Apple has repriced the third-party external SSDs on its store, and a 1TB SanDisk drive that sold for roughly $120 is now listed at $360.
PCMag puts the SanDisk 4TB Pro-G40 at $1,199.95, up from $499.95, and a 2TB version at $600. The 4TB drive launched at $399.95, so on those figures the current listing is three times its introductory price and 140 percent above the price it carried before this move. The 1TB jump works out at a straight trebling. All three calculations are mine, from the published listings.
Provenance matters here more than the arithmetic. PCMag and Gizmodo both credit the same Bloomberg newsletter by Mark Gurman for the price observations, so this is one report with two carriers rather than two independent sightings, and the numbers should be read at that strength. Gizmodo relays Gurman's point that vendors, not Apple, normally set these prices.
The more useful detail is what is left on the shelf. PCMag reports that third-party storage on Apple's site is currently unavailable, naming LaCie, Promise and SanDisk among the brands affected, while Apple's own Mac Pro SSD upgrade kits stay listed at $1,000 for 2TB and $1,600 for 4TB. Neither carrier reports any comment from Apple.
Run the new listings per terabyte and they land more neatly than a panic would. The 2TB at $600 works out at exactly $300 per terabyte and the 4TB at $1,199.95 at a hair under it, while the 1TB at $360 carries the small-capacity premium these drives have always carried. A retailer improvising under pressure does not arrive at a flat rate across two capacities. On that evidence this reads as a reset to a new cost basis rather than a reaction to one bad week, though nothing in either report says so directly.
The first-party contrast points the same way. Own-brand modules holding their listed prices while every partner SKU goes dark is the shape of an allocation decision, not a demand spike, and it is the part of this that a storage buyer can actually act on.
Treat the specific dollar figures as provisional. They come from a single primary that neither carrier reproduces in full, they describe listings that can change without notice, and PCMag's account contains at least one transcription slip, labelling one Mac Pro kit configuration 8GB where the surrounding capacities require 8TB. The direction is not in doubt. The decimals are.
What a buyer should take from this is narrower than the headline number. Consumer external SSD pricing has moved far enough that it is now a poor proxy for anything except channel scarcity, and a refresh planned on last year's per-terabyte assumptions is working from a figure that no longer exists.
Bootnote: the Pro-G40 is the drive with the metal keychain loop, sold for years as the rugged option for people carrying footage between sites. It launched at $399.95 and is now listed at three times that, which makes it one of the few storage products whose price has kept pace with its own marketing about surviving punishment.
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