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Comment by dlevine | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised they are still shipping these with 256GB of storage base. I had a Macbook with a ~500GB SSD in 2012 (I installed it), and a 500GB spinning disk in like 2008 (also user installed).

A 500GB SSD can be had for <$50 these days, and a 1TB for <$100. Still plenty of profit for Apple, even if they bump up the base storage to 512GB and make 1TB a $200 upgrade...

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Are you familiar with the concept of "pricing ladders"? The point of the entry level product is not to simply be "the economy model", it's to be feature deficient in just the right way to make you take a "step up" the ladder to the next model.

What I've observed is that Apple does this by targeting the base model with a storage option that's just below what's probably the sweet spot for price / usefulness in the current market. You'll likely be just frustrated enough to take the step up that ladder.

MKBHD has a very fast explainer on this effect in iPad pricing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiNYOZZLOyg

They do this trick with RAM/disk configs for all their product lines. This basically means that any useful config is relatively expensive, and I would never recommend their entry-level models to anyone.

Do regular users use more than 250GB or so of local storage? Large media collections are likely stored on a NAS or external HDDs and the local disk is more for the OS, apps, and scratch space. Nowadays many files are on the cloud as well. Developers, video editors, and other people who actually handle large amounts of data locally will likely purchase an upgrade.

While they're Linux systems pretty much all my desktops and laptops only use 50-100GB of disk space, and I still issue 128GB SSDs with no complaints as everything's stored on the network. Considering how expensive storage is on Apple devices I don't want to be paying the premium for 1TB of NVME which I won't use.

I think “regular users” are very unlikely to use any sort of external drive, other than maybe some sort of cloud service.

Exactly this.

Regular users keep their photos and videos in the cloud these days, whether iCloud or Google Drive.

And video editors are going to be using external drives anyways, the internal SSD is just for scratch.

If Macs were used more for gaming then that would be a major reason... but they're not.

I bought my wife a base storage mini with this assumption and her iCloud messages was 95gb because of all the pictures and videos sent. There is no way to offload it or move it to store on my nas, or an external HDD that I could find

It's a very intentional thing to try to make you need more space.

I pay $30 a month for the 6tb iCloud plan and could find no other workarounds other than logging her out of iMessage - which is absolutely rubbish

If her iCloud backup is 95gb then it only costs $3/mo. for the 200 GB plan [1].

If you're paying $30/mo. for the 6 TB storage plan then that's because you're choosing to store a ton of stuff there. It's certainly not because of your wife's messages. And you're making my point for me -- I do the same! $10/mo for 2 TB. It's great.

Cloud pricing is pretty decently competitive when you compare it to building your own storage with the same reliability, which is going to involve redundant on-site hard drives in a NAS, and an extra off-site backup.

You can also just delete the largest iMessage media files directly from the phone, there's literally a feature for that. Since most people don't really care about saving any of the videos or images after they've been seen, or you can save them individually to your Photos at the time if you do care. I do a mass-delete every year or two.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/108047

We pay for iCloud regardless because we've crossed the 2tb threshold for our devices and our kids devices backups + photos and videos.

Deleting the iMessage data off the device is not feasible after like ten minutes it was showing me 20 at a time that had small sizes relative to the amount left to delete. Thank you for your attempt at helping though

Arguably Apple would love to push people who handle large amounts of data into absolutely unreasonably priced upgrades, and people with large media collections into lifelong iCloud subscriptions.

It's not especially hard to fill up 250GB over time. Apps these days seem to have little concern about conserving disk space, and many are super bloated themselves. A hobbyist wanting to enjoy their iPhone camera's capabilities on that pretty 4.5K display might find themselves filling the drive awfully quickly with 75MB RAW files and 400MB/minute video, plus Photoshop itself taking up 10GB.

Macs clearly aren't a first choice for serious gaming, but a casual Mac user who were to want to, say, try the top selling Mac game on Steam—Baldur's Gate 3—would find that at 150GB it'd use up nearly their whole drive. I've certainly had to help a bunch of family and friends sort out why their Mac kept telling them their startup disk was full.

I'm a lifelong Mac user who switched to a DIY Linux machine (6TB storage & 64GB of RAM) primarily over this issue. Sometimes looking at the base specs of new Apple products and the cost for upgrades feels a little like if the base model Porsche 911 came with a go-kart engine, and for another $100k you could get an actual flat six.

