom into a full general-purpose OS, but that's a different topic.)

As an aside, I'm not sure whether adding the T2 chip would make it more complicated to use a third-party SSD. It's my understanding they function as the SSD controller and do some kind of wonky things, but I am not taking the time to look that up and could be completely wrong. :)

I feel like they are taking a page out of consoles, at least if the iPad's influence is to be felt on future Macs. Relatively rigidly defined hardware specs and the apps are designed to take that into account.

On the 27" iMac, the memory upgrades are able to be done easily by the user. The 21" Models require taking it to an Apple Store to do so. I believe the iMac Pro also needs to be taken apart in order to upgrade the RAM.

The difficulty of lugging a 27" machine around is probably the only reason they make it user upgradable.

https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2016/06/img_0...

New MacMini is upgradable as well. I just put 32GB in mine.

but SSD is soldered on motherboard though. previous models allowed to change storage..

Franky I don’t think people upgrading their own machines ever played into this.

I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time.

If you’re someone who didn’t want to pay the Apple premium before they took user upgrades away, it seems a little unlikely you’ll be happy to stomach them after. Rather you would just do without (of course there will be some who do upgrade, but I suspect they’re in the minority).

> I suspect the vast majority of people who pay for the upgrades are businesses or consultants where the Apple upgrade price is fairly negligible compared to cost of their professional time.

Yes exactly. The premium on my time has been gradually edging out in my priorities. I'd rather pay a little extra to have something already there than spend the same amount in my own time instead. It's a fair tradeoff. "But there's not much time involved, it's a ripoff," say many. But there is time involved for people who don't regularly upgrade computers. Figuring out what to buy, the best place to buy it, then the process of doing the upgrade yourself (if it's possible) is not a trivial amount of time unless you do this often enough.

Let's say you can upgrade a hard drive in 2 hours total, which is conservative -- the total time of researching what to buy, reading how to install it, ordering it, opening the package, putting in the drive, configuring the stuff you need to do, if necessary. Even at two hours, for my wage, that's about $200 of my time. I'd rather just spend the $200 or even a little more to not deal with it. And in reality, for me at least, it would take more than 2 hours of my time all-in anyway.

One example, just so you know how much you are being ripped off... Yes, this is actually a trivial amount of time even if you do it once a decade.

Last time I checked buying 32 GB of ram for the imac was about $175, apple took $850 to upgrade from the base 8 GB to 32 GB...

Replacing them wouldn't take many minutes.

(Or - you could buy 64 GB for $350 (something apple didn't even offer, I guess the uint32 would overflow)).

And realizing that $850 is effectively for 24GB, because Apple was already compensated for the 8GB in the base price.

Upgrading RAM is much easier than upgrading storage, since storage is stateful and backups are never quite right.

That doesn't apply on a new machine.

Upgrading the RAM on a Macbook used to be a five minute process: Order "macbook ram" from the online retailer of your choice, pop out the battery using a coin, slide the RAM into the slot. Done. Anybody could do it.

The only ones that had anything close to reasonable prices were the 2012-2013 MacBook Airs. The base one came with 128GB(which was decent at the time) and upgrading to 256 or 512 wasn't a lot more than those drives cost at retail.

Throughout its history, Apple went back and forth between reasonable memory upgrades and ridiculous memory upgrades. They seem to have settled on a general trend recently - if the user can do it, like in a Mac Pro or iMac, charge a ridiculous amount. If it's not user accessible memory, like in a portable, charge a more reasonable (but admittedly still on the expensive side) for memory upgrades.

I bought a tricked out iMac last year and the only thing I didn't upgrade was the memory. Got 32 GB from Other World Computing at the same time for a much more sane price.

Apple NVMe disks are fast as hell - faster than any other single disk else I’ve used, outside of the dell NVMe disks we have in some of our servers that cost like $3000 each. I can also trash whatever disks Apple is using for years without ever running into failure, whereas I’ve blown out the wear leveling on plenty of “affordable” SSDs.

The iMac competes via its 5K display and having macOS in general. Remember that Apple’s comparable offerings for this tier display were priced at $1299, in the same price range as many 5K displays.

The $1800 price point isn’t hard to grasp once you consider the display.

EDIT: I previously compared to / referenced possibly sub-$1000 5K monitors, but it seems the ones I was looking at in that range were actually 4K.

It’s like buying a 5k display and getting a subsidized computer. There’s ~1 5k monitor on the market today (LG)?

