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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

The comments are mentioning the Xeons in Mac Pros and how Apple should switch. I have no factual basis for this, but I figure Apple has got to be using AMD's new chips as leverage to get some pretty sweet deals on Intel silicon.

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Deals that Apple does not pass on to their customers.

So? As any corporate sack-chortler worth their salt will eagerly tell you, to seek rent is not only their prerogative but their moral duty.

If people continue to pay Apple's (sometimes) outrageous prices, why should they lower them?

(I'm just as guilty, having spent over two grand on MBPs multiple times!)

Despite their price, there was a time when macbooks were only 5-10% more than the PC equivalent laptop. People that were complaining about its price were inevitably comparing it to bottom of the barrel PC laptops, not higher end business laptops that had comparable specs.

I haven't priced out any recent macbooks to know if that's still true though. Glancing at the new 16" macbook pro, it seems like it might be reasonably priced for what you're getting.

There is so much that goes in to a laptop that doesn't make it to the spec sheet either. People only look at a couple of specs to decide how much it should cost but some laptop makers put everything in to those specs and cheap out on everything else and you end up with a laptop with a fast CPU but brittle plastic, A TN display, a DAC that hisses and a whole bunch of other nastyness

Yeah, the MBP 16” is pretty comparable to the Dell XPS in price - at least when comparing base models.

However, the costs go up a lot if you spec out a custom config (+$400 just for 32GB RAM). Then the MBP starts looking quite a bit more expensive. Overall I don’t think they’re a bad buy though if you want macOS.

That said, the Mac pro, even starting at the base price is pretty outrageous... I mean, I get $500 for the case and $1500 for the MB, but the rest just seems to be too much in aggregate, and even more ridiculous for mfg upgrades out of the box.

>Yeah, the MBP 16” is pretty comparable to the Dell XPS in price - at least when comparing base models.

The Dell XPS [1] with a comparable spec cost $1650 compare to MBP 16" $2399. In the old days Apple would have priced it closer to $2199 or slightly lower.

Somewhere along the line they started making Mac same margins as iPhone.

[1] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/deals/new-xps-15-laptop/spd/...

>Despite their price, there was a time when macbooks were only 5-10% more than the PC equivalent laptop.

I seriously doubt 5-10%. You are talking about minimum $50 - $100+ dollar difference, that has never happened. Mac has always been roughly 20-30% more expensive than a laptop with comparable specs. So $1000 comparable spec laptop, Apple will sell you one for $1300, ( But with more expensive upgrades )

The 30% has been fine for years, the quality and finishing as well as macOS was well worth the price tag. But in recent years it hasn't been 30% at all.

I remember when I bought my first Macbook Pro in 2014, the specs compared to Dell/Lenovo was in the same price range. There was no Apple Premium.

So I decided to give Apple a chance, and I am still using that laptop today, it has really been great value for my money.

As you lower the price, more people can and will buy your product giving you (hypothetically) more profits than before. I’d like to think Apple has done all their homework about what price point to sell at to maximize profit but honestly at this point I think they just make up whatever huge number they want for the Mac Pro price to make it seem cool and go with it.

https://blog.asmartbear.com/price-vs-quantity.html

Don't feel too bad. 386 PCs used to sell for $15k in 2020 dollars.

When I was in high school in the early 2000s I had a friend who told me his parents purchased a 386 when they first came on the market where I live and they paid around $15k. My jaw just dropped. Then my friend just started chuckling at his parents folly when looking back even at that time it was such an expensive paperweight. Heck, thinking about it now it probably came up in conversation because at the time I had a hobby of picking up old computers that people had thrown out and cobbling together the working parts and built a 386 and a 486 that way. Good times.

Apple has been successfully using the Good, Better, Best three-tiered pricing model for quite some time. I remember buying a Powerbook 140 at the time when I really wanted the 170 but could not justify the increased price.

From wikipedia:

"Intended as a replacement for the Portable, the 140 series was identical to the 170, though it compromised a number of the high-end model's features to make it a more affordable mid-range option. The most apparent difference was that the 140 used a cheaper, 10 in (25 cm) diagonal passive matrix display instead of the sharper active matrix version used on the 170. Internally, in addition to a slower 16 MHz processor, the 140 also lacked a Floating Point Unit (FPU) and could not be upgraded. It also came standard with a 20 MB hard drive compared with the 170's 40 MB drive."

So where's the "good" Mac with a PCIe slot?

