this is a cost-saving measure on the one hand (2280 are more broadly available and affordable than the small sizes these days), but on the other hand allows you a lot more flexibilty when choosing fast storage options. you'll also be able to do RAID stuff between the 2 SSDs, of course.

now the bad news: i didn't anticipate the recent SSD+RAM apocalypse last year. the 32GB RAM+256GB eMMC are safe because i bought them early. but i didn't buy all SSDs early enough: even with the switch to 2280/being able to combine stock of different sizes, the SSDs at promised capacities would cost us 33514 EUR over budget. we don't have this extra cash, so the only option is to reduce the SSD capacities: we can ship 1TB instead of 2TB and 512GB instead of 1TB. i'm extremely sorry for this.

everything else about the Next is going well though. we fixed many small papercuts that i experienced while daily driving the laptop and have many parts already stocked or ordered. i have a draft of a more detailled Crowd Supply update that i'll finish over the next few days.

for reference, SSD price development graphs @ PC Part Picker https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/#storage.ssdm2nvme.2000

i forgot to say that with this new plan, the half capacity SSDs are still more expensive than the original ones (approx 5158 EUR over budget).