I wonder how expandable this is? Buy the bottom end machine with the CPU you want and upgrade SSD and RAM? I would imagine SSD is upgradeable but RAM soldered onto the mobo?

On Apple laptops "SSDs" are also soldered PCIe flash memory chips or something like that, so maybe on this very thin desktop computer they will also be doing that.

27" iMacs have typically featured 4 memory slots in an easily accessible panel on the back:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201191#install1

And https://www.apple.com/imac/specs/ (click 27-inch) says

> four SO-DIMM slots, user accessible

Thanks. Hopefully the SSD is accessible too. I have a ~2010 iMac 27" and I had to pull of the front glass of the monitor and disassemble half the computer to replace the HDD with an SSD. That was a gigantic PITA.

I think the SSDs on all the T2 computers are built-in to the mobo — the T2 is the disk controller — so not even a removable card on the back side like the iMacs models up to now.

and it's interesting, hard to find a 5k "retina"; was looking at this, but other than the hard to find (these days) LG model, everything from the usual suspects (dell, etc) gives you some gigantic screen at a lesser DPI...

> people still buy their machines

Sure, but more would buy at lower prices.

That said I don't doubt that Apple has researched this a zillion ways, and this price point is there for solid reasons.

> Sure, but more would buy at lower prices.

Well, sure, that's just the law of demand. If Apple's goal was simply to ship the most products as possible in the short term, they would sell them for a penny until they ran out of money.

True.

My only point was that "people still buy" is not much of an argument.

In hindsight, I didn't contribute anything of value to the discourse by that...

"People still buy and Apple is wildly successful" is a pretty decent argument though.

Same can be said about other exclusive brands.

Apple intentionally prices a lot of customers out of their market. Their monetary strategy relies on it, oddly enough. If they sold to more people, they’d run into many more issues being seen as a monopoly.

Tim Cook spelled it out pretty clearly to Congress when he testified last week; Apple does not have majority market share in any market they’re in. Not in smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, or wearables. And they don’t want to have more market share. The inflated prices and being seen as a “luxury brand” is a great way for them to continue making a huge profit while restricting market share to the point that they can skirt around most monopoly law.

The downside there is to maintain growth, they need to continually push into new markets, which they’ve been doing about once every 5 years (desktops -> laptops -> phones -> tablets -> wearables -> automotive/AR?)

"Veblen goods"?

I imagine they also reduce their support resources, and improve their customer retention, by pricing where they do. Low-cost shoppers are going to be hard to retain.

>Apple does not have majority market share in any market they’re in.

That is his spin. iOS has majority market in US ( over 50% ), and iMessages etc. So it is not a niche.

Of course he would like to use Shipment, Brand or whatever other matrix to prove. Although congress seems to be dump enough ( or not ) to not act those questions.

And that is speaking from an Apple Fan.

But isn't it great to show that you can afford Apple?

As I see it it's basically price discrimination.

Apple wants a certain profit margin for the model as a whole. Yet for customers who will never pay prices that will give Apple that full margin, they offer a model at a low price point with a compressed margin, but with a painful aspect that will encourage customers who can pay to go with a higher priced unit — here, the painful thing is the small SSD size.

So the idea that the minimal-SSD model is somehow the "real" price and Apple is selling SSD space at an exorbitant markup, isn't quite right.

You could almost think of it as Apple offering a discount if you'll go with the smallest SSD, so they can capture more of the market while still keeping their average profit margins high.

If Apple charged "competitive $/TB prices", the small-SSD option would likely be more expensive, rather than the larger-SSD options being cheaper.

I think it's simpler than all that: any FRU gets a 5x price hike.

To add to that, it allows them to advertise that "prices start at..." and give an unrealistically low price, which is manipulative, to be sure.

Perhaps that's true for people who buy personal Macs, but in several companies I've worked for, the companies that buy Macs for work almost always use the smallest SSD option: you don't need a lot of local storage, since most files will be in company-managed storage systems.

Sure, there will always be customers for whom the low-price option is perfect.

Outlet malls are another form of price discrimination, as they offer lower prices for those willing to travel further to get the lower prices. But there will always be some people happen to live next to the outlet mall.

If people want to "cheap out" they can always get it with the base storage and hang a big thunderbolt drive off the back. It basically performs the same as if it was built-in, at a much lower price. One can get the entry level 27 inch imac and add storage and RAM to get a high end config on the cheap (graphics excepted).

Apple SSDs have been historically leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. Apple started using SSDs driven by PCIe while consumers were all using SATA. Jacking up the price was justified.

