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This was the previous go-to method for adding a chunk of storage to your laptop's capacity, so it's nice to see the slot return. It's not cheap, but you owe it to yourself to make your main computer as usable as possible.Ī small step in the right direction here is that the 2021 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models have an SD card reader. If you have lots of large videos or similar, 1TB is better. If you're buying a MacBook today, we'd recommend that you get at least 512GB of storage. You could look at other methods of adding storage to your MacBook, but those incur additional costs and some are inconvenient. It obviously won't be viable in a few years once these machines don't run modern macOS versions and are thus too old to use reliably.īeyond that, performing an upgrade like this yourself will invalidate your warranty and any AppleCare plans you've purchased. While this is a great option that's cost-effective if you have an older compatible machine, it has its own drawbacks. You can currently only buy SSD upgrades for MacBook Pro models made in 2015 or earlier. This is likely why we've only seen small increases in the iPhone storage baseline (moving from 16GB to 32GB, then slowly to 64GB and now 128GB) rather than larger leaps in base storage for MacBooks (like moving to 512GB or even 1TB at a minimum). But the company has much more bargaining power with manufacturers than consumers and most retailers. Has Apple been hit by the volatile price of computer memory and SSDs? Sure. Ongoing events like the supply chain issues and chip shortage that happened alongside the COVID-19 pandemic have an effect on this too. Though the price of SSD storage has fallen overall during the last decade, there have been some notable price hikes as well.
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Scarcity is one of the biggest drivers of price hikes in the tech space-think of how expensive video cards were during the cryptocurrency mining hype of 20, for example. But in the case of components like memory and storage, that doesn't always happen. Why Hasn't Apple Raised the Base Storage?Ī lot of times, we expect the price of technology to fall as it becomes more prevalent. So why has Apple put the MacBook on a diet? And is 256GB of space enough for a MacBook? Let's examine why you shouldn't settle for the minimum storage when buying your next MacBook.
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