Comment by JohnTHaller
3 months ago
RAM and storage are both incredibly painful.
$200 to add 8GB RAM to the base 8GB (16GB total).
$400 to add 16GB RAM to the base (24GB total).
$200 to add 256GB storage to the base 256GB (512GB total).
$400 to add 768GB storage to the base 256GB (1TB total).
$800 to add 1768GB storage to the base 256GB (2TB total).
For comparison, a faster 2TB nvme PCIE4 SSD is a bit over $100.
Right, but you can add storage without soldering.
You can, but as someone who is currently juggling external SSDs to try to get a video project finished, I can tell you that you don’t want to.
Hence me yesterday looking at the 4TB upgrade price on the M3 MBP. Hoooooooly cow. I mean I’ll almost certainly get it on my next upgrade, but wow.
Why? Soldered drives are awful. If your motherboard dies you can kiss goodbye to your data. Watching Louis Rossmann’s repair videos disillusioned me from ever wanting to upgrade internal storage beyond 1TB.
Externals are cheap, fast, and safe. It’s win/win/win, the only downside is that they’re inconvenient if you want to use the laptop on a non-flat surface (such as a lap), but I’m not sure I would pay the Apple tax just for that.
5 replies →
Via USB/Thunderbolt or SD card you can. But you can't upgrade or replace your SSD in an Apple Silicon MacBook.
You can't add nvme that get the nvme level of performance.
Especially not at the level we'd be used to in any other serious isecase (eg. Split PCIe lanes into x4 and have a bunch of fast storage)