This reads like Apple Stockholm syndrome.

I haven't bought a device with less than 1TB storage in a decade. The users that you're talking about would be happy with a Chromebook or iPad, not a $1k+ machine that ostensibly is for "pro" work. In fact the last time I did it, it was an Apple device and I wouldn't buy one again.

AAA video games will take 100GB of local storage. I'm not claiming Apple is good for gaming, but they pretend Macs can game - never mind you can't fit many games on an entry level Mac.

I haven't checked recently but iirc a hefty chunk of disk was used by the system too - so 256GB isn't really 256GB for a user. It's more like 128.

Schools and companies often buy low-storage configurations.

To add on, my phone is 512 let alone what I want my laptop to be. Apple claims that their ssds are magically super fast as if they don't use the same technology all other high end ones do, it's just that Apple massively overcharges for them, no wonder they make so much profit.

If a user only needs 256g then fine, but it's just creating ewaste as if they sell it 2ndhand there's fewer people that will want it.

My next machine will probably be 512GB model, but I’m still doing fine with my 256 GB Air and a 4TB NAS. I use an action camera for mountain biking and I take photos with a 24Mpix mirrorless camera. I just offload the material to the NAS as soon as possible, and I don’t game on the thing.

Also, macOS definitely doesn’t take up 128 GB.

I have near 300GB of just photos/videos.

Video games now take up 50-100GB too.

Mate, I have VM images that are bigger than 250GB. Xcode, libraries, local cache of my cloud storage...already full. It's inadequate on purpose to get you to pay the exorbitant uplift for a higher storage tier. 1TB should be base spec these days.

You just made me nostalgic for the intel MBP days when you could swap the factory HDD and optical drive for two SSDs

I still use one of these for media viewing on my TV, great machines as you could upgrade disks to 2TB and memory to 32 GB. This is for machines that are 12 years old! And Apple is still selling new machines with ridiculously lower specs.

But how will they sell their cloud storage then?

If only it were possible to plug some external storage into these machines (say M.2 NVMe over Thunderbolt.)

A relatively generous interpretation is that they want to keep down the price of the entry model. They make their own silicon now, only three different sizes so it's not viable to differentiate on compute power. The easy way out is to put too little storage and memory in the base model and make customers pay through the nose for more storage and memory.

Imagine you are running a digital design shop and you want to determine two things:

- the software that your users are running is licensed. - the media that is produced is stored on a central resource that's tightly managed and comprehensively backed up.

If so, maybe having client machines with minimal disk space is what you want?

This is a desktop so I think the assumption is that the savvy can attach a USB3/4 device with appropriate storage (e.g. for your massive photo library - it's easy to change the location).

Except that storing your iCloud Photo Library on an external drive is a PITA, as multiple daemons (photoanalysysd being one of them) will randomly activate themselves to do their shit, making it difficult to predict when the drive will not be able to be gracefully ejected. It needs to be a permanent external disk.

We're talking iMac - so it's effectively permanent external storage.

... in macOS all drives always need to be "gracefully ejected".

The problem with any sort of external storage device is how easy it is to accidentally unplug it while something is using it.

Those are the things that Apple does to milk you the most money.

To think mid to premmium smartphones come with 256GB by default and 8~16GB of RAM.

Hello from The Land Of Perverse Incentives :( https://support.apple.com/en-us/108047#nasalac

Hey I've seen this one, this is a classic!

These are not ordinary SSDs, which (via SATA) are dirt slow in comparison.

Ordinary SSDs have been NVMe for years and have similar performance to Apple NVMe SSDs.

It depends what the person meant by ordinary, but if ordinary just generally refers to "off-the-shelf" or commodity SSDs, then we've been able to get equivalent or better performing NVMe SSDs for a long time, for a small fraction of the price. Within what you can get retail, I think you'd still want the higher end of it for comparable speeds and yields, but would still save A LOT doing so.

What year are you currently living in? A good 2TB Gen5 NVMe with W/R speed upto 7,000MB/s can be had for less than $200 during sales that happen multiple times a year. Go down 1 tier lower to 4,000-5,000MB/s and you can have one for just $120. Nobody puts SATA in premium laptops, hasn't been the case for quite the few years, you got brainwashed good by Apple.

Stop repeating Apple's marketing BS that their SSDs are magically faster, especially since Apple do not manufacture them.

Look up and understand how the hardware works first before you shill Apple's stuff.

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