They're great little computers but you're kidding if you think $400 to upgrade to 1Tb (from 256G) is not priced. I can get 2Tb of gen 5 NVMe for under $300. Same issue with RAM, but at least at 16Gb most people don't need to upgrade.
Come on. You can still think they're great while admitting they're over priced. Those aren't in contention.
your typical casual user needs 2TB of local storage (outside the cloud)? that’s news to me.
I agree it’s overpriced, and it bugs me too. But i still recommend mac’s to my less tech savvy family and friends. Why? I’m not interested in being their tech support, and also, it’s trivial to buy a portable 2TB thunderbolt 4 SSD for $200-$300, if the need arises in the future. In fact an external SSD is even easier to replace/upgrade than an internal ssd (generally speaking). i think we’re losing sight of the topic here. CASUAL USERS :)
> your typical casual user needs 2TB of local storage (outside the cloud)? that’s news to me.
That is *NOT* what I said... and you know it...
I don't believe 256GB is sufficient for the typical casual user. Apple knows it too. But $200 to upgrade FROM 256GB TO 512GB is, as you asked "too expensive".
It is "too expensive" BECAUSE comparable off-the-shelf hardware is significantly less AND has better performance. We're also talking about a level of performance most people will not notice the difference between.
I cannot find a 512GB NVMe drive that is PCIe 5.0, but here is a 1Tb one that costs $170[0]. They key point here being that you get twice the storage for 85% the price OF UPGRADING. That drive suggests it gets 14.7GBps reads and 13.3GBps writes while this Reddit user shows their Mac Mini M4 gets UNDER 3GBps for both read and write[1]. It definitely would go higher with the 512 variant because those disks are suffering from the same issue that the M2 Air suffered from... but that doesn't change the price that you pay more for less. You pay more for SIGNIFICANTLY less.
> I think we’re losing sight of the topic here. CASUAL USERS :)
It wasn't me... The question wasn't what you'd recommend to your less tech savvy friends and family, the question was if something was over priced.
P.S. iPhones won't capitalize a singular "i", as would be the proper grammatical usage.
P.S.S. External drives aren't just annoying, they're slower too.
Come on. You can still think they're great while admitting they're over priced. Those aren't in contention.