Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Apple's charging $250 for a $99 SSD plus some software. It's overpriced.

Welcome to Apple's SSD pricing. Want to upgrade from 128GB SSD on a laptop to 256? $300 for that please. How about from 128GB to 512GB? $800. All the way to an astounding $1,300 for a 768GB drive. It's insanity, but since you can't open up the laptops to add one of your own it's insanity that you have to pay for.

I really hope you don't have to pay $1,300 to get a 768GB drive in your system. I ran into a situation a couple years ago when the 320GB drive in my MBP was running out of space. I didn't want to buy a whole new system, so I ordered a 640GB drive online, took it to a local certified Apple repair shop, and let them put the drive in. The cost of the work? $100.

This was before the unibody models, but I'm sure the process will be the same for the new systems. Oh, and the best part of going to an Apple repair shop was that my warranty remained intact. I never had any issues getting the Apple Store to work on my laptop after the hard drive was replaced.

If Apple prevents people from doing this with the new hardware, then this will be a disappointment. I haven't kept up with the specifics of their new laptops--I know that the RAM is soldered in, but I hope the hard drive will be replaceable.

AFAIK on the latest Apple models with SSDs, the SSDs are a proprietary form factor but not soldered on.

OWC sells an ssd upgrade for Retina MBP:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/Aura_Pro_Retina_2012

That does seem high, but if you factor in the (non-trivial) installation process, and the fact that you won't be voiding your warranty with a DIY installation, it may be an acceptable tradeoff. Apple is probably counting on your reaching this conclusion as well.

Apple charging more than the stand-alone market price for storage upgrades... just like they have done forever?

It's called bundling and price discrimination.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com