Right, affordably repairable is all that counts, otherwise it makes more sense to buy a new machine. If it cost you $2000 to fix a Mac Studio, would you? I wouldn't
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Mac Studio Storage Not User-Upgradeable Due to Software Block [Updated]
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I would most certainly do that if I bought Apple products at work. If a computer doesn't come with a 3 year warranty, I always upgrade the warranty to 3 years at purchase. If that's not an option, I'll buy another kind of computer.
You'd have to do the math and estimate how many machines are likely to fail in their lifespan (and estimate an average repair cost), versus the cost of AppleCare.
Ordinarily, any kind of insurance on a device (in this price range) wouldn't really be worth it in a business setting, the provider is profiting off of the higher cost of insurance versus the average lifetime repair cost for each device. But in Apple's case, repairs are often expensive enough you might literally be saving money by buying AppleCare across an entire fleet of devices if they are expected to fail often enough.
Apple claims in court that they don't profit off of repairs. I'm not sure how much I believe this claim (or which repairs they are referring to). Some repairs are almost as expensive as the computer itself.
Are you in the US? Consumer protection laws only mandate the 1 year, so that’s what they do before an up charge.
I buy every Lenovo for work with a 3 year warranty. It’s the cost of not micromanaging repairs for hundreds of machines.
At ESPN every device had warranty’s. At the college I worked at every machine had warranties. I’ve never seen an established business not simply consider extended warranties part of the purchase price of the computer.
That is a good point. There is definitely a cost to having to manage each repair individually (in terms of both time and paying someone to handle it).
Yep, and yep, and why I always upgrade. It's usually a decent price. Some machines still come with a 3 year warranty, but it's usually the upper end models.
Cost in both financials and wasted time!
Yes, how DARE a company try to maximize profits on a luxury good. /s
Look, obviously no one here would be disappointed if Apple gave us the ability to easily upgrade the SSD, but I'm not going to start throwing shade at a company for charging what the market will bear.
And of course you can always just buy high speed external storage if you want.
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I won't throw shade at them for it, it's capitalism. It encourages other companies to undercut it and to compete with it. It's how the system has always worked, and it's why both Intel and Apple are trying to outcompete each other (to our benefit).
That being said, I have a feeling Apple may have priced the storage upgrades too high for their own good on the Mac Studio. They might have honestly priced them even higher than the market could bear, and they are probably leaving profits on the table. I certainly wouldn't pay those upgrade prices when I could very easily pay half the cost for a Samsung T7 or something that I could just throw onto the thunderbolt port.
Sure, the built in storage is 7GB/sec, and that probably benefits a lot of users for an OS drive. But for storage expansions, external alternatives are pretty freaking attractive and are more than fast enough for most users. Especially when I can just throw it under the desk and have it out of sight entirely.
While obviously not perfect, Apple hasn't gotten to where it is today in terms of their worth by making foolish decisions (which leaving profits on the table would be). I'm sure the people that are paid the big bucks at Apple to do market research have priced the upgrades to maximize profit. Obviously not everyone will pay those prices (many of whom are probably not even the target market), but enough people probably will. If they determine they will increase overall profits by lowering the upgrade costs, they'd do that.
Oh, I'm not arguing that Apple has made foolish decisions. They're a $3 trillion company, they have proven themselves to have done a remarkably good job (and I happen to be a stockholder myself).
But no company is perfect. I can't think of a single company that has made every single decision perfectly in their years. Apple themselves has walked back on numerous unpopular decisions, and has brought back scissor mechanisms to the keyboards and HDMI ports onto the Macs again, for example. I'm a big believer in what Apple is doing, but nothing in the world is painted in absolutes.
The Mac Studio is a bargain. You can't find this kind of performance in the PC world in this price range. But those storage upgrades? I'm sitting here looking at them, thinking "Why in the world would I pay those prices when I could just buy a high-end external SSD for a fraction of the price and sneak it under the desk, out of sight?"
