Plenty of comments commenting on OWC being overpriced so for some balance...
Being "overpriced" is a subjective determination as it really comes down to value which necessarily includes compatibly + the "I just want s**t to work out of the box" factor. With that in mind, I see OWC as being somewhere b\t the MotherShip (i.e. Apple which by nearly all measures is far less value) and the wild (non-approved Mac gear).
There was a time when Macsales (later, Other World Computing, then OWC) competed against many more companies for Mac parts. Tigerdirect and NCIX in Canada come to mind as past players, as do multiple local Apple authorized resellers. Along the way, OWC sold products from major brands then,
including hard drives (like Seagate, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Maxtor, Toshiba, WD, and so on).
Along the way, OWC re-positioned their brand as
the place for any Apple products which didn’t come from Apple themselves. They did well for a while with this re-positioning, and I applaud them for that (and, I’ll add, I’ve been a customer of theirs a few times over the years, as recently as 2020).
When OWC were selling products from many vendors within lines which OWC also offered their house brand, they took out some of the guesswork in what to buy for Macs. Again, I applaud them for that.
What changed was — not unlike with Apple — the
opacity of OWC-branded products’ provenances and prices escalated as they moved into vending their own house brands for products like SSDs and RAM whilst no longer offering competing brands’ products (or letting a customer willing only to shop at their store to decide
between competing brands — like a Tigerdirect or even a Newegg now). OWC began charging a lofty premium on spec-for-spec identical products which competitors offer for less elsewhere — and I cannot overstate this — if an
informed consumer did their digilence. That means, bluntly, a consumer should still be doing their homework before crying uncle and shouting, “Shut up and take my money.”
And that there is our sticking point:
There are informed Apple consumers who advocate for others to do the same (like regulars on here), to encourage consumers to find competing products of the same quality for less, and there are consumers who
aren’t willing to do basic legwork — consumer diligence and literacy — of shopping for products which fall somewhere between consumables (like groceries) and durable goods (like a computer). That is: items which aren’t impulse-buy cheap, but not at a threshold at which one can flirt with taking out a loan (such as with buying a new Mac).
This also happens outside of tech, but it’s really incumbent upon a consumer to do the diligence of knowing what their computer needs and to fulfil that whilst getting the best value for their hard-earned money.
There's also a few generalizations here about non-Apple or non-OWC stuff being just as compatible as actual Apple\OWC gear. Here's the thing - In many cases, that just ain't true. When going with non-approved gear, the term YMMV cannot be overstated as the results depend heavily on the type of item (RAM, SSD, HDD, GPU, etc.) and the model of the Mac in which said item is to be installed.
OK. Here’s a good case example:
When OWC released the Aura Pro line of m.2-factor blade SSDs, their marketing materials noted only how High Sierra or higher was required, but didn’t explain in product literature how the NVMe protocol of Aura SSDs rely on PCIe (and not SATA), why it’s different from the AHCI standard of the OEM Apple SSD blade, or why Apple didn’t provide drivers for NVMe until High Sierra.
Nowadays, one may drop USD$139 on an
Aura Pro X2 1TB SSD [
archived 2023.03.09] for their rMBP running High Sierra or newer.
Or, they can spend less than USD$100
for a high-end WD Black NVMe 1TB SSD [
archived 2023.03.09] (which explicitly includes a DRAM for caching),
or USD$53 for a
WD Blue NVMe 1TB SSD [
archived 2023.03.09]. Round up the WD Black to $100 when including the cheap and plentiful Apple-proprietary socket-to-m.2-NVMe adapter, and an informed consumer will pay from
at least 30 per cent (for a WD Black) up to 60 per cent (for the WD Blue)
less than the OWC Aura Pro (which, even in its product info,
doesn’t even mention if the hecking thing has DRAM on board!). Heck, if a savvy consumer shopped around, they could probably find even lower prices on the same items. Well, except for the OWC Aura Pro, which is only available from OWC. :/
The Aura Pro, compared with even the cheaper WD Blue? It has a lower throughput (2989MB/s vs. 3500MB/s) and lower TBW (450TB vs. 600TB). OWC’s Aura Pro page boasts “7% overprovisioning” — but
every SSD maker does that
already.
Aside from a single line of OWC SSDs whose controller can down-step to SATA I (handy for a Power Mac G5’s SATA bay), the rest of OWC’s house-branded SSDs are far and beyond what one ought to pay for even a competing product from long-reputable brands like Western Digital, Kingston, or Micron.
tl;dr: Since expanding their house brand and shutting out others on their store, OWC got spendy (or zealously opportunistic, take your pick) and chose to render their brand as boutique as Apple themselves. That is their wont. But so too is consumer scrutiny and encouraging fellow Mac users to do their consumer homework before pulling out their bank card.
The information a consumer needs to buy a quality competing product, without the premium of OWC’s name slapped on it, is not hard to find in 2023 — or, for that matter, in 2013. Quirks which made older Apple gear stand apart in third-party products to upgrade a Mac (like NuBus, ADB, or FireWire) are no longer and haven’t been for long while.
Don't believe me? OK - well please hop over and browse the MR thread entitled "PCIe SSDs - NVMe & AHCI" and note the wide variety of capability WRT to non-approved NVMe products.
This isn’t a matter of “belief” or “disbelief”. That thread’s creator, much as creators for other information clearance threads on here, do stuff like this as a means of providing hard data which can and often does gets buried in marketing materials and tech specs (or just omitted outright). Providing these data in one place is, as a by-product, a gesture of consumer advocacy as much as it is one of improving industry-wide transparency.
Along these same lines is the Samsung 870 EVO mentioned elsewhere in this thread. The 870 is a very capable SSD unless of course you want to use it as a boot-drive in certain cMP5,1 configurations in which case, you're out of luck.
In fairness, there appears to be
several issues around the 870 EVO which also negatively impacts non-Mac users on non-Apple hardware. Whether this was a design issue or a string of bad firmware, Samsung will probably not be remembered with widespread praise for the 870 EVO. Others? Absolutely.
So my overall points are (a) If you're one that has the time and chutzpah to tinker with non-approved gear (which I often am), then go forth and install what you may; but (b) If you want something to work Day-1, then OWC is a great bet...
A) One doesn’t need “chutzpah” to be an informed consumer and a savvy shopper (is this now frowned upon?), but
B) if you don’t want to be an informed consumer and/or don’t care about how much money you spend (even when it’s a poor value relative to distinguished competition), then OWC it all the way and let that ignorance be blissful. 🤷♀️
