I was also surprised at how high the maxed out laptops can go in price. From memory, around the 2015 model line the top end would be at around $3000 without the crazy disk options.
There was a rule of the thumb that Apple priced their product at a rough ratio of $2 / day. That would give 4 year for my 2014 laptop, and it mostly did. That would be 5.5 years for the top end 16" laptop, I guess that's reasonable ?
- Mid CPU
- Lowest available discrete GPU
- Max RAM
- 2 TB SSD
RAM was my absolute must have, and to get the same on today's MBP:
- I would have to at least max the CPU
- That’s substantially better GPU than I’d buy otherwise
For the same RAM and storage, the price is almost identical (in fact it might be identical but I don’t feel like digging up my old order to compare such a small difference).
I am disappointed they didn’t move the price down more. And I’m disappointed I have to buy more compute than I care about to get the other specs I want. But it’s clear at least to me this is more value for my money than I paid 2 years ago.
I realize I haven’t looked at the exact price / performance jumps between the releases across MBA and MBP for Intel to Apple Silicon.
I’m curious just how big of a change there was across common metrics.
I like the M1, but I could have chosen the 16" intel at the time I bought it, even if it's to switch to the M1 Pro/Max next year for instance.
Have you come across many instances where you wish you had an Intel CPU?