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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

The 2TB option is an extra $400. That's $200/TB. The 4TB option is $250/TB. The 8TB option is $275/TB.

That looks like planned obsolescence to me. A customer with 1TB will likely want to upgrade sooner than a customer with 8TB, so this pricing strategy discourages people from buying the more future-proof options. Other SSDs on the market tend to be cheaper per TB as you go up in size, but Apple's seem to be completely backwards (and obscenely overpriced, of course).

Or am I being too cynical here, and this is just that famous "luxury tax"?

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"Options" are a popular marketing scheme to have your customers with deep pockets subsidize a lower starting price at the bottom end while keeping the same overall margin. Doesn't matter if you're Works the same way whether you're buying a Mac, buying SaaS software, or buying a car.

Apple does use very good quality SSDs, so I would expect them to be premium priced regardless.

I've never heard of an accusation of planned obsolescence based on price before.

> A customer with 1TB will likely want to upgrade sooner

Though I have no data to back it up, I think this is your mistaken assumption. I think it's much more likely that people upgrade because of CPU/RAM than disk space.

Yeah you can throw an external SSD on a thunderbolt connection and unless you're editing video you'll never know the difference.

Depends on what you compare it to.

A basic 8TB SSD is about $500, but it's also more than 10x slower than what's in the Mac. A fast 8TB SSD from Sabrent, which is still slower than what's in the Mac, is about $1800.

Of course not everyone needs a blazing fast SSD for all their stuff. But that's why it has USB ports in the back.

Those are desktops, and Thunderbolt/USB 4 allows for fast SSDs. You can have the OS installed on an external drive too.

It's much less of an issue there than on laptops.

A lot of professionals use external drives for their work, and Apple has the right of charging beyond market value per TB of storage because the space is integrated, so you'll find that most people will purchase on-the-curve storage and rely on high-performance commodity drives for day-to-day artifacts and asset work.

That seems pretty typical for Apple. Upgrading from 512gb to 1tb on a MacBook Air is $200.

I would argue that the professionals they're targeting are storing terabytes of assets on network-attached storage, not on the local machine.

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