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Comment by DrBenCarson | Hacker News Reader

I believe these are actually one of the lowest markups Apple has and in general a great deal.

Consider this: 1. 14” or 16” custom miniLED display 2. Anodized one-piece aluminum clamshell 3. Completely custom SoC (much more expensive than buying Intel’s latest, at least in the short-term) 4. Completely custom OS with a full suite of native apps 5. Custom MagSafe adapter 6. Thunderbolt 4 (3 of them)

Now consider that this laptop outperforms most desktop workstations that cost $4k+…and does it on 16h of battery life.

If you’re in the market for a high-performance computer, you’d have to be dense to not buy one of these (or building x86 firmware)

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> Now consider that this laptop outperforms most desktop workstations that cost $4k+…and does it on 16h of battery life.

> If you’re in the market for a high-performance computer, you’d have to be dense to not buy one of these (or building x86 firmware)

I'd love to see which $4000+ desktop gets beaten by any M1 processor. $4000 is A LOT for a desktop computer. I paid (in total, with upgrades over the years) around ~$1600 and easily beats anything provided by Apple.

That seems unlikely. From recent benchmarks you need to go into $1000+ territory for the CPU alone to get close to M1 multi-core performance. And then there’s the GPU, you can’t even get a 2070 for that amount at the moment.

> From recent benchmarks you need to go into $1000+ territory for the CPU alone to get close to M1 multi-core performance

I don't think so, quick comparison, with numbers from https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Apple-M1-Pro-10-Core-32...:

- Apple M1 Pro 10 Core 3200 MHz - Score: 23730

- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X - Score: 27293 - Price: ~$499

And I just spent 2 minutes digging up those numbers, didn't even look very carefully.

The latest Ryzen CPU is the 5950X, costing near 1k, and it’s behind M1 in that same site’s leaderboard: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

All the recent M1 benchmarks from respectable news sites confirm the same for the majority of multi core real workloads.

tl;dr you absolutely will not beat M1 Pro with a $1500 PC for work.

Did you miss that I mentioned AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X or you're just willingly ignoring it? It beats the M1 and costs <$500.

> https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

> $1000+ territory for the CPU alone to get close to M1 multi-core performance

Your claim was that you need a +$1000 CPU to get close to M1 multi-core performance, then now you link the single-thread tests?

I took the chart from the website you picked.

Here’s a full comparison between M1 Max and the 1950x: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10837819?baseli...

The M1 Max is ahead by leaps and bounds on many tests despite the synthetic score being close. And these only tell half the story. In all the reviews I’ve seen so far, it consistently beats the iMac Pro by up to 2x-4x in real word tasks. Mind you, the original M1 chip already beat many high-end desktops, so this is not surprising at all.

Even if the cpu was that cheap: $600 cpu + $200 mobo + $100 ram + $100 ssd + $50 power supply + $600 rtx 2060

That’s the best machine you can put together with ~$1500 and it will be absolutely smoked by the M1 Pro/Max. Then you can try to find a mini-led 4k 120hz monitor, peripherals, mic and speakers, all for < $1000 (hint: impossible)… and still not be able to run on batteries or pack it in a bag.

The 5950x costs $750, you can buy it on Amazon right now for that. Much less than 1k. Also, you're comparing single thread performance on only one website. In every website it kicks the M1 Pro's ass on multicore, as it should with 16 cores. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/apple-m1-pro-vs-amd-ry... It can also beat it by a hair in single core depending on the benchmark.

Don't be disingenuous just to win the argument.

To actually prove your point, you need to look at GPUs. A 3070 is ~$1100, so there we go, already we've broken his $1600 budget, and we have bought none of the other parts (which would total at minimum ~$1000 more).

If you go 5900x plus 3070, you're pretty much right in line with M1 Pro, but it will cost you around $2500 to equal the Macbook pro. So an upcharge of $1000 to $1500 for the price of being a mobile workstation, as well as all the Mac software. Not really unreasonable.

Whether some parts are custom or standard start to lose their meaning in Apple's scale. Probably you're right in the SoC case, reserving that sweet 5nm capacity from TSMC likely costs a lot. But the rest of your list is similar to any Apple device, so it shouldn't factor in the markup difference between these machines and their other products. Even the SoC investment is benefiting the whole product portfolio, even though this version is specific to laptops for now.

>Now consider that this laptop outperforms most desktop workstations that cost $4k+

I'd really want to see that setup and benchmark

They must be getting their bread by charging $400 for the ram upgrade instead of the traditional $200 apple price for what should be $80 of memory.

> traditional $200 apple price

That might've been for when it was only an 8GB increase in RAM.

That's also what it was when it was a 2gb increase in RAM. RAM has gotten a lot cheaper per GB than what Apple continues to charge per GB and thats honestly never not the case. Only now its worse, especially when you have developers trapped in docker centric workflows where they need to have more memory, no way around it, and apple decides to raise prices on their already high markup.

That ram is no longer a commodity ram sticks, can’t compare prices directly

Good point. The ram is cheaper for them because they aren't buying the dimms, just the silicon.

Apple is using very high bandwidth LPDDR5 - it can't be cheap.

yeah, because plugging more silicon into ready-to-ship cpu modules is so easy.

Instead of complaining that RAM updates are so expensive, we could frame it as "Apple takes a lower margin on entry level configurations so they can offer the same quality hardware to price concious consumers".

> much more expensive than buying Intel’s latest, at least in the short-term

This sounds very unlikely? Apple has been building their own silicon for a decade, I am sure they are saving significant money on their chips.

> Now consider that this laptop outperforms most desktop workstations that cost $4k+

You can spec the 14” & 16” to well past $4k also.

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