This sort of "upgrade" nickel and diming is true of every laptop vendor, but Apple is definitely one of the worst. It's like their pricing structure is stuck in 2012
The SSDs they use really do cost that much though. Even if you got them from another manufacturer they'd be about that expensive. Apple don't use cheap SSDs...they use blazing fast, top of the line units not found on many other laptops.
If you have criticism, price isn't a valid one.
But you can definitely argue that they should have cheaper/slower options so that consumers who don't need blazing fast SSDs can still benefit from increased storage.
You can buy SSD with the same specs 3.2GB Read and 2.2GB Write for much cheaper. Samsung sells 970 EVO 1 TB m.2 for $300 [1] but you can even buy cheaper on amazon for less than $235. Keep i mind those +$400 was price for upgrade from 500GB to 1TB not the price of 1TB which is much much more.
For example Apple charges upgrading macbook pro 13 from 128GB (silly they even offer pro machine with such small SSD) to 1TB for..... $800! So in other words prices their 1TB SSD disk for ~$1000. It's insane.
Fair enough but Lenovo doesn't solder their SSD. Nothing prevents you from buying the cheapest option and upgrading yourself, e.g. Lenovo thinkpad X1 Extreme has even 2 SDD m.2 slots. You also don't have to max out you storage when buying because you can always upgrade it in the future once you need more storage or when SSD gets even cheaper few years later. On top of that those 2 m.2 slots allows you to put disk in raid 0 or use second one with optane memory once its cheaper and worth it.
Aren't those just the numbers for SATA connection vs. M.2 PCIe?
Apple doesn't manufacture SSDs, they buy them from the same companies that Dell, HP, Asus, etc... do. There isn't special Mac only models of those drives, it's all the same hardware in the end. The only advantage I see is that Apple was quick to switch to M.2 and macrumors cherry picked their competition to avoid PCs with M.2 SSDs.
Geekbench across OS's and motherboards is worthless, especially when they have different file systems. You need to look a the spec sheet for the actual hardware, or compare on the same machine with an aftermarket part.
I'm extremely skeptical that Apple has some magic SSD with 6.5x read/write speed of everyone else.
To make things worst, out of all the laptop vendor Apple is the only one with their own SSD controller, which is not a small percentage of BOM cost in SSD. And they are one of the few that gets favourable NAND pricing due to the volume they move with iPhone and iPad.