Because many people don't want to take up an i/o port and have another "dongle" hanging out the back of their Mac when they can just pay to upgrade the internal SSD. I'm a numbers guy, so I made this quick chart to put things in perspective. Notice that your cost per GB of storage on the M1 Max model is identical in the 2TB-8TB SSD upgrade range. On the M1 Ultra model, they do get more expensive per GB as you increase the SSD size, but are acutally cheaper per GB than on the M1 Max model. I'd guess many people buying these are not going to really need more than 2TB of internal storage, if even that. But if they do, at least they're getting a good value per GB, at least in the realm of Apple's pricing. Obviously the "total cost" below is strictly the base model of each + the SSD upgrade cost, so the % of total cost that the SSD is would decrease if you're upgrading other specs.
This chart drives home that right now premium SSD storage is only marginally below the prices Apple is charging. I would have easily dropped an extra $1000 to get 4TB of storage inside my Mac Studio. There are two reasons I didn't. 1) if I ordered online it would take 10 to 12 weeks to get it and by then I would have missed out on the performance increases needed for work I have right now so I walked in the store and purchased a base model Mac Studio Ultra. 2) I always do better reselling the most expensive base model for some reason.
Fair enough. For someone who need 7GB/sec storage across their entire device and can afford the machine, the upgrade costs won't be a dealbreaker (particularly not when those storage upgrades are bundled with the price of the M1 Ultra upgrade as you've mentioned). But Samsung's flash prices frequently are under 10 cents/GB, and this is across some of their higher end devices as well. For a lot of users, these devices are fast enough. It leaves folks like me wondering "Why would I pay these prices when I could pay less than 1/2 the cost with an external drive?"
Portability isn't really a concern on these, as they are essentially desktop computers. No dongles are required for a USB-C flash drive, and they are easy to tuck away out of sight under the desk. Sure, I guess it's less elegant to have an external drive, but if that's the worst thing that exists on someone's desk, that workspace is immaculate.
In all honesty, the whole thing is basically a non-issue on pretty much everything except for principle. Because for those who actually need 7GB/s speeds, the upgrade prices aren't that unreasonable. For businesses, the prices aren't unreasonable either (they will pay it anyway, Apple won't lose anything here regardless of their upgrade policy). But for the vast majority who don't need those speeds, they can already "upgrade" their storage easily with an external SSD (and many probably will).
It just seems like a bit of a weird hill for Apple to die on for the desktop market, since it's really not that much of an inconvenience for people just to turn around and plug in an external drive (and many already do this). I see why Apple has implemented this strategy on the MacBooks, but it makes less sense to me on the Mac Studio and the Mac Mini.
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How many people are journalists in a foreign country vs people who have a problem with their computer that could be solved by starting up from an external hard drive.
You’re talking about *hundreds* of people who benefit from that feature and tens of thousands or more whose lives are made more difficult by it
Being able to start your computer up from an external drive has been a feature of Mac OS since day 1 and has always been very useful
Nobody was talking about that, but if that’s your concern, you absolutely can boot any M1 mac from an external drive.
How to start up your M1 or M2 Mac from an external drive
Need to boot your M-series Mac with an external drive? It's not as easy as it used to be, as it likely requires you purchase new hardware.
www.macworld.com
even if the internal drive is broken?Nobody was talking about that, but if that’s your concern, you absolutely can boot any M1 mac from an external drive.
How to start up your M1 or M2 Mac from an external drive
Need to boot your M-series Mac with an external drive? It's not as easy as it used to be, as it likely requires you purchase new hardware.
No. Then you have to service it.
But on devices where the drive is soldered, it getting broken is… very unlikely.
It’s still a big problem. That’s the most important time you’d want to start up from an external disk
What is? The scenario where the internal flash memory broke, but nothing else on the board did, and you want to keep reusing that SoC?
I… guess?