Because Apple will not sell the 128gb for $1899. Apple's business model (if they thought they could get away with it) would be to sell the 128gb for $1999, then ask for $100 more for the 256gb model and not the other way around. Apple makes the biggest profit margins amongst all the PC makers...
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How longer will Apple make the cMBP?
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Because Apple will not sell the 128gb for $1899. Apple's business model (if they thought they could get away with it) would be to sell the 128gb for $1999, then ask for $100 more for the 256gb model and not the other way around. Apple makes the biggest profit margins amongst all the PC makers...
Actually the PPC forum is the main reason I'm on this site. I was referring to the MBP subforum.
No. Apple set their pricing according to what maximizes profits, as companies should do. That includes a lot of price cuts over the years when Apple thought that the increased sales volume would more than make up for a the narrower margin.
It's likely that Apple dropped the 128GB SSD option for the MacBook Pro because too few customers were choosing it.
There is no good reason to offer a 128GB SSD these days as the cost of NAND is so low. For example, the Crucial BX200 range starts at 250GB.
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/storage-ssd-mx200
Samsung 850 Pro starts at 128GB, but at just over $40 extra to purchase the 256GB SSD (amazon prices), there is little reason to get the smaller drive, expect perhaps as a boot drive in a desktop machine where there is existing fast mass storage for user files.
For the 850 EVO the difference is about $20. Before someone mentions PCIe interfaces, the PCIe interface and additional PCIe lanes in new drives doesn't change the price of NAND. If Samsung is charging $40 extra (retail prices) for their top of the line 256GB 850 Pro, Apple is paying less.
I'm happy running my virtual machines on an affordable SSD in a cMBP, but I must admit I didn't purchase new and probably wouldn't these days. Perhaps in the long run I'm going to have to make a difficult choice when it comes to portable virtualization, but right now the cMBP with VMware Fusion does a great job.
Mostly because its just too meager. Throw the OS on there, and maybe a decent sized iTunes library and boom, you're nearly out of space.
Not any soon, the people love non-retina for a reason not because of price. It is still mighty machine, and upgradable ram or SSD.
I never said it was insufficient, I just say it is bad value for money and upgradeabliity in a 3 year old computer is pretty much pointless especially at that price point....
My opinion of course but I wouldn't swap my retina screen for anything, the rest is just gravy.....
Apples and oranges. The PCIe SSDs Apple are shipping are much, much faster parts than Samsung's 850 Pro, right?
Not everyone needs an iTunes library. That's why Apple were still able to sell 11" MBAs with only 64GB until recently.
Samsung 850 Pro (512GB variant tested on my early-2011 15" cMBP): 520MB/s read and 510MB/s write.
Samsung SM0512F 2-lane PCIe XP941-based SSD (tested on my late-2013 13" rMBP): 750MB/s read and 720MB/s write.
Samsung SM1024F 4-lane PCIe XP941-based SSD (tested on my late-2013 15" rMBP): 1050MB/ read and 990MB/s write.
Samsung SM0512G 4-lane PCIe SM951-based SSD (tested on my early-2015 13" rMBP): 1400MB/s read and 1300MB/s write.
I’m not talking about the cost or speed of PCIe vs SATA, as I clearly stated in my post.
I’m pointing out that once the PCIe or SATA SSD design is completed, the cost of upgrading NAND from 128GB to 256GB is small and there is no evidence to suggest that the NAND used on the Samsung XP941 and other Samsung PCIe SSDs is superior to the NAND used in the 850 Pro.
The sequential r/w speed of the 850 Pro is limited by the SATA interface, except in the 128GB model where the NAND appears to be the limiting factor. In the 128GB size, the Samsung XP941 PCIe SSD is also limited by NAND performance.
From anandtech.com:
In some benchmarks, the 850 Pro performs better than the Samsung XP941.
From tomshardware.com Samsung 850 Pro review:
In the larger sizes, the sequential r/w speeds of the PCIe drives are great.
But there are a lot of applications that are more sensitive to the speed of small random r/w operations.
The 4KB write performance is another area where the Samsung XP941 PCIe drives appear to lag behind the 840/850 Pro models, even more than the 4KB read performance.
More graphs available from anandtech.com
So no, depending on the application, the PCIe SSDs might not be much faster, at least until you get to the larger sizes with four PCIe lanes.
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External hard drive is the obvious solution. If you dont want the added bulk of that then there a lot of very small USB sticks and expansion cards that go in the SD slot that go up to 128GB and are reasonably priced these days, so I don't really see storage as a problem. The performance difference in having flash memory/a solid state drive massively outweighs the minor inconvenience of external storage, in my opinion anyway.
Honest question: How does the speed of the 128 GB sticks compare to traditional HD and SSD? If the speed is comparable to SSD then I agree this could be a fairly workable solution. They would be easy to carry around in a bag to expand storage. It's not ideal, but nothing is. Are they as reliable as HD or SSDs?
Its so expensive because its PCIe SSD. At that data rate its pushing its price is on par with other drives at the same speed.
Sticks and cards are not the best way to go. Sure you can get a 128SD card but it will still not have the transfer rate of a MyPassport 2TB. A USB stick is usually worse unless you get the super expensive SSD USB sticks, and they get very expensive. If you need external storage Western Digital makes a 2TB MyPassport Pro Thunderbolt drive for $299 that has 233MBps read/wright. Its not SSD but its perfect if you have a decent sized main HD in your MBP.
Sticks and cards are not the best way to go. Sure you can get a 128SD card but it will still not have the transfer rate of a MyPassport 2TB. A USB stick is usually worse unless you get the super expensive SSD USB sticks, and they get very expensive. If you need external storage Western Digital makes a 2TB MyPassport Pro Thunderbolt drive for $299 that has 233MBps read/wright. Its not SSD but its perfect if you have a decent sized main HD in your MBP.
They aren't as fast but my original post was written under the assumption the extra space on the USB drive would be used to store data. You wouldnt need to run an operating system or any programs from the USB stick, which is where you really benefit from the speed difference of an SSD. You aren't going to notice much/any difference in speed by storing part of your iTunes and Photo library etc on a USB drive instead of your SSD.
In regards to reliability, always back up, always have everything important saved in at least 2, ideally 3 different places, one of which should be kept in a separate geographical location. If you have a proper back up system in place reliability doesn't become such an issue. Technically they probably aren't as reliable but in my experience I've never had a USB stick fail on me through my whole school/college/uni life and through many years of working in IT but I have had failed HDD and SSDs. Like I said, backing up is the most important thing.
Edit: If you meant transfer rates then yes they will be a lot slower than an SSD, if you need to be constantly moving around large files such as HD video then you'd probably need to look at a faster solution, won't argue with that.