The MBP isn’t even a very good example of Apple price gouging. Any other laptop that your can get for less money is likely to have rather significant trade-offs.

Why should they? The market dictates the price.

If people are buying Apple products at those prices then why should Apple lower their prices? The answer is they shouldn't.

Ah yes, the "market" for macOS machines with PCIe slots.

While you may scoff enough people are willing to pay the extra for Mac OS and a high level workstation to justify their prices.

Indeed it does. Which nicely explains the rising popularity of Hackintosh's, particularly among developers and other technologists. AMD Hackintosh's[1] in particular have skyrocketed in maturity and simplicity since Ryzen.

1: https://amd-osx.com/

Apple are locking down the platform via proprietary chips etc. It isn't a long term solution and shouldn't be relied upon.

To be fair, the Hackintosh community is pretty persistent. They added opcode emulation into the kernel, for example, to handle running on CPUs without the expected instructions (older AMD CPUs back in 10.8 or so). I wouldn't be surprised to see the cat-and-mouse continue.

Wonder what happens when Apple starts "enforcing" a Tx chip to boot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors#Appl...

This sounds really interesting, do you have any links that I could follow to learn more? Is it setting an invalid opcode exception handler?

They released a whitepaper on it, yeah. It was a bit annoying to dig up, but Archive.org comes to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100217014904/http://xnu-dev.go...

It's strange that I can't find any source code for this…

https://github.com/sinetek/xnu-amd/tree/master/osfmk/OPEMU

Thanks! I still wonder how usable programs that utilize SSE3 with this, but it's a pretty cool workaround.

Indeed though keep in mind that the current method for running macOS on AMD doesn't use this and instead relies on patching through Clover. The downside being that whilst the OS itself may run any applications that use an opcode that isn't implemented will simply crash.

I'd been running Hackintosh and an rMBP for my desktop and laptop respectively... this past year I've passed on both and now running Linux for my personal desktop, and will be getting a new laptop within the next few months, some of the Ryzen Asus laptops coming soon are interesting.

Although still not without issue, my workflow has aligned so much with Linux and it's finally reached a good enough point for my day to day use... not having to use the VM based mac or windows docker has been really nice (WSL isn't good enough imho).

So, explain to me again how "the marked dictates the price"? ...

I know you are being facetious, however there are options which the market provide.

1) Other companies that are willing to sell you workstation and laptop computers that you can run other operating systems on such as one of the Linux variants, Windows, BSD etc. Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer from Apple.

2) There is a thriving second hand market of Apple machines just look at ebay, craigslist, gumtree etc.

If a new Apple machine isn't worth it to you, you are free to buy alternatives.

I am going to buy one of the newer Lenovo Thinkpads as I don't think the MacBook pro is worth it to replace my ageing Macbook Pro.

> Which nicely explains the rising popularity of Hackintosh's, particularly among developers and other technologists.

Can you provide a citation for this? Having worked with literally thousands of engineers, I have never seen a hackintosh in real life.

I personally know of a iOS software house where all developers use hackintosh, so yeah it's popular.

Which you can derive from there being at least one hackintosh shop?

It's the only iOS software house I personally know, so in my POV it represents 100% of macos/iOS shops.

YMMV.

You put together all your information from anecdotally never seeing one.

I believe he’s wrong and they are not meaningfully rising in popularity. Hackintoshes started as soon as the Intel transition, and they do exist (I’ve seen a couple personally, both built around the Leopard era when tools were mature and the desirability of iCloud/iMessage integration was lower.) Today there aren’t many people who need to push computing beyond the relatively affordable Mac Mini and iMac configurations. Most Hackintosh practitioners want Apple to release the “XMac,” a cheap and configurable desktop tower* and operate their Hackintosh in its stead.

It’s a respectable hobby, though, like iOS jailbreaking or emulation, and for persistent people it does let them run MacOS on more powerful hardware than they could afford.

* https://arstechnica.com/staff/2005/10/1676/

Not sure a citation exists for such an assertion -- but I'm a decade deep and numerous production (profitable) iOS apps shipped without ever touching Apple hardware. MacOS is a joy but the hardware is consumer rot.