Not anymore. Fast NVME drives are commonplace. Unless these drives are again significantly faster than the competition, which I doubt, that's just Apple doing their thing and not adjusting fast enough.

Maybe. Also part of the RDF. I've met many Apple people who seem to believe that even today, high end Dell laptops etc. are all still SATA.

Apple's drives are no longer faster. They're fast. But high end PC drives are just as fast (and usually 1/3 the price).

HN clearly isn't the target market. When HN frets about how it isn't suitable for them, it's just a lot of meaningless bluster and noise.

Though let's be real here. I have a 2018 MBP with 256GB of storage. I have XCode, the XCode beta, Logic Pro, virtually the entire Adobe gamut of software, brew and a massive selection of brew packages, every browser, IntelliJ, GoLand, and just a tonne of crap.

I've used about 150GB. As fair disclosure I have a USB 3 1TB 970 Pro in an enclosure that I use for the occasional massive file download, purely because I'm paranoid about flash exhaustion, though by the system metrics I'm still at less than 1% wear.

Yeah, someone buying this for their kid to do their homework is going to be completely fine with 256GB. Though it's worth noting that the next option is just $200 more and gives you a faster process and 512GB. The lowest end one is just the one to frame the value, and presumably isn't their recommendation.

I agree that Apple has focused its attention exclusively on the consumer market... and that's a problem.

Developers write code for platforms that they're using. This is what drove adoption of Apple hardware in the early 2ks (a POSIX that runs MS Office!), which in turn set set the stage for the iPhone and iOS.

Unlike then, Apple now has a good grip on the consumer market: Not targetting iOS with a mobile/tablet release is a bad idea, regardless of whether or not devs are familiar with it. But OSX? There are a few areas where it's still has strong devotees: Color management in OSX is still fantastic, creating a lot of loyalty among artists, photographers, etc... It's still technically a POSIX, so it's still attractive to developers.

In short, OSX is not targetted at consumers. When someone needs a "computer" for their kid to do their homework, that's increasingly going to be an Android/iOS device.

For a platform to survive, it needs a healthy developer community. A developer community needs incentives (e.g., market-share or devs already using the platform). Right now, what are the incentives for OSX devs?

Not entirely sure if you intended to reply to my comment, however just to clarify I'm saying that this particular machine isn't for developers or hackers. Apple has different machines for different markets.

Developers buy MBPs. Industry users buy iMac Pros (which starts at 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD, going up from there) or even the goofy Mac Pro.

"When someone needs a "computer" for their kid to do their homework, that's increasingly going to be an Android/iOS device."

Lots of people do the vast majority of their "computing" on pads and smartphones, but they still like a computer on the desk for..."productivity". For many of those people, this device is more than adequate.

It seems crazy. I bought a 2TB M.2 PCIE gen 3 drive not too long ago for 200 EUR.

These drives are so tiny now they could easy offer an expansion slot which is accessible to the user, like the PS5 will. I miss the early-2000s era Apple who would actually do something like that.

At least Thunderbolt gives a theoretical 40 Gbps expansion option, if not as clean as having it built-in would be.

$100-$150 for an enclosure, so that's still going to be cheaper than Apple's markup.

I wish there was a consumer level standard for NVME drives caddies like the ones that are emerging for servers.

Like this but for consumers. https://www.anandtech.com/show/11702/intel-introduces-new-ru...

Apart from the margin argument advanced in the comments (which I agree with) this TB3 machine can be upgraded with an external drive directly attached to the PCIe bus (that TB3 interface is faster than your disk Last time I checked so supposedly no performance issue).

You may not find this adequate (actually, I don’t like it either) but it’s not an unreasonable position to take.

Having worked in the hw biz not only do memory sockets add to BOM, they reduce reliability (statistically — not on any one machine, but over your installed base)

> 1/2 TB in the $2300 one

It's $2k for the 27" with 500GB.

How much is it to get a really good quality 5k display with a Dell?

> What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using that you can't have a sensible amount of storage space at those prices?

I'm using 165GB of 500GB on my current system. Considering all the systems issued by work are configured the same and nobody complains about space issues, I don't think it's a big problem.

I'd take the 5k display over 1TB storage any time. Sadly my work issues laptops and not iMacs.

It's odd that you can't increase the storage for the £1799 / $2300 model. I don't think 256GB SSD is enough these days.

Personally, I am always inclined to buy my Apple products when travelling as most times it's a lot cheaper in the US or Singapore. I mean $2300 (incl. VAT) vs $1799+1.08=$1945 $350 cheaper.

