Published 6:47 PM EST Nov 29, 2018 Corrections & Clarifications: A previous version of this column incorrectly stated that only one size of solid state drives was available on iMac models. When Apple announced the first new versions of its MacBook Air laptop and Mac mini desktop in years, it left the bad news behind its site’s “Buy” buttons: a scant storage allocation that’s expensive to upgrade.

Both the Air and the mini start with a 128-gigabyte solid-state drive (that term refers to their use of flash memory without moving parts instead of a hard drive’s rotating platter). More capacity means more money: Configuring either with a 256GB “SSD” costs $200 more, and a 512GB drive adds $400. A 1 terabyte drive tacks on $800 — a dollar above the entry-level Mac mini’s $799 price. Could you get by with 128GB of storage? Not easily – as I learned from owning a MacBook Air with that allocation and from providing tech support to a family member with one who used it far less intensively.

Both Macs regularly needed housecleaning to free up space to install Apple’s operating-system upgrades. JUSTIN LANE, EPA-EFE Cloud storage from such vendors as Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, Google and Microsoft can free you from having to keep local copies of photo, video and music archives. But that demands constant and fast connectivity, costs extra (Apple’s iCloud runs $35.88 a year for 200GB or $119.88 a year for 2TB) and won’t help with Mac apps. “In today’s world, I can’t recommend any notebook or desktop without at least 512GB,” emailed Mark Vena, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy. His one-word summary of Apple’s storage pricing: “Outrageous.” Among competing Windows laptops, most offer more storage and charge less to upgrade that. The cheapest model of the HP Spectre x360, for instance, starts with a 256GB SSD, and ordering that with a 512GB drive adds only $80. The Lenovo Yoga 920 also includes at least a 256GB SSD, and it’s $130 more for a configuration with double the storage and a faster processor.

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More: Review: Apple gives MacBook Air (most) of the love it's been lacking More: Black Friday 2018: The best deals on the Apple MacBook Air, Pro, and more More: Sorry, vegans. HP's Spectre Folio laptop is made with leather The Dell XPS 13, however, includes just a 128GB SSD in its low-end version and a model with a 256GB SSD – which also doubles the memory from an inadequate 4GB to 8GB and ups the processor – costs $310 extra. Meanwhile, Apple itself doesn’t think 128GB is an acceptable minimum on other Macs.

The 12-inch MacBook offers at least 256GB; the iMac normally includes a 1 TB hard drive, but if you replace that with an SSD you can buy only a 256GB model in its entry-level configuration, with higher-capacity SSDs available on more expensive iMac systems. Apple PR did not answer an email asking about the logic behind this pattern.

“I think Apple’s strategy is as simple as extracting as much ASP (average selling price) as they can for the vaunted Apple experience,” Vena said. He added that Apple won’t lose if it sells iCloud subscriptions instead: Compared to the one-time revenue of a storage upgrade, that recurring revenue “will likely be higher over the lifecycle of the customer.” On both the Air and the mini, you have no options besides paying Apple’s price for upgrading the internal storage. The Mac repair site iFixit dismantled an Air and a mini and found that both have their SSDs soldered to their logic boards.

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(That inspection, however, revealed that the mini’s memory is relatively easy to replace if you’d rather not pay $200 to go from 8GB to 16GB. “We’re going to launch a RAM upgrade kit for it.” CEO Kyle Wiens wrote in an email.) The mini’s array of ports does allow for the possibility of plugging in an external SSD – 512GB models cost $100 and change at retail – at the cost of cluttering your desktop a little more. What’s your price for a tidy computer setup? Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, email Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at @robpegoraro.

In particular it contains a number of default directory paths indicating where temporary files should be created, where speech data normally resides, etc. The routine VOICEBOX.M contains various installation-dependent parameters which may need to be altered before using the toolbox. You can override these defaults by editing voicebox.m directly or, more conveniently, by setting an environment variable VOICEBOX to the path of an initializing m-file. Speaker recognition matlab. Several of the routines require MATLAB V6.5 or above and require (normally slight) modification to work with earlier veresions. The routines are available as a zip archive and are made available under the terms of the GNU Public License.