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Comment by wrs | Hacker News Reader

MacBooks are supposedly "overpriced", except he couldn't find any entirely comparable hardware--not even counting the value of having macOS. So in what sense are they overpriced?

It seems the other manufacturers care about this market niche even less than Apple does.

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They're "overpriced" because you can buy more GHz, cores, GB ram, and GB storage for drastically less money.

What you can't find is screen resolution, quality of the keyboard, trackpad, and hinge, battery life, and general polish ("marketing") along with the other specs, while still costing less.

I agree, but I wouldn't characterize polish as "marketing". Polish includes design cohesion, build quality, choice of materials, a philosophy of engineering in service of the user experience (consider the comment elsewhere in this thread about how Apple has bespoke handling for Thunderbolt to allow it to power down at idle), and software/hardware integration. It's arguable that Apple has slipped in some of these areas, but none of them are "marketing", and all of them contribute to the sense of quality (and to cost).

I agree, but I think most critics of Apple would claim that only specs are real, and what we're talking about here is an illusion created by branding.

I think we're on the same page. Apple's relatively costly products will be seen as an especially bad value by those who do not see value in polish and attention to detail (or who believe polish and attention to detail -- particularly Apple's --- are a marketing illusion).

They're overpriced compared to what we had back in the day with the mb airs -- great performance and specs, sitting in the $1000-$1500 price slot, $2K pimped.

funny, when I go to the grocery store, their oranges are way more expensive than the apples I bought a decade ago.

MacBooks are generally fairly reasonably priced so long as you want the exact, precise hardware configuration they want, with no feature they don't offer or that are madatory but you don't need. Also, I'm pretty sure none of the MacBooks meet his "Linux compatible out the box" criteria either.

Eh, I use a Macbook Pro as my primary machine, and that's overselling it. Sure, the people who say "look at this $700 machine with the same specs as a Macbook Pro" are stupid, but there's a couple of comparable laptops.

Most notably, the Dell XPS 15 even puts the MBP to shame in some areas, and it basically runs linux out of the box despite what this article says. I'd get it if I wasn't happy with my current 15 inch rMBP.

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