I can still recall the very first hard disk made for an IBM-PC in 1982. 5MB for $1500 (about $4000 today). It slid into a floppy port.
I have a document on my computer that tracks every computer I’ve bought, including the cost per gigabyte for the hard drives. The earliest record I have is one from 1993, where a 340MB drive cost $1,226 per gigabyte and the most recent was a much larger one where I paid about two cents per gigabyte. (This is only for traditional hard drives with spinning platters; I don’t bother to track SSD prices.)
Is it the same though? Yes an OEM is going to mark up the price for sure, but that $245 isn’t at all unreasonable. There’s different speed chips, over-provisioning, and duty cycle specs to consider. Cheap no-name SSDs can be pretty slow, have little to no extra flash cells to make up for ones that die over time, and have lower numbers of writes before they start to go bad.
I think there are answers:
SSD drives are more expensive than physical hard disks with moving parts, and are available in quantity for a reasonable price with far less capacity. (Try buying a regular hard drive smaller than 1TB)
Dell or Apple, etc. figure that someone looking for more capacity does so for a reason - and so is willing to spend more money or money is no object. As a result, they make the higher capacity significantly more profitable. Also, businesses are more willing to spend extra, and so may want to buy the expanded computers. Or they want to rope in the affluent who couldn’t be bothered trying to upgrade things themselves.
I have bought two my Mac Minis over the years with minimal RAM and upgraded them for far less than the Apple cost. If we’re going down memory lane, my first disk drive was a dual floppy unit for the Commodore PET. $C1500. 360K each, single sided. Our first hard drive computers at work were the IBM XT with 20MB and you risked crashing the drive if you moved the CPU wile the computer was on. One utility was for parking the heads before shutdown. I helped troubleshoot for a fellow pre-IPM PC who had a single floppy external drive for is TRS-80 and did not realize that he should not turn off the drive with the floppy inside. Each time he did so, there was a spike of current through the head that corrupted whatever sector of his disk it happened to be on. Over time, one function after another failed until the system could no longer load.
You have imagined this particular evil. Apple has never soldered a battery into any device.
I had one of those and I loved it, but now I have a laptop with only USB-C ports and no one makes a little USB-C thing 
I assume that some of the actual drive is taking up unused space in the USB port itself so they can’t make a really tiny USB-C one.
This IMHO or even Great Debates territory, but the $245 is something like a 200% markup above retail. That’s not from the cheapest possible drive, but something like an Intel 665p for $114.
Why do they do this? Because enough customers are willing to pay it to make it worthwhile. Or, they think enough customers are willing to pay. They may have market research to backup their decision of price points for upgrades, or they might just be guessing.
Dell does this for enterprise storage, too, and there the markup may be 300% or more above retail. I recently bought a server, and I paid about $400. For the same drive Dell was charging $1300 installed. I’d have paid $600 for the drives, but when buying enough to fill a server the extra $900 adds up fast.
In enterprise there is the issue of lock-in. I only have a few servers, so when a drive fails I do the warranty replacement myself, and swap the components myself, and even using my time, I’m still ahead on price. If I have a large datacenter and lots of computers, it is probably too much trouble to figure out which vendor I bought that drive from for warranty replacement, or to make sure I have a spare on hand if I’m not going to bother with warranties. If they’re all from Dell, and all under the same service contract or warranty, then I don’t have to worry about it. A drive dies, call Dell, and they send a new drive or a technician, and it gets swapped out. So, I’m stuck buying Dell’s drives because I bought Dell servers, and I have a Dell service contract. I can shop with HP or Lenovo, but they all play the same games.
Apple can also get away with it due to lock-in. Apple does not have a monopoly on PCs or phones, but they do have a monopoly on PCs that run MacOS and phones that run IOS. So if I want a Mac I’m forced to pay whatever Apple is charging for internal storage. The only other option is to not buy a Mac, or get something with less storage, so perhaps won’t meet my needs.
The important thing to realize here is that a business does not have to make the same profit margin on all its products, and there’s often a lot of competitive pressure on the low end of the market, which means it’s a lot harder to make profits there.
You’ll find this in almost every industry.
A first-class seat costs the airline maybe twice as much in actual costs, but they sell it for six times as much as economy seats. They make a lot of profit on the
The base model of most cars is sold at a pretty meager profit, but the profit margin on upgrades is quite large.
Many video games are free to play the base, but you pay extra to have more lives/levels/a fancy hat.
The primary reason for this is price discrimination. If you try to make the same margin on all your products, you’ll lose the customers with better alternatives (the person who knows they can just buy a new drive and replace it is likely going to do so even if it saves them just $100 instead of $300), and you’ll make less on the customers who are willing to pay more. Bad business.
The other thing to realize is that very few people are going to disassemble their new laptop to put other components in it at any price, so there’s little pressure to price based on input price.
Also, most people just don’t need very much hard drive space.
My suspicion is that, for most people, if they do need more space, it is for archival storage (e.g. movies and stuff), and they can easily just throw in an SD card or small USB 3.0/USB-C drive that would be fast enough for that stuff. Or, yes, using cloud storage–if they only use the laptop in places where they have a decent Internet connection.
I personally would find it absurd to use only 256 GB on a computer that was more than just an Internet machine. But my actual SSD in my computer only has 111GB on it. My hard drive has the rest. And my USB 3.0 thumbdrive that I got for cheap is faster than my hard drive.