> What kind of magic fairy dust SSDs are they using

I don't know about magic fairy dust, but Apple's SSDs are known to be phenomenally fast in benchmarks. $300/TB is compared to $200/TB aftermarket for a high end NVMe SSD. Is that markup? Yes, but it's not 300%.

But it’s intel so presumably you could beat it on an AMD with PCIE gen 4 right?

Not presumably, definately, at least in benchmarks. Max transfer rates on a current model gen4 ssd can reach upwards of 5GB/second, but top-end gen3 model is faster at other things. The Samsung 970 pro is still the fastest nvme consumer disk in almost all categories, besides max transfer rate, due to its usage of 100% mlc, instead of qlc & mlc cache.

When SSDs were the hot new thing yeah, apple had top end SSDs compared to the competition, but today... https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-SSD-AP1024-7171-Benchmar...

Apple uses a file system especially designed for fast file transfer speeds, and guess what benchmarks they're using to declare their SSDs superior? With newer M.2 drives like the 970 EVO or Sabrent Rocket Apple has no valid excuse for charging so damn much for storage...

> With newer M.2 drives like the 970 EVO or Sabrent Rocket Apple has no valid excuse for charging so damn much for storage...

Can you show any other major manufacturer that includes a competitive internal drive for significantly less? Because otherwise you're comparing very different things. Dell also upcharges $300 for a 1TB NVMe SSD.

"If I buy it separately and install it myself" isn't a valid market comparison. If you want to do that, then do it.

https://laptopmedia.com/laptop-m-2-ngff-ssd-compatibility-li...

Many (most?) modern laptops seem to have an m.2 expansion slot. You could for a fraction of the price put in a 2TB SSD.

Can you get your friendly local repair shop to solder on a bigger BGA or are they DRM'd?

Are you sure the newer iMacs have soldered on storage? I was under the impression they use m.2 SSDs.

They don't. I wouldn't call it user replaceable, since it's difficult, but no soldering required.[0]

Many vendors (including Apple premium resellers) offer replacing the drives for whatever you like.

[0] iFixIt https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iMac+Intel+27-Inch+EMC+2546+Bla...

Nice! You're right, that procedure is a bit yuck, but so it goes on macs these days.

Not clear if this will be possible with the 2020 model though, since it has the T2 chip.

Can it be high endurance drives?

My MacBook Pro has used 5% of its SSD endurance in 6 years or so? It has a 1TB SSD.

I'm not filling it up, but I'm not trying to optimize the writes or something?

For all of the handwringing over SSD endurance figures over the years, the fact of the matter is that normal use won't ever get close to using it up. The only people who ever really needed to worry about those figures were doing heavy data processing every day.

I actually do heavy data processing but not every day.

It can be hundreds of RAW images (50MB/image) or the simulation software I'm working on which can generate GBs of output in 3 seconds if I leave the wrong flags on.

In my other workstation I can actually see the big jumps of write accumulation when I do these tasks via SMART (I log the data periodically).

So mine was a honest question rather than covert fanboyism.

I'm actually impressed that you're dumping that much data regularly on Apple's notoriously undersized drives.

My other workstation is a Linux machine. I use the Mac as the portable one so, they can replace each other at any moment's notice.

This is why I paid or a 1TB SSD on the Mac. I guessed that I'd wear it down faster but nope, that thing holds.

I would be interested in hearing more about how you log / see this - a real world case always beats benchmarks

Actually, my method is very simple. Every 10 minutes I log the Total LBAs Written attribute from the SSD to a log file alongside a long time stamp.

Periodically I graph the data with GNUPlot. There's a slight slope most of the time. In some regions there are jumps. These are generally when I seriously work with my software, generating logs and other output.

System is on another SSD and swap is on a high performance HDD so, they do not affect the graphs I'm getting.

That jumps helped me to catch two KDE bugs. One was an isolated case with akonadi. Other one was reported and possibly KRunner's bookmarks extension will see some more revisions to eliminate disk trashing.

Addendum: When I have spare time, I'd write a small HTML/JS file to get the data from log file and graph it interactively. A both fun and useful project.

The Sabrent Rocket 1TB, a reasonable, fast $130 SSD, has an endurance rating of 1665 TBW. To have hit that rating, you'd have to have written 760 GB to it every day over those six years. At 5%, that's still 38 GB a day, every day.

If you were spending more to get better endurance, you could have just bought the 2TB version, which would have guaranteed 1422 GB/day.

