It’s time to pack it up. Crucial is phasing out its wildly popular MX500 SSD, which has been one of the most popular and best SSDs you can buy for close to seven years. I’ve personally recommended it countless times, and I’ve had one plugging away in my personal system for over five years.
Since it was introduced in the opening weeks of 2018, the Crucial MX500 has been at the top of bestseller charts — and for good reason. It’s an inexpensive 2.5-inch SATA SSD, and it’s available all the way up to 4TB. It was also frequently on sale. Reddit user u/iEngineered snagged a 4TB model on Prime Day last year, but it failed earlier this month. After making a warranty request, Crucial informed the user that the 4TB model was no longer in production.
Crucial confirmed to ComputerBase that the MX500 is being discontinued. On Crucial’s website, the 4TB and 250GB versions have an “end of life” badge, while the remaining capacity options are out of stock. Retailers still have remaining inventory, thankfully. The 2TB version, for example, is on sale on Amazon for 17% off right now.
Although the MX500 has reached legendary status within the PC hardware community, that’s not because it’s particularly fast. This is a SATA SSD, and it only claims sequential read speeds of up to 560MB/s. Even a last-gen M.2 SSD like the Samsung 990 Pro can reach speeds of up to 7,450MB/s. The MX500 was popular because it was inexpensive, provided a ton of storage, and came with a rare five-year warranty.
I still have a 2TB MX500 rocking in my personal PC, which I use alongside an 1TB M.2 drive to store games. Despite the massive delta in speed, I wouldn’t be able to tell you which games are installed on which drive unless I specifically look for them. It’s true that M.2 drives are slowly becoming the norm, but there’s something to be said for large-capacity SATA drives that just work, especially when they don’t cost a lot of money.
It’s not a shock to see the MX500 go, however. Not only are motherboards packing more M.2 slots — at least three, and sometimes five or more — but M.2 NVMe drives have also drastically dropped in price. For example, the Samsung 990 Evo Plus is actually available for $30 less than the 4TB MX500, despite speeds that are 10 times as fast.
Old souls may look back on the MX500 fondly — I certainly do, and I plan on running my own MX500 into the ground until it completely gives out — but the situation today is much different than it was seven years ago. So, pour one out for the MX500, but don’t mourn its loss too much. There are much better options available today.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.