I’m merely pointing out that nice stuff costs money.
Yes, but if you pay money for nice stuff you should
actually get nice stuff.
I spent well over 500€ the other day on a suitcase for my camera gear - in the shop down the road they have the same size suitcases for 49€. Did I get ripped off or is it the price todays society deems acceptable to safely carry ten’s of thousands of quids worth of camera stuff?
...and was the 500€ suitcase
nicer than the 49€ one? Because if you pay 10 times more than the "budget" option it's entirely reasonable to expect all-round better quality, performance, design, bundled extras etc. If the 50€ case had an uncomfortable plastic handle and a rubbish lock that could be opened in 2 seconds with a paper clip you could say "well, it was a cheap case". If your 500€ case had any of the same faults, you'd be perfectly entitled to be upset about it and to blog and post your dissatisfaction to warn others.
(Anyway - it's not really a relevant analogy, because you were perfectly free to buy a cheap generic flight case, spend 10 minutes picking out the little foam cubes to fit your equipment and done. With Mac, your choice is to switch to Windows or Linux, locate and quite possibly
pay for alternative software, waste time converting files, and have your productivity nobbled for months while you adjust to a different system. That cost may vary from negligible to deal-breaker depending on your workflow.)
I have the base M1 MBA model with 256gb storage and it’s more than enough space for my needs.
...but the M1 Air used 2x128GB flash chips that could be accessed in parallel - not a single 256GB one, so the speed issue discussed here probably didn't apply...
However, to a certain extent, it's
always been true that (ignoring the cost) a bigger SSD is better - sometimes bigger chips are a bit faster because of their internal organisation, but also filling a SSD to the brim is never a good idea - even more so than with HDD - and will cause slowdown and excessive wear (for anybody who doesn't know why, see e.g.
wear levelling and
garbage collection for how spare space on a SSD is a good thing)
In the past, I've built my own PCs, and the "how much RAM/Storage" judgement - whether it's DRAM, spinning rust or Flash - usually comes down to:
- the largest capacity modules use "bleeding edge" highest-capacity chips and disproportionately expensive
- the smallest capacity modules are only being made in small quantities for 'legacy' applications, and are also disproportionately expensive.
- between that there's a 'goldilocks zone' where you pay a commodity price-per-GB that doesn't depend very much on what permutation of number and size of modules you use. (For hard drives/SSDs with onboard controllers there's obviously a fixed 'minimum price' element - but if we're talking M1/M2 Macs that's already built into the SoC)
...so the most
economical choice is to pick something from that "goldilocks zone" - filling all the slots in cases where that has a performance impact. Installing
less is false economy (...and as small chips fall further into disuse it will eventually cost
more than a higher spec).
The fact that Apple have resorted to using a single 256GB chip in place of 2x128GB - whether it is down to cost or supply shortages - is a strong clue that the 128GB chips have passed out of the "goldilocks zone" and that, therefore, it is time to drop 256GB as the base model. Just like most other laptops in the mid-$1000 price range.
(...and let's not forget that we're talking about the 13" MacBook
pro here, which sells for a premium over the M1 MBA, which is
still the go-to Mac laptop for anybody with more modest needs).