(NB: SSDs suffer write amplification, so if you actually need 1.4TB of writes per day you should choose an enterprise drive instead.)

Endurance isn't a problem with SSDs for consumers, at all. Even QLC, which has significantly worse endurance than TLC, has plenty.

I'm not aware about the TBW rating of the Mac's SSD. I didn't drill into its SMART stats. Maybe I should do that. Home workstation's home is on a Samsung 860 Pro, 256GB version, which has 300TBW.

I have a slower storage tier on that computer for big files and archives so, it's only hammered when I really need that speed.

When I bought the Mac, 1TB SSD was top of the line. 2TB was not available for Mid 2014 Macs. Actually, I upgraded everything as apple could while buying it

I'm aware of the dynamics of SSD writes and TBW values. I personally don't write that brutally. Things get hot if I'm processing images or working on my software and need to see some detailed logs or interim results along the way.

If I was using my computer as an ordinary user, I'd not worry about it at all. My family's computer runs on much simpler drives and their write volume is nowhere near me.

The only constraint of price is that must be greater than cost. After that price is determined by what the customer is willing to pay based on the value they receive.

I realize that games these days are full of high detail world-building, but I shudder to think that 250-500 gb for an install is considered commonplace these days...

Yeah, entry level should be a 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM for any "premium" desktop in 2020. I'm sure some bean counter at Apple has calculated that arranging the options in this way makes more money for Apple per unit, but I can't tell you how many times I have looked at an iMac or Mac Mini and thought "that's a pretty good price", then add the correct amount of memory and disk capacity and noped right out of their website.

Schools need Macs at that price point or they can’t buy them .

Schools need Macs?

What do you mean by that?

Schools like buying Macs, and they don't particularly care about performance. The low-end iMac has always been a top seller to lower education because a kid isn't going to complain that their computer takes four minutes to boot.

That doesn't explain "Schools need Macs at that price point or they can’t buy them ."

I'm not sure what kind of explanation you're looking for beyond "more expensive Macs will not be bought".

Maybe I misread the comment but it was a response to someone noting how expensive they were... so I read it as saying that they're supposed to be that expensive so schools would buy that. That seemed odd.

Schools have historically liked buying Macs; I'm not sure how true that is anymore. Chromebooks have swept the schools, both because they're very cheap and because Google has, from what I've read, just terrific classroom management software compared to most competitors. More recently Apple has been pushing the iPad into education pretty hard -- competition from the Chromebook is arguably why the $329 iPad ($299 for education) exists. Macs are increasingly positioned as being for teachers and administrators, not students.

Schools don't need Macs... it would be the other way around iMacs need schools.

It's only rich schools that buy them, and most places that do would be better off without them.

Until you have to manage a lab full of Windows, then MAC becomes a much better value. With a Mac you don’t have to buy MS office, you get iWork. You also get iMovie, GarageBand and other Apple software that covers almost everything a typical school would need. And you never have to buy updates for either the OS or the other Apple software. You also have less malware to deal with.

Having worked at a school with labs full of Windows machines, the real cost of IT support is not to be discounted.

Maybe a Mac isn’t the best solution for everyone, but in the school environment, they’re great. Most schools have kids doing video projects, presentations, desktop publishing, etc. —- tasks for which an out of the box iMac can handle with aplomb and with minimal hassle or additional expense.

Sure there are probably FOSS alternatives, but if you are the computer lab teacher, the last thing you have time for is managing a lab full of temperamental Linux boxes and the multiple flavors of FOSS software alternatives that frankly, aren’t that good compared to what Mac gives you included. For example, what’s a FOSS version of iMovie that works so powerfully and intuitively?

Whole MS 365 suite is free for schools, even the windows licenses are free, so... What are you talking about?

I'm imagining this being said to the principal of a local rural school in, like, Ghana.

Spend $x now on Macs, or spend more later? I should hope that the principal of any school would understand basic math.

Spend later like looking for the one guy who has a Mac in the region and knows how to fix problem x? Or spending later like sending kids to extra courses because they have no idea how to operate the most common office suite on this planet? Spend later like taking that one broken device for a xxx km tour to the next Apple store? And so on...

I wonder how people here are unable to understand basic reality. Especially in third world countries.

Apple’s pricing makes sense when you realise they’re just a consumer electronics company masquerading as a luxury brand.

Most people can afford to buy an iPhone of some kind. $1000 monitor stands and expensive iMacs is what makes their brand seem luxury.

Yeah, iMacs don't really help there.

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