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.
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.
On Amazon.ca, they have the same SSD for the low low price of 104.99.
There's a whole other discussion to be had about why Canadian retail pricing is what it is compared to other countries (including the obligatory aside into why Target Canada failed so hard among Candian shoppers) - Apple's CAD prices similarly don't match up to expectations when converted back into USD and compared with their US pricing. It just doesn't make sense to me, even though I've read an endless ream of news articles explaining it.
Between Microsoft shoving AI into even Paint and Notepad, Google just taking 4 GB of your drive space with a local LLM via Chrome, and Apple already shoving AI into Pages via their "Creator Studio", it's almost like Big Tech doesn't care about what their users want regarding AI.
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.
What really hurts is that even if the bubble were to burst tomorrow, from what I understand we'd still see catastrophic pricing on memory and storage in 2028. (But I would love to be wrong on this.)
What really hurts is that even if the bubble were to burst tomorrow, from what I understand we'd still see catastrophic pricing on memory and storage in 2028. (But I would love to be wrong on this.)
Apparently contracts have been signed siphoning off pretty much all of manufacturing capacity leading to that fear but, these may be options placed by the big AI bidders. As seen, OpenAI had to scale down its ambitions and others may follow leading to a relaxing of restrictions. That doesn't mean that the slack won't be taken up by the remaining more successful AI clients, so I'm not that hopeful.
FYI, the Extreme Pro 6G is our highest end SATA drive. If you would have scrolled down just a bit, the pricing for the Electra 6G is much more affordable. I think there might be a bug on the page though as it is showing out of stock on some Electra's that are actually in stock.
Regardless- high pricing comes directly from our suppliers. Only 3 manufacturers in the entire world produce NAND chips. SATA drives are on their way out, combined with insane flash pricing due to AI... and you get SSDs at the above pricing. Unfortunately, we have to pass along the price increases to the customer.
For reference, I just saw today that Blackmagic increased their pricing for the 4th time since NAB... which was only 2 weeks ago. Lexar goes up 25% June 1. Every flash based product will continue to increase in price.
