The hammer is coming down all over the place due to the sudden AI shortage that's taken hold in the last three months. But not all at the same time. An OWC CF Express card recently was convenient for me to avoid the brunt of the price increase, but their SSD drives have tripled in price. For some other vendors it looks like the other way around. But as existing price agreements expire, it's all going up until either we're through this bubble or memory suppliers decide it's safe and reasonable to expand.
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Other SSD Prices for our older Macs...WTF!!!!
- Thread starter DouglasCarroll
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Just wait till our future ram is cloud based and on subscription.
hagjohn
macrumors 68010
Nobody should be surprised by the prices. AI, tariffs and the economy. Prices, across the board (for probably everything), will get worse in the years to come.
Or just don't shop OWC. Their prices tend to be hyper exotic™ , have been for ages. Sometimes for good reason as they are producing specific accelerators and such. For other products they are providing a bit of peace of mind that it will "just work" with an older Mac.
That said, in the case of storage, RAM, USB cards / ETC, there is enough data online for what works, and what doesn't to avoid most gotchas.
I ordered an SSD from Amazon on Good Friday. They were sold out but still accepted the order.
The SSD was shipped to me in January at the OLD price. TG
The SSD was shipped to me in January at the OLD price. TG
CrapShack
macrumors regular
Thanks to the AI build-out, anybody who makes any kind of memory can pretty much charge what they want.
Amazon UK has loads of different ones between about £50 and £65 at the same speeds as those OWC ones 🤷♂️
Your statement that "The price of everything trends upwards longterm" remains incorrect for computer hardware, which is what we are discussing. For computer hardware to suddenly become more costly after increasing value for 40+ years is a big change.
MacInTO
macrumors 68000
Certificate of Excellence
macrumors 68020
Just did this myself on a trip to the dump this afternoon. An old, dusty Presario sr1000 Athlon box with no cover came home.
Two 512mb sticks of DDR included.
Now I can retire.
swamprock
macrumors 65816
As an aside, many years ago, I bought a pallet of TI-99/4A stuff from a barn sale for $30. It had a number of expansion boxes, software, computers, and other peripherals, and I made a killing selling it all.
Back to the regularly-scheduled topic...
Or feel good about doing something positive for the planet and all the e-waste out there!
🙂
Certificate of Excellence
macrumors 68020
The reason it was recycled was because the vga port was broken off. The leads/pads are still there but the blue plastic broke off around them. I will take a few minutes and see if I can solder on a new port.
May 9th, 2026 pricing update on the same SSD's as the first post....WOW!!!
😱
MacInTO
macrumors 68000
Even more over priced than usual. Americans getting shafted by the government tariffs. If there aren't tariffs then it's this OWC. Where I am, I can still get a name brand 500GB SATA SSD for about equivalent US$80.
I recently purchased a 2013 mac pro with a 1TB SSD and 64GB RAM for less than the cost of the 480GB SSD on that listing. Maybe just buy a used computer! 🤣
I recently purchased a 2013 mac pro with a 1TB SSD and 64GB RAM for less than the cost of the 480GB SSD on that listing. Maybe just buy a used computer! 🤣
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Certificate of Excellence
macrumors 68020
Ended up soldering on a new vga port and the system works perfectly. No idea what I’ll use it for but it works flawlessly. Has business XP install on the hdd.
rampancy
macrumors 6502a
Just for kicks I thought I'd check out Canada Computers and see how much their current price is for a 240 GB Kingston A400, a lowly bottom of the barrel DRAM-less SATA III SSD that I'd pick up on their webstore for $20 on sale, as it was the only name-brand SSD I could find in brick-and-mortar retail that still explicitly suppoted SATA I on 32-bit Core Duo Macs.
They're now charging $106 for them.
They're now charging $106 for them.
MarkC426
macrumors 601
Half that price on Amazon £66
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CAD106 is GBP57, so not sure how more is actually half the price. I suppose sales tax in Canada is a somewhat less than in the UK so probably both prices are pretty much the same.
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Canadian federal general sales tax is five percent -- other than Alberta and the territories of Yukon, Nunavut and the Northwest Territories which do not have local sales taxes, all the other provinces tack on an additional six to ten percent depending on the province.
mike.coulter
macrumors 6502
You all keep complaining about these memory and storage price increases like you don't even want AI.
Certificate of Excellence
macrumors 68020
You’re right. If I had a say in the matter, I don’t want AI, but we sure are gettin’ it aren’t we?
Slix
macrumors 68000
I paid about $300 for a 480GB SSD for my 2012 MacBook Air in about 2014, and it included the tools and an enclosure. Jumping back to those prices for a standard 2.5" SSD ten years later is literally insane, and I can't wait for the AI nonsense to burst.