No, I'm not a professional, I'm actually a teenager studying computer science at a county wide STEM high school, so I guess I am real amateur hour. I'm not saying that content creators don't need large amounts of space for their content, because 4k raw footage takes up a crap ton of space. What I'm saying is that they don't need to spend $3,200 for 4TB of NVMe storage. An NVMe is great for boot drives and really fast access, but all my 4k footage doesn't need to be on a drive that fast. It's unnecessary, incredibly expensive, and I would rather still have relatively fast SATA speeds for a significantly lower price point. And no, no professional needs an NVMe drive for their workflow. Nice to have? Yes. Fast? Definitely. Worth the price? No. Apple is forcing people who want these large amounts of storage to pay for what they don't need. They can most likely get work done at probably pretty comparable rate with a slower but still plenty fast SSD.
Well this lack of awareness makes more sense now that I know you're a CS. Here's a piece of advice. Make sure you take some humanities classes when you get to college early, because they actually are important, contrary to what silicon valley culture makes you think, and will help you maybe be empathetic to others, something you clearly need to work on.
Now as for why it is necessary for film makers (I used youtubers as a perfect example) would want (and need) those faster speeds. If they are storing the footage on their computer, as well as rendering a final movie in FC, that speed will make a difference in terms of time. Time for those professionals = money. The faster they can get it off their camera's and start cutting, and rendering movies, the better. Take my friend, a professional who shoots other people's promo ads. his clients will start to demand promo reels faster. He wouldn't be hired for a lot of jobs if he wasn't using a mac (you should hear some of the stories of how eccentric his clients can be) In that case, him having the biggest and best may let him keep clients, in other words, it would make him more money in the long run. So yes, that's a
need. Again, it's not worth the price to you. To other's it is. I also don't need a fully maxed out MacBook Pro. But will I pay $2,000 for a new 13 inch MacBook air with retina screen and a 512 SSD and 16 GIGS of RAM if they come out in the fall? You bet I will. Because it is the only piece of computer kit I can see myself needing in the near future. Now, you could make the argument that I could go get a MATEBOOK X PRO for a lower lower, and get everything I
need. Except you don't know me, or my work flow, and the fact remains I have software for my business that I
need that only runs on Mac 0S. That's worth the $500 I'm paying for the operating system alone.
I'm not even getting into what some scientists would need, or music producers working with huge names. Speed equals money, there for, need. Or, people who do a lot of software development and run a ton of heavy VM'S. That's a need right there.
Lastly, apple isn't forcing anyone to do anything. If they want to choose the biggest drives, it's an option. You could get a smaller drive in the mac, and using usb C, use a Samsung drive at a lower price. It sounds like that's what you would do. More power to you.
The people who question how much these cost, it's clearly not the computers for you. That's fine. The prosumers can get the lower sized hard drives, and everything will cost more or less what they cost last year. For students and average adults, the MacBook and MacBook air refresh reboot aren't out yet, but by all accounts, will be here this fall. Or hell, for the majority of computer users, phones, chrome books and iPads do what people need.
