I’ve talked a little about buying a 2017 MacBook Air for $700 in 2018 and how the 2017 model compares favorably to the newer model, since we have both in the house.
But I’d forgotten one of the most important reasons I liked the older MBA model until just recently, when its paltry 128 gig SSD filled again and my usual cleaning and ruthless deletions still left me with a pretty full drive:
The 2017 MacBook Air has an upgradeable hard drive.
SSD prices from Apple are insane. I checked for both models of MacBook Air, as Apple still sells the 2017 version for $999. The upgrade from 128 gigs is the same for both: $200 for 256 and $400 for 512.
Sheesh.
Now I’ve seen just enough about the OWC SSD upgrades for the older MacBook Air like mine to make me a little wary of buying, but the prices can’t be beat. For “just the drive”, the prices are:
240 gigs: $113
480 gigs: $179
1000 gigs: $280
That is, I get to keep my 128 gig drive on the chance the new drive ever dies and I get to add a terabyte of storage to my MacBook for $280 (plus tax and $9 for the pentalobe screwdriver), $120 less than buying a MBA with 512 gigs from the stable – or, in this case, $420 less, since I bagged the MBA for $700, nearly $300 off of the same model’s current price on apple.com.
Apple, you crazy. I mean seriously, one extra user-accessible port – itself apparently just a quick hack on a normal m.2 port. WHY APPLE WHY?!! – adds tons of extra life to your old Macintosh. How much can soldering the hard drive directly to the board really save you on a unit? How much lost goodwill does that savings cost you later? Revenge of the Mezzanine slot, I suppose.
Though with butterfly-keyboard-gate, I guess the SSD is pretty low on the ole “cust-sat” worry list.