Under $2,000 - M2 and M1 MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro

However, this does give you an extra item to take with your MacBook from place to place.Įxternal drives are considerably cheaper than Apple's built-in storage upgrades, making them a viable option for extending storage in a more budget-friendly way.

Modern external drives are very fast, making them especially useful for expanding storage. However, aside from chargers, the other thing that users can greatly influence is storage via the use of external hard drives. Since Apple's hardware cannot be upgraded post-purchase, users are stuck mainly with whatever specifications they buy. For reference, the cheapest 512GB 16-inch MacBook Pro costs $2,499. You have a price difference of $2,400 between the lowest-capacity 512GB models and the 8TB highest-capacity variants. Going from 2TB to 4TB costs users an extra $600, while the shift from 4TB to 8TB costs an additional $1,200.

If you go beyond 2TB, the storage upgrade costs rise steeply. The 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro have capacities starting at 512GB, and upgrading to 2TB costs the same $600 as if you would go from 512GB to 2TB on the MacBook Air, for example. Shifting from the lowest to the highest capacity in the value-oriented models can cost users an extra $800 on the base price. This isn't a problem for the cheapest MacBook models due to Apple limiting the storage range to start from 256GB and finish at 2TB. Storage upgrades can quickly increase the cost of a new MacBook Air or Pro.

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