I’m sure if it was indeed popular, there would be some way of demonstrating that. Aside from the fact that I have never seen one in my entire career as a consultant, working with hundreds of organisations, the reason this sounds ridiculous to me is that Apple has a long history of making very little effort to obstruct the hackintosh community. Which suggests very strongly that the community is too small for Apple to bother with. There are a few topics on HN that seem to bring out people claiming that incredibly niche interests are actually very common and popular. Apple is one of them. So I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that somebody making such an incredible claim should have at least some way of substantiating it.

I’m sure if it was indeed popular, there would be some way of demonstrating that.

Google Trends suggests that searches for 'Hackintosh' peaked around 2009 and have been steadily declining down to around a half since then. Searches for 'Ubuntu' dominate so much it makes the Hackintosh graph look flat by comparison, but Hackintosh seems about as popular as 'Manjaro' (Linux Distribution) currently is, fwiw:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=hackinto...

The only reason I'm using a Mac now is by pure good luck as all my PC components at the time (back in 2011-ish) were OSX Snow Leopard compatible, right down to Wi-Fi, bluetooth, motherboard, soundcard, etc. I admit it wasn't completely vanilla due to the infamous tonymacx86 software method but it did get me running quickly.

I gave OSX a test drive and found it much more simple compared to Windows. As I already had an iPhone/iPad it made sense to switch. Come upgrade time I bought a Macbook Pro and have been on OSX since.

The market price is the equilibrium of both supply and demand.

What you're saying is the fact people are buying their machines means they shouldn't change price or value proposition... because there are in fact purchases; which, is quite frankly, baffling, to me, a humble idiot.

Mercedes must think their EQC is positioned perfectly in the market with 55 sales? I now imagine Magic Leap will be leaping to raise prices with their next version?

> The market price is the equilibrium of both supply and demand.

Obviously.

> What you're saying is the fact people are buying their machines means they shouldn't change price or value proposition... because there are in fact purchases; which, is quite frankly, baffling, to me, a humble idiot.

If Apple are selling the machines in sufficient quantities at whatever they are priced at (I haven't cared to look) then obviously Apple's customers think they are worth it. It isn't really more complicated than that.

You assume without any facts or supporting evidence that they are achieving optimal sales. What you're saying is literally something you're just making up out of thin air. It's okay to be completely full of shit, just don't market it as truth.

Just doing a quick web search and the company made $224 billion dollars in 2018. Do you honestly think they aren't achieving optimal sales? The proof is in the pudding and they have a very very large pudding.

> It's okay to be completely full of shit, just don't market it as truth.

I know you think you are being big brained but not everything is "you must provide a citation". It is pretty obvious Apple knows the market well, knows exactly what they can and can't charge for certain products. You pretending otherwise because I haven't provided you with a citation is a complete joke, it is like asking someone to cite for evidence that the sky is blue.

> "Obviously the way it is, is the way it is. Obviously".

In conclusion, you think no company should adjust their prices, ever? Because the current price is the market price which is obviously the right price because it's the market price?

It's circular reasoning, which can be applied to any sales situation - and if it explains everything, it explains nothing.

> In conclusion, you think no company should adjust their prices, ever?

Obviously not. I am saying they have no incentive to change the price if the sales are inline or above with what they would have forecasted.

> Because the current price is the market price which is obviously the right price because it's the market price? > > It's circular reasoning, which can be applied to any sales situation - and if it explains everything, it explains nothing.

Again you don't seem to understand basic market economics. Your product is only worth what people are willing to pay for it. There is the odd exception to the rule (Head and Shoulders Shampoo being one of them, which is priced far higher than they originally intended because people assumed it didn't work because it was cheap).

Generally if there are two or more companies producing product X (in this case Computer Workstations and Laptops) then the market will coalesce around a particular price point for a particular specification. Sure there are those that will always stick to a brand, but the vast number of consumers won't be loyal.

Whether or not the company makes a profit on each unit sold is irrelevant to its market price. If they price their product higher than their competitors people will look at the alternatives.

e.g. I bought a MacBook Pro in 2015 because Apple's machine was cheaper than Lenovo, Dell for the same spec and had a better screen than any of the competitors machines.

This really isn't complicated stuff. I think that personal bias seems to cloud people to some basic truths.

> The market price is

No. There is usually no such thing as _a_ market price. There's a distribution of prices for purchases of the same item (and that's when we ignore the cases of transactions involving more than just the transfer of money).

> the equilibrium of both supply and demand.

Supply and demand for a specific products are more the _result_ of socio-economic processes and phenomena rather their _causes_.

