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The White Unibody MacBook has same storage as M4 Air
- Thread starter awshucks
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Speed is not relevant to capacity. A 256 GB SSD will store no more movies than a 256 GB HDD.
That’s why I recommended him the external SSD or HDD, or the upgrade from Apple
In other news, cars still have 4 tyres 100 years after their invention.
Just noticing.
But life has changed.
In 2009 people had music libraries. In 2025 they use Spotify.
In 2009 people had movie libraries. In 2025 they use Netflix.
In 2009 people had photo libraries. In 2025 they use iCloud Photos
Storage needs have changed and on average people store less stuff locally I would bet.
That’s sort of the point. The cost of the SSD in a 2025 MacBook Air represents a significantly smaller percentage of the BOM than the similarly-sized HDD did in a 2009 MacBook.
That, if anything, is an apples to oranges comparison. A 2025 MacBook Air screen has 416% more pixels than a 2009 MacBook screen, and then there's TFT vs IPS, viewing angle, contrast ratio, color depth (millions vs billions!), color gamut, brightness (double!) and True Tone. The only roughly similar aspects are the physical dimensions and the refresh rate.
The 256 GB storage in a 2025 MacBook Air is the equivalent of putting a 1280x800 display in it.
While probably true for most people, it is just a hygiene factor. I doubt the 512 GB SSD costs Apple many cents more than the 256 GB one does. I would be sort of fine with the 256 GB base configuration due to your stated reasoning if the $200 upgrade price was not so horrendously absurd.
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Does anyone sense that iCloud prices will increase due to tariffs? In addition, if data was to be stored within a country that became, shall we say, unfriendly, wouldn't large, local storage be preferable?
What do you mean? They were even more so 16 years ago! SSDs were very expensive. It cost an extra $1000 to get an 64GB SSD on the original MBA instead of the standard 80GB HDD!
Could they, yes, will they know to do so? No. If you look up on Apple's website it says xcode is only 3.18 gb. So you think hey 256 is more than enough, wrong. As soon as you open it for the first time it ballons to 15ish gb. Then it downloads the simulator runtimes etc and very quickly within just a month or so will take up over 100 gb
This is just 1 month of xcode use on a new Mac Studio as an example with only the minimum simulators I need downloaded:
If I had to support multiple iOS versions or different devices it could easily be in the 200 gb range. This issue doesn't personally affect me, My rule is always to get double the storage I am currently USING so when I upgraded from my M1 Max to the M4 MAX studio my M1 was using like 800 GB, so 1,600 would be double so I got 2 TB which should last me the next few years. I just feel its a bad experience for Windows users moving over since they typically start at 512 in windows land.
Not a relevant question given the minis also have 256 gb and I can definitly see first time developers dipping their toes with a mini/air (in fact my first mac as a developer was an air and then a mini!)
If you think that there hasn't been massive improvements and innovations in tires during those last 100 years you are completely off base. Probably one of the few things that are consistently improving vs becoming mass produced garbage.
My point was that several factors play a role. You just snipped one. Market demand for a basic entry level product (regardless whether its more capable but Apple designated it as such) vs cost to build and msrp. Apple usually prioritizes experience (speed, feel, aesthetics). Industry standard for base entry laptop configs is still 256gb. BUT i will agree, Apples upgrade cost for higher capacity storage and ram is truly a travesty. This would be a non issue if they charged something reasonable in line with the market or allowed internal upgrades like in those years of 2009. I guess Apples internal upgrade version of today is an iCloud subscription. Which sucks for many.
I’m not saying there hasn’t been massive improvements in tyres.
In fact my entire point is there has been.
Same way that a 250GB HDD in a 2009 MacBook is not comparable to a 256GB drive in today’s MacBook Air as there a has been massive improvements in speed and reliability.
Oh yeah Apple absolutely scalp people in storage prices. No denial there
But as someone with 130gb free 5 years into owning a 256gb M1 air I’m not exactly desperate for more storage.
As much as I'd like to say "In that case I'm obviously smarter than the overwhelming majority of developers", it seems that if this really was the case there would be many threads here by developers who bought the 256GB versions without knowing any better and are now stuck with poorly configured machines.
But that's not the case. There are a couple of threads but very few. It seems to be a non-issue and it seems that developers generally ARE smart enough to choose the right specifications.
Also "just noticing" that the starting price for the base model MacBook back in 2009 was the same as today's Air: $999 (nearly $1500 in 2025 dollars). As a matter of fact, if you go back a full 20 years to 2005, you'll find the base model iBook is also $999 (over $1600 in 2025 dollars).
So, you can bump up your 2025 Air's storage by 4x for a total of 1 TB and still not hit that kind of price.
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My point was specifically targeted at newer developers or people moving to develop for iOS/macOS. They get burned because they don't know, and they don't know because Apple's Xcode is a massive storage hog that is deceptively listed as 3 gb when its really 100gb the second you start using it.
Once you get burned you learn and move on. No other platform/IDE has this issue. Read on the microsoft forums people are complaining about how Visual Studio takes up 10-20 gb or how entire game engines like UE5 take up 50-60 gb and here I am laughing in Xcode that uses 100 gb of space to make iOS 18 (only) apps.
Apple could have done 200 different things to make Xcode better and be able to effectively use the 256 gb starting space but they didnt and wont because they know developers will opt for the bigger drives since we are used to Apple lol.
Normal people dont really store much locally. They stream TV/movies, they stream music, and they have photos in Google or iCloud. So it makes 100% sense that the default storage on their budget laptop has 250GB.
Meanwhile in other news, I still sometimes use mine. Funnily enough it has a 256GB SSD and my entire offline music library on it.
It is the budget/entry point laptop option for Apple in their lineup and for Mac users. Comparing to budget Windows laptops is really pointless and has been done a trillion times. Also, your budget is different from a lower income or a higher income maker and their beliefs in what's value add or not. So it's also slightly subjective. Based on your currency, there are also VAT implications which has nothing to do with Apple.
Yes and the efficiency cores in the m4 have a clockspeed that’s also almost the same as Power Mac g5 from 2005 (2,9GHz vs 2,7GHz) 20 years later!
The same number can mean completely different things in different technology. The speed of the ssd is completely different, the speed of the processor is much higher we can now more easily do whole disk compression, streaming media, cloud storage and the availability of high speed internet literally everywhere reduce the need for high storage. Like someone else here said: I have a 4TB M2 Max macbook pro for professional use, but for my husband I bought an entry level m1 MBA. He’s using half the storage and has no need whatsoever for more. The storage speed gains since 2009 are way more important to him than storage size.
I’m quite sure apple has data that supports this. Millions of people don’t need more storage, and for the same price have more use for faster storage than for more storage, so that’s where they put their effort.
I think a 250GB 2.5" HDD probably cost more in 2009 than a 256GB SSD costs today. You can get a 256GB SSD for $20-30 these days. I don't think HDD were ever that cheap new even ignoring inflation.
You're missing my point. How much did an SSD of equal storage cost compared to an HDD in 2009? I didn't say that HDDs are/were dirt cheap... I said that they were dirt cheap compared to SSDs. In 2008, an MBA with a 64GB SSD cost $1000 more than the same laptop with an 80GB HDD!
Sure. But that's missing the point that on a percentage basis the 256GB SSD is a smaller fraction of the bill of materials on a modern MacBook Air than the 250GB HDD was on a white MacBook. Apple is spending less on storage in the base models despite HDDs being as cheap as dirt.
Sure it is. If you can't do some basic research on what kind of tools you might need to do something that requires tools, you're probably not ready to start doing it.