Ahhh…you are right. They only solder a chip onto the battery so it must be replaced at a certified Apple repair store: theregister.com/2019/08/08/apple_battery_authentication/
If confused battery soldering with soldered SSDs: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250869828
I can see why people would be legitimately upset about this… but I can also see a good rationale for Apple doing this that isn’t money-grubbing.
The supply chain for 3rd party phone batteries is really bad. If you don’t validate it, then every mall kiosk is going to buy the shittiest not-to-spec batteries that fell off the back of a Shenzhen factory somewhere and in a few months when the phone starts crashing because the battery is crap, people are going to go complain to/about Apple, not the cut-rate place they got their battery replaced.
The smaller drives are a bit of pain during a transition to a much, much better technology. It’s overall a good thing. PC manufacturers don’t help things when they charge $200 more for a slightly larger solid state drive while you can buy a new 1TB SSD for $100. They are absolutely milking the new tech to boost their profits.
You’ll usually do better to buy a cheaper laptop with a small SSD or HDD and then clone the drive to a larger SSD you install yourself. Some SSD vendors throw in the clone software for free.
The very first sentence of that story states there are “third-party repair services” regarding iPhone batteries.
iPhone batteries do not have to be replaced at a certified Apple repair store. iFixit, for example, sells iPhone replacement battery kits for not all that much less than what Apple will charge you.
Apple may discourage non-certified repairs or doing it yourself, but it remains an option.
And iFixit received that right after Apple unsuccessfully sued them to stop doing that . And they’re still after iFixit and other “unauthorized” repair shops. Search for iFixit sued for the latest 2020 news. I won’t give a direct link because most of the top hits from from iFIxit and I want everyone to be able to make their own judgements on the facts.
What lawsuit are you referring to? I just searched Google for “apple sues ifixit” and “ifixit sued by apple” and got a grand total of one hit and that one hit mentioned nothing about a lawsuit. In the first 10 pages of results searching for the same terms without quotes, I see no hits backing up your claim of an unsuccessful Apple lawsuit against iFixit that ended with iFixit able to sell battery kits.
If iFixit “received that right after Apple unsuccessfully sued them to stop doing that,” why did you claim the exact opposite in post 30 by saying iPhone batteries “must be replaced at a certified Apple repair store?” You’ve moved the goalpost like 3 times now.
Please post your link.
If you want to select a phone based on which one has an easily replaced or cheap battery, that’s your choice. For me, and I think for most people, it’s not the primary reason we choose a phone.
What? We can’t have a reasonable discussion if you won’t share a link. For one, search engines don’t show the same results to different people, so just a search term won’t get you there.
When I search “ifixit sued” I get https://www.ifixit.com/News/34892/apple-is-bullying-a-security-company-with-a-dangerous-dmca-lawsuit, which is an editorial of sorts from iFixit about Apple, but isn’t related to a lawsuit against iFixit itself.
Since you’re not sharing links I can’t tell if you have an actual cite that shows you are correct or if you’re misreading the one I found…
Note that “third party repair service” and “certified Apple repair store” aren’t mutually exclusive categories. There are independently owned repair shops that have gone through a contractual/training process with apple that lets them get genuine Apple parts and advertise as a “Certified Apple Repair” shop.
There are also third party shops that haven’t done that and will give you parts not approved by Apple, and Didi44 is definitely correct that Apple has tried to stop them through technical and legal means
Laptops probably started coming with roughly 1TB mechanical hard drives standard maybe 10-12 years ago and I suspect that stayed the norm until SSDs became very common. Laptop mechanical hard drives are even slower than desktop mechanical hard drives. But they’re still far cheaper per gigabyte than SSDs.
But SSDs have fallen in price far enough that something like a 256gb SSD is comparable to a 1-1.5TB mechanical drive in cost. For most users, it’s a much better choice. Most people do not use massive amounts of disk space on their laptops. 256 is still plenty to store dozens of movies, thousands of songs, tens of thousands of pictures if need be. But most people are more reliant on streaming and cloud services for storage, so you don’t need to keep your entire media life on every device you own. Additionally you can use cheap and plentiful storage mediums like thumb drives and SD cards to store mass data. They’re slower than mechanical hard drives would be, but fast enough for a media library.
SSDs are MUCH faster, especially in laptops, in terms of performance. They use less power. They’re far more reliable and less vulnerable to the physical abuse the laptop can see.
To try to maintain the same price point (or make it cheaper), going with a small SSD over a large mechanical drive makes sense for 95%+ of users. The rest of the users could buy custom/non-mainstream design with big mechanical hard drives if they want.
They can also be tiny. Look at the photos of M.2 SSDs on the Wikipedia page. So if you’re trying to make a thin, lightweight notebook, an SSD is a better choice.
I think they are mutually exclusive, aren’t they? If you’re an independent shop who is Apple certified, that makes you are a second party to Apple’s first party. And then the independent shops who aren’t certified are the third party shops with no obligations to Apple. I mean, they are both independent shops in so far as they aren’t owned by Apple, but one has to follow the Apple rules, the other does not.
I don’t think anyone would argue that Apple is happy to budge an inch to make life easier for non-certified repair shops, but that’s not what I was arguing against. I’m just, FWIW, pointing out that Didi44 is definitely incorrect that iPhones must be replaced by Apple or at certified shops. Well, that and the part about an Apple/ iFixit lawsuit.