Benjamin Mayo (tweet, MacRumors):...
Apple has lowered the cost of higher-end Mac solid state storage options, cutting the price in half for many of the configurations. For example, the 4 TB SSD of the 512 GB 15-inch MacBook Pro used to cost $2800. It now costs $1,400. These savings are seen across the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac mini, and MacBook Air line.
This is great news, although the prices still seem inflated. For comparison, Apple is charging $400 to go from 256 GB to 1 TB, but you can get a highly regarded 1 TB Samsung SSD for $137. And there’s now a 2 TB Intel one for $103. Granted, this is not as fast as what Apple ships, but for many people the tradeoff would be worth it for that amount of storage. And it would certainly be an improvement over the spinning hard drive in the 2019 iMac.
Having just upgraded the SSD my MacBook Air (2017 version) from 128 to 480 [sic] gigs for $150, let me tell you Apple's SSD prices are a heck of a scam. There's nothing the added millimeter of thinness buys you that's with the sacrifice. Apple has to make the space for upgradeable SSDs in their laptops and give users easy access to them (the 2017 MacBook Air does a wonderful job of this, by the way), especially when Apple's shipping out machines with undersized 128 gig SSDs, a size which makes those thousand-dollar machines absolutely unusable in real life.
That is, you shouldn't have to pay an extra 40-60% more to make your thousand dollar box a usable computer -- as $400 and $600 are the prices from Apple to go from 128 to 512 or 1024 gigs in today's MacBook Air, respectively. Compound this with the unfortunate fact that this upgrade must be performed at purchase or forever hold your peace and you've got a shoddy state of affairs. And you shouldn't have to find out the hard way, after you've purchased and too late to make a change, that you really need that space to make good on Apple's promise you can use your Mac as a digital hub for photos and videos.
Update: Worse, in at least one case, the newer drives are not only cheaper, they're cheaper.
The 2019 MacBook Air, refreshed last week, appears to have a slower SSD than the 2018 MacBook Air, according to testing by French site Consomac.