So add a 30% tariff, will it still beat what Apple wants to charge you? that's your answer.
I was going to wait it out till the end of the year, but due to tariffs uncertainty i purchased it last week from Bresun store (aliexpress) 2TB sandisk, very fast shipping (6 days), just intalled today and its working well.
This is the 1TB disk I purchased to replace the base 256GB. I hate that these drives' write speeds outperform the read speeds. By the way...Black Magic's test is not the way to properly get a good overall reading. It measures for video performance only.
More to the point Apple isn't escaping the tariffs, either. How long it will swallow that 30% hit to its markup is another question you have to consider. Unless you are ordering from its dwindling local stocks of stock configuration items, it's going to ship from abroad.
Apple won't pay a 30% markup on the SALE PRICE to the punters they mug. Apple pays a 30% markup on the COST PRICE so you'll see an increase in price of maybe 5-10%. Remember, Apple builds its widgets for about 20% to one third of the sale price to mugs.
Apple has a markup of up to 40%. Any reduction in that is a hit to profits. It will be more than 5-10% or shareholders will have to foot the bill.
Thrilled to see the Pro upgrade becoming available.
i felt the same way towards reliability and longevity with this 4 layer board compared to 10 layer apple design but for $180 2TB version when i purchased actually cheaper than an external drive+thunderbolt4 adapter combo, definitely voided my warranty now, no apple care for me anyway, time will tell.
Unless you swapped out the chips on the original SSD board, broke something during the repair, why would you think that the warranty was voided? As has been mentioned multiple times in this thread, if something breaks on your mini (extremely rare, but not entirely impossible as mini’s tend to be much more reliable than MacBooks), just put in the original SSD, restore, and bring back to Apple for warranty work. Just don’t do something dumb like bringing it in for repair with the 3rd party SSD.
While I am also expecting price to drop, but with M4 Pro it may not be dropping as much as the M4, since there is relatively much less demand thus the momentum for competitors will be low. They also took too much time to push the M4 Pro card out, because by now the Mac Studio M4 Max exists, and it is compatible with the M2 Studio card so no new work is needed, which draws even more demand away from the M4 Pro scenario.
