Not everyone makes Bay Area money as an engineer especially in the hard sciences. Even though I’m one of the lucky ones, it’s annoying being forced to pay Apple prices for storage which is about double the market price eg Apple 8TB $2400 vs decent brand decent speed 8TB ~$1200-$1500. It is very hard to justify. This also doesn’t account for inflation and the general decrease in storage prices over time. Yes, the price drops are no longer as fast but in a year or two, we’re still seeing %25 price decreases; it’s still worth waiting for a lot of people including me. I feel the same way about Apple RAM. Soldering it down does nothing for me. it just helps Apple’s profits, since it seems they’re no longer able to substantially grow their user base. It feels like extortion and this isn’t helping growth long term even if they only see iOS as the future
But isn’t this exactly the point of the thunderbolt ports? You can buy your external SSDs and get as fast (even faster if you RAID them) access to your data.
I use this setup. It is annoying as hell when you have to constantly unmount drives. Using this setup for Apple Photos is even worse. In Catalina I’m unable to safely unmount unless I reboot (shutting down photos and waiting 30 min isn’t enough) Also this setup is not portable
Apple no longer just works anymore for me. It hasn’t for the past 2-3 years now.
It's also hard to imagine needing 8TB on-the-go capacity. That's certainly a niche use. I can imagine more cases where being tethered to a desk in order to get to the data would be not a big deal.
