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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

The most important thing to me about the new MacBook Pro and MacBook Air 2020 is ( hopefully ) the confirmation of price trend.

$999 Retina Mac with 256GB Baseline Storage?

Somewhere along the line in 2016, Apple's product value proposition went off. Everything from Mac to iPhone, they either had the same price but not as much improvement or a price hike with new feature.

At first it was thought Apple is moving into higher margin luxury style business, but now it seems it was a cover up for Service Revenue with huge margin. Despite Apple doubled its Service Revenue from 2016, its Gross and Net Margin has been stable over the past 5 years at ~38% and ~19%.

iPhone 11, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iPad in 2020 have all priced like they were in ~2015. Roughly 30% premium to their competitors, So in a way, you can think of Services ( and likely wearables ) is Subsidising ( Edit: Offsetting should be the better word ) these price reduction.

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Apple tends to use roughly the same physical design over many years, and every new physical design is usually accompanied by a price increase. Generally speaking, every new physical design requires a lot of work and upfront cost - so this is arguably fine.

Except the 2016-2019 models (except the new 16-inch model) didn't offer good value - largely because the "redesigned" keyboard was unreliable, the touch bar was laggy, and the thermals (super thin design) were not very great, leading to performance and heat issues.

They pushed the touch bar way too hard. I thought the virtual esc key in Terminal would be fine, but it ended up just being laggy and frustrating. The 2018 touchbar is somewhat marginally less frustrating, but people shouldn't have to deal with a laggy esc key after paying $1800.

Also - they were selling 'Pro' computers with 128GB of storage. Ridiculous.

One should definitely do some research before buying anything expensive. On the other hand I think some models are extremely reliable and despite (or because of ;)) the fancy design far most robust than most PC laptops.

128 GB is really ridiculous, on the other hand it's possible to upgrade that. I think the higher price tag is reasonable for a laptop that lasts so many years. Also for anything compute intensive I think it's anyway more practical to rent out a VPS somewhere...

I don't think the keyboard is particularly reliable. And the storage is not upgradeable.

Sure, especially for the models you pointed out. But other models...

On the other hand with PC laptops it's so common that a part at the display's hinge falls off or even a key for that matter. Recently a MacBook Pro fell from 1 meter or so, and the was just a tiny ditch, everything else was still working.

> Baseline Storage

Macs don't have baseline storage! They have soldered-down sealed-in storage. Before that, it was fine to get minimal RAM and disk and upgrade it later, like every other OEM did to soak the whales without driving away cost-conscious consumers. Then the soldering-money-gun came and used artificially constrained RAM and SSD to enforce value-based pricing and profitably planned obsolescence.

And disappointing that they've removed the SD card slot. I have a nice adapter that sits flush on the Macbook air and holds an extra 128gb.

Is that at all comparable in speed to a SATA SSD? I know that Apple uses NVMe SSDs in MacBooks, but if something over the SD card bus were anywhere near the speed of any internal SSD that would be very impressive.

Depends on what you're storing. I don't care about speed for my music and movies.

What? An almost maxed out mbpro in 2014 cost around $2800 (512gb/16gb/i7). The same laptop is now priced over $4000 (2tb/64gb/i9). They are roughly equivalent just under top of the line laptops. They are absolutely going for luxury and the prices are unbelievably high.

I think that these kind of comparisons are quite hard to make. Even back in 2014, Apple offered 16GB of RAM on the base model 15", just like they do today, but they now use much faster RAM (obviously) and give you many more options. The RAM prices didn't dramatically drop either in these 5 years.

The 2014 model you're considering was actually the 2nd configuration offered by Apple itself at the time (the cheapest with a dGPU), so I would compare it with the 2nd configuration offered by Apple today. This means the 16" with an i9, 16GB, 1TB and a Radeon 5500M that costs 2799$.

You could argue that getting the same amount of RAM 5 years later is not acceptable and you would actually be right, but today you still get double the cores/threads, much faster RAM, double the storage (and, again, much faster), a much more powerful GPU and a better display. So I'd say that the only big issue of today's MacBooks compared to 2014 ones is the RAM price.

It's not like competitors started putting more RAM in their laptops though, today 8Gb is still the standard.

Not sure if I agree, more likely is the following:

- Apple presumably is subsidizing hardware if it leads to larger NPV for their service business and recurring revenues for the lifetime of the said hardware. For instance, if a user buys an iPhone, they're more likely to buy Apple music, News+, iCloud storage plans, etc. This is akin to, in extreme case, Sony Playstation - they're often sold at a loss hoping to create future revenue streams from games. The reason why they can get away from selling Playstation consoles at a loss is because without buying games, it is completely useless piece of hardware. In the case of iPhone, it is not quite the same as Playstation because you don't need Apple Music to use an iPhone.

That was also the period when NAND/DRAM prices were up. They've lowered the price after their costs have come down.

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