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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Base model is 256GB configurable up to 2TB, all others start at 512GB, the M4 Pro model can go up to 8TB

It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly the 8TB drive on the Pro is at least in line with the top of the line 8TB NVMe SSDs you can buy though there are cheaper options at about $600 vs the $1200 Apple is charging.

That's regular Apple pricing for you. Great deals on the baseline models, but insane margins on the upgrades that make them usable. And of course the ability to upgrade the devices yourself has been phased out in the name of performance and power efficiency

in the name of [share price] performance and [market] power efficiency

Edit: sorry, answered to the wrong post.

I just checked some Dell prices: $730 to upgrade an XPS desktop from 512GB to 4TB (Apple charges $1200), or $508 to upgrade an Optiplex tower from 256GB to 2TB QLC, or $654 to upgrade it from 256GB to 2TB TLC (Apple charges $800). Scalping on upgrade pricing is something all the PC OEMs do.

Yeah, but the 5 minute job of installing a cheap retail SSD in that Dell machine yourself is still an option which Apple has removed from all but the Mac Pro, which offsets any SSD savings by being $3000 more expensive than an equivalently specced Mac Studio.

Right. The repairability argument is the reasonable discussion to have. The silly pricing games are more of a red herring.

I think it's more relevant with Apple because they've removed all the competition for basically all upgrades to their devices by either soldering things to the board or bundling them into their SOC. When there's no alternative their prices become the only option.

The Mac Studio technically still has socketed SSDs, which presumably cuts costs by not having to manage a separate motherboard SKU for every SSD capacity, but they went out of their way to design a proprietary SSD module format rather than just using the standard...

Kind of, they were socketed NAND cards and the controller lived on the mainboard, so as far as getting out of the problem of Apple entirely setting the prices for everything it's not relevant. As far as I'm finding no one managed to find a way to create a compatible card to create an avenue for DIY upgrades. I've found a few upgrades but they consist of buying an entire second Mac Studio to harvest the drive from.

Giles from Polysoft is manufacturing 3rd party mac studio nand cards. There is still a problem sourcing nand because apple doesn't let the owm sell to anyone but them.

I thought I had seen something about that but couldn't find the actual boards mentioned for sale. Sounds even worse though because it should be possible but Apple being Apple has ensured there's no source for Giles or other companies to perform repairs.

There's an industry in China for desoldering and reusing apple bands. Unfortunately getting new oem nands is going to take legislation.

Yes, though that relies on the product being fairly popular and for the chip to be stable for a while for it to be a useful source. Mac Studio NAND chips aren't going to be readily available from them unless they happen to be a shared part from a more popular device.

All macs use the same compatible nand chips.

Is there any compatibility between generations, eg. harvesting NAND from a M1 generation machine to upgrade a M3 (or now M4) generation machine?

As far as I'm aware, yes they're all compatible.

Apples segmentation takes place in the nand firmware. The firmware contains the location in the storage configuration. And this may or may not be rewriteable. Iboffrc has done a video explaining how some of it works. It's all from reverse engineering though.

I think repairable or not, the pricing to upgrade to the max config just isn't something a price-sensitive consumer should take seriously. Beyond one or two upgrades, you might as well pretend it says "call for quote" and just not consider 4+ TB as a realistic option to get from the OEM, because those prices are trying to cause sticker shock. And that goes for any PC OEM—the price-gouged upgrades are so far beyond reasonable that it really doesn't matter whose prices are the most silly or by exactly how many hundreds of dollars. What does matter is whether aftermarket upgrades and repairs are possible.

It matters that there are no after market options for Apple because it means the inflated OEM upgrade price is the ONLY price available for every given upgrade. It matters less with Dell/Asus/Lenovo etc. because that's not the only price available.

The top of the line is also not where Apple is gouging the worst. It's in the middle tiers that are actually relevant to many more people. Most don't have a need for 4+ TB main drives but 1-2 TB is a size that's pretty easy to justify for a lot of people and Apple's price is the only option for them and they're absolutely lining their pockets with cash at the expense of anyone not going for the bargain bin basic tier that can't hold 2 modern games.

By all means, complain about the cost to get a 1TB config, and put that price in proper context. But it still doesn't make much sense to focus on the $1200 upgrades, or any of the other upgrades whose price rounds up to "lol, no".

The gouging is bad at all levels as well as the design effects on repairability and the issues with obsolescence. If you'll look way back though I acknowledged the $1200 is at least vaguely in line with the top of the line Sabrent 8tb NVMe of the same size.

"Repairability" is a red-herring when the discussion is about user-upgrades and the ability to purchase components from 3rd-party suppliers (who compete against each other and the OEM)

Apple is getting at throwing this red herring.

At least on the storage side, Apple's parts are neither more performant nor all that much more power-efficient than a standard, replaceable SSD.

Apple's silicon is good but I don't see what's so special about all the other stuff. Looks like they just solder components to the motherboard instead of using industry standard interfaces.

*industry standard physical interfaces. The electrical interace is bog standard.

Phased out in the name of profit efficiency. Despite what marketing will tell you the SSD is industry standard NVMe and the RAM is standard LPDDR5.

> I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive

It's worse than that -- 4TB gen 4 drives can be had for well under $300, sometimes $225-250, and that's for buying a drive outright, not "trading up" from a 256GB device. I think it'd be more accurate to say that you can get double the capacity for a _quarter_ of the price.

I was ballparking it based on my recent buy of a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and inflated the price a little in my head to closer to $400 than the $330 it actually was.

I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.

Very much so. When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD.

Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).

I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5.

Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.

You can get some decent size external usb SSDs. I have the Samsung T5 2TB. I think they have larger models now. Works pretty well. And with USB-C speeds are very usable. You can probably get faster/bigger stuff via thunderbolt.

I'm considering getting one and a nice big monitor or TV. It needs to run x-plane 12 at decent speeds and maybe support a bit of light gaming. My macbook M1 pro is actually pretty decent for this but the screen is too small for me to easily read the instruments. I expect this will do better even in the base setup.

Otherwise my needs are pretty modest. I'd love to see steam add some emulation support for these things as I have some older games that I enjoy playing. I currently play those on a crappy old intel laptop running linux. I've also been eyeing a new AMD mini PC with the latest amd stuff (Beelink's SER9).

Seems pretty nice as well and seems like it is more performance for the money. Apple is doing its usual thing of charging you hundreds of euros for 50 euro upgrades. Get the base mac studio instead. It probably makes more sense if you are going down that path.

The big problem is that there are lots of stuff that macOS won’t let you move to a external drive, like iCloud Drive.

It's USD2,400 to upgrade the M4 Pro model from 512GB to 8TB, which feels a bit steep, but it's an option.

Alternatively, you can get one of these[1] external Other World Computing NVME SSDs for USD1,190 right now. And then you can easily move all your files from your laptop to your desktop when you get home.

[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/US4EXP1MT08/ (15% off list price as of writing)

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