[twoparachute45]

> There’s a lot of diversity under that “3D TLC” umbrella.

There really isn't. Apple is reported to use SanDisk 3D TLC NAND chips. SanDisk is owned by Western Digital, and the WD SSDs use SanDisk chips. They're literally the same chips.

[Retric]

They could in theory come off the same assembly line, that doesn’t mean the everything is identical.

Hell WD chips could be of higher quality as I am not suggesting I know their internal processes. I am saying things are optimized differently.

[izacus]

At this point of the conversation, you seem to be really grasping for theoretical stuff to defent Apple's margins with very little proof. Why?

[wtallis]

There really isn't much diversity in NAND flash product lines. Each generation of 3D NAND from WD+Kioxia basically consists of two sizes of TLC die and one or two sizes of QLC die. For the purposes of this conversation, binning doesn't matter because "SSD grade" is already the top bin. So the only variable on the NAND side for a high-end 2TB drive is the question of whether it's built with the high-capacity die (cheaper per GB), or twice as many of the low-capacity dies (potentially faster if it allows more controller channels to be fully populated, but that's usually not a problem at 2TB).

[pdpi]

> They could in theory come off the same assembly line, that doesn’t mean the everything is identical.

It could just come down to different binning of the same part, and it would still make a difference.

[bayindirh]

> They're literally the same chips.

At what grade? Plus, how much extra endurance is baked in to Apple's drives, i.e. how over-provisioned are they?

My MacBook Air M1 reports 99% health after being daily driven (and some 26TB written to it) at work since 2020 (we got these as soon as they introduced), and I don't baby its drive in any way.

[dazed_confused]

Any decent consumer SSD will be exactly the same, brands such as SK Hynix, Samsung, Crucial, WD, etc. same chips and same performance, much cheaper than the Apple tax.