I guess they’re asking too much from the SSD anyway and want to leave a small difference on purpose.
They won’t want to make an SSD a cheap replacement.
In order to simply earn good money and give people a lot, they are content with a budget SSD model if it is already entry-level 10 TB. Now it has become a little artificially short for simple users, 256-512 GB is already enough.
Gamer would like to get 1-4 TB soon anyway.
Someone to work with rendering or large server/tasks who really wants everything on an SSD, they definitely want 4-16TB space and a pro server is still multi or infinite demand.
Scaling up and stacking tiny flakes less than 1 gram costs no material, so there’s about 1/200th of that gold on something that already weighs less than 1 gram.
Only buying machines and expensive research and development. I think an SSD has long since outgrown a hard drive that they can offer for literally nothing if they wanted to. Although they saturate the market very quickly, big profits are a thing of the past. In addition, hard disk manufacturers immediately turn their necks.
If they want, they can probably shove 16TB on M.2 tomorrow and still make a profit even if they ask 100€ for it. The problem is people don’t have to buy anything for 10 or more years until it breaks. The life of an SSD will also be much longer with this capacity because an SSD simply scales well with more volumes, so it ages less quickly. Because the same cells are not rewritten over and over again.
This was also happening with light bulbs, auto parts, etc. A very successful and much developed product will not break or meet expectations. The manufacturer protects itself by ensuring that the product is no longer suitable after x number of years. You do this by not providing enough capacity or shortening the lifespan, shutting everything down and making it irreplaceable. (planned obsolescence) so that they can welcome their existing customers over and over again.
I like that SSD prices are finally coming down again because my demand is still high for them but I don’t buy them because I think they are too expensive. I even have 5 TB now. 1 x 1 TB 2 x 1 TB 1 x 2 TB. I would prefer 2 x 4tb or just 1 x 8tb in the future more is always welcome I can still get it full