[_ph_]

Apple might have chosen cheeper SSDs to lower prices - which in principle think is a good idea on the entry level laptop, even cheap SSDs are plenty fast - why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades? Current market prices for SSD are between 150 and 300€/tb. For SSD upgrades in the MB Air, Apple is charging 240€ for each upgrade step. That means prices between 1920€/tb (128->256g) and 480€/tb (512g->1t). Even the price for the last step would consider an extremely healthy margin, but what about the other steps? And let's not talk about the 240€ for the 8g memory upgrade.

[asark]

Apple's prices used to be non-insane. Marked up, yes, but not nuts. Wasn't even that long ago. You'd have people post stuff about "look I can get a PC that's just as good for 40% as much, what a ripoff!" but it'd always turn out they were choosing worse parts.

These days, though, between price hikes, mediocre to poor base memory amounts and disc sizes, and massive markup on upgrades, it's not true anymore. Their prices are hugely inflated.

[microtonal]

Also interesting is that the SSD in the base model is still the same size as the SSD in the base model of the MacBook Air Mid 2013. Sure, the SSDs became faster, but it is quite insane that a model that is six years newer still comes with the same capacity (at roughly the same price).

Other than that, it seems like a great laptop for its price. It's nice that the 'budget' models now have retina as well.

[wtallis]

Minimum disk capacity requirements haven't really grown in quite a while. An OS plus a web browser still fits in 128GB with lots of room to spare. 128GB of flash now accounts for a much smaller portion of the machine's BOM, but the entry-level capacity itself still makes sense.

[awinder]

Apple's had this model for over a decade at least where the base models are fairly priced but you can really make the thing uncompetitively priced through outrageous ram/storage upgrade pricing. That's exactly where things go off the rails -- in fact, it's pretty apparent to me that Apple is normalizing profit margins over expected upgrade volumes (so that entry level machine sells at lower than the profit margin apple wants, and they make it up by making ram/ssd upgrade carry higher profit margins).

For the life of me, I can't / won't understand why Apple does this. It's a needlessly obtuse move on their part. It's the kind of thing that makes you start soldering ram & ssd to the motherboard in order to protect your biz pricing model; wouldn't it be easier to re-evaluate that biz model?

[_ph_]

Yes, their upgrades had always been expensive, but at a price point, where would be willing to pay the markup for the convenience and simplicity. Today I fear, that the pricing is driving away a lot of users. I would be interested in a new laptop, but I am not going to pay 2000€ for an Air with 16/512. And that doesn't include mandatory Apple care. The company I work for basically has dropped Macs from the list of available machines.

[asark]

$100 would be old-school Apple markup price for 8GB of memory at current prices (under $50 for good, fast laptop memory). Instead they want $200. It's nuts.

If their memory and disk upgrades were $100/step—which is still very high—I'd have probably already bought an Air to replace my 2014 Macbook Pro (the new Pros are now solidly out of my price range for a personal machine) but they're double that, so instead I've given them $0.

[_ph_]

I am in the same boat. I don't need a laptop urgently, but would be willing to spend up to 1500 for the named configuration of 16/512g. As it is, the last Apple laptop I bought was the late 2008 Macbook. Which already had 4g of main memory for around 1200€.

There is also an elphant in the room: the keyboards. Until shown otherwise, I wouldn't trust their longlivity beyond the 4 years waranteed by Apple.

[JoshTko]

Auto manufacturers, Airlines, everyone does this.

[bduerst]

The $1K aluminum monitor stand is symbolic in that regard, even though it's not even hardware.

[_ph_]

I hope it isn't software :). But yes, it is not even electronic.

[jschwartzi]

I just bought a 1TB NVMe PCIe SSD for $110.00 off Amazon. It's about 1Gbit/sec slower than the next price point but it's about 2 or 3 times as fast as my existing SATA SSD.

The next-highest price point was a 3Gbit/sec 1TB SSD for about $150.00.

[josteink]

It’s 3GigaBYTES/s, not Gigabits/s.

Nvme drives really are massively faster than their SATA counterparts.

[jschwartzi]

Oh shit. Well then that's cool.

[imtringued]

Those have gigabytes per second not bits. SATA 3 has 6gbit/s.

[lotsofpulp]

>why are they still charging insane prices for their SSD upgrades?

The answer to "why are they charging this much for so and so" is always "because a sufficient number of people are willing to pay it."