You must have never seen a supply and demand graph, let me elucidate you: https://cdn.britannica.com/70/74270-050-317C4423/Illustratio...

If you're talking to me about socio-economic processes when we're talking about something simple, it pretty clearly shows you're you're not very educated in Economics.

You _do_ realize that if you say something with a chart instead of with text it does not become more valid, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand#Criticism

If you like your charts and economic formalisms, and believe in "market prices", perhaps you should take the time to read the Candide-like "Production of commodities by means of commodities" by Piero Sraffa.

Elasticity?

Not much of a deal, but the price differential on the high end Mac Pro CPUs is actually slightly less than Intel list.

My hunch is that the ARM transition is coming sooner rather than later and instead of spending time and effort into rewriting a bunch of OS functions (like AirPlay Mirroring) to support AMD processors that lack Intel-only features like QuickSync, Apple is just going to drop the iOS pieces it has written for ARM64 into the MacOS (or whatever it's called) that runs on their upcoming ARM-based desktops and laptops.

I mean, I wouldn't re-write code to support hardware-accelerated video transcoding on Ryzen+GPU if I knew that in 2-3 years I was moving from x86-64 to ARM64.

How well would Premiere or Photoshop run on ARM? How long would it take to rewrite these apps to run natively (i.e. with acceptable performance) on an ARM platform? Until you can do video/photo/audio editing faster w/ ARM using existing software products, I do not see it being viable as a replacement for x86 in any of Apple's higher-end products. Perhaps ARM is included for sake of mobile development, but with 32+ modern x86 cores you could just as well emulate ARM and barely feel any overhead.

Sure, there are a lot of neat tricks ARM can do with special instructions and hardware accelerators in very well controlled use cases. But, for the average creative professional who doesnt have time or patience to play with hyper-optimizing their workflow, having an x86 monster that can chew through any arbitrary workload (optimized or otherwise) is going to provide the best experience for the foreseeable future.

Apple has dragged Photoshop kicking and screaming onto different platforms and even OS’ before. If they succeeded when they were nearly dead (OS X Cocoa timeframe) they will have no problems doing it now.

Like sibling comment says, it's not exactly the first cpu transition for Photoshop...

> Photoshop 1

> Photoshop 1 (1990.01) requires a 8 MHz or faster Mac with a color screen and at least 2 MB of RAM. The first release of Photoshop was successful despite some bugs, which were fixed in subsequent updates. Most users ended up using version 1.07. Photoshop was marketed as a tool for the average user, which was reflected in the price ($1,000 compared to competitor Letraset’s ColorStudio, which cost $1,995).

> Photoshop 1.x requires Mac System 6.0.3, 2 MB of RAM, a 68000 processor, and a floppy drive.

Source: https://lowendmac.com/2013/photoshop-for-mac-faq/

They are rewriting all those Apps on iPad OS anyway, which is where many of the professionals are moving towards. It is the same with Autodesk, their CEO said he doesn't know how well iPad Sales are doing, but he clearly sees a trend of more pros moving to iPad. They are everywhere in their industry.

(Unfortunately I can no longer google the link of the video)

Which is not to say they will move to ARM. I am still skeptical of it.

> to support AMD processors that lack Intel-only features like QuickSync

QuickSync is only just a Hardware Video Encoder. Which AMD has as well, it is called VCN [1]. Not to mention Apple hasn't been using QuickSync for as long as they have been shipping T2, where Apple uses their own Video Encoder within T2. ( T2 is just a rebadged A10 )

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next

And 100 Comments but not a single mention or suggestion as to how would Apple deal with their vested interest in Thunderbolt. I would not be surprised if 90% of the PC shipped with Thunderbolt were from Apple.

USB 4 is out, the Thunderbolt 3 spec has been out for quite a long time as well, and yet we dont even have a single announcement with USB 4 controller.

Unfortuntately Threadripper only ("only"..) supports 256GB of RAM, Mac Pros can go up to 1.5TB.

So they definitely couldn't switch completely, and supporting both would be expensive for apple due to doubling mobos + testing + drivers etc, and confusing for the consumer because of the differing max RAM capabilities.

You're not considering AMD Epyc chips here, and Supermicro already have dual socket boards out that will take 2TB of RAM.

You're right I wasn't, because I presumed those chips were clocked too low to be useful outside of server farms.

I am not the audience for a Mac Pro though, maybe it's fine?

I'm sure Apple's own chip team works pretty good as leverage too.

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