Hacker News Reader

Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

the fact is, apple hardware is not _that_ expensive relative to what you get for the money.

Their supply chain is super optimized, and it's hard to beat them on price if a competitor decides to try (at the same quality that is).

View on HN

What gives people the perception of apple being expensive is that other OEMs play tricks to boost numbers on a spec sheet that the common person checks while cheeping out massively on parts that don’t show on the spec sheet.

I know someone who got an MSI laptop recently and it’s complete garbage. The screen casing cracked from the force of the hinge within months, the trackpad is borderline unusable, wifi is spotty, the paint on the keyboard started flaking off within months, and it’s a general piece of junk.

But on the store page it looks like an extreme bargain because it has the same ram, GPU and cpu as much more expensive laptops

> What gives people the perception of apple being expensive is that other OEMs play tricks to boost numbers on a spec sheet that the common person checks while cheeping out massively on parts that don’t show on the spec sheet.

Yep! Like with dell: non-standard power supply size, non-standard motherboard size. And with most of the companies: a motherboard that uses whatever the cheapest USB, sound, SATA chipsets were in the bin that week.

The boards are designed and reworked constantly by the factories...as opposed to Apple who pour enormous engineering effort into refining, testing, etc each revision.

It's really the cost of capability and addons, I'm not sure about that MSI model but you're able to get a ton of storage and a good gpu for under what apple charges

if you want one or two tb of storage and decent ram you're looking at $3,000+ after taxes

I think this still ties in to the point. People laugh at the apple user mentality of “I just know it’s going to work if I buy Apple”. But then you have windows OEMs where you have to do careful research because the product line is full of scams and traps.

As a user of a 15" 2018 MBP, Apple has had their fair share of scams and traps. They had no business stuffing the chips they did in that chassis. Especially the i9s. The cooling is woefully inadequate even for my base model i7 and I have no doubt that a $1000 gaming laptop with its "cheep" build with the same CPU would have better sustained performance.

Apple has also repeatedly sold several year old computers at brand new prices, in particular the 13" 2012 MBP that was only discontinued mid-2016, the 2015 MBA that they "updated" in 2017 and sold for another few years, the 2014 mini, the 2013 Mac Pro. What's worse is most of these were computers at the bottom of their price range. I had to steer so many people away from the attractive seeming base model MBP and convince them that yes, it worth spending $200 extra to get a machine that's 3 years newer. What other OEM literally sells several year old machines for new prices?

EDIT: Just remembered they still sell the 2018 i5 Mac Mini for the same price.

EDIT 2: Oh yeah and I just remembered they'd hide what generation Intel CPU you were getting and just say Dual Core 2.5Ghz i5.

that's true for all products these days, including apples

This is very real. I noticed that the Lenovo T14s has a noticeably better trackpad than the Lenovo T14, but you can't tell unless you try it out on both Notebooks as both are listed as "Mylar® surface multi-touch touchpad" on the spec sheet.

This is very true!

At the same time, this can be important or not.

When I do my pc builds I pick the cheapest case as well, and I'm fine with it. Similarly I took non-Apple laptops all my life (up to 5 years ago, when I started coasting on employers' hardware) without many problems. I just couldn't justify spending 3k to have a laptop which performs as well as one for 1k, just for the better quality of the materials.

If the exact combination of specs that you want is one of their handful of available configurations, apple hardware pricing is fine. But if you start from what you want to do, most of the time the cheapest mac that does what you want (which will probably be vastly overpowered in some area you don't care about) will be much more expensive than the cheapest PC that does what you want.

I think one thing that creates that impression is the costs for beefier options in the Apple store. Everytime I configure a Mac and add RAM I feel ripped off. The price difference between the upgraded Mac and what you'd pay on Newegg is just so large. I'm still a happy customer, since I still get so much lasting value, but in the moment it certainly hurts.

It's Apple's way of price discrimination. They want to offer computers at every price point, but they don't want to build a dozen different models.

So their entry level machines are a great deal -- you get the quality of a 5000€ machine for just 2500€ if you can live with limited storage.

But if you want enough storage, you're paying the full price...

I'm not a fan of their policy, because the result is that lots of people get computers that are artificially crippled by low storage. But there's no way they could keep their entry level prices as low if they charged a fair price for upgrades.

> So their entry level machines are a great deal -- you get the quality of a 5000€ machine for just 2500€ if you can live with limited storage.

It sounds really weird to talk about 2500 EUR laptop as "entry level".

> They want to offer computers at every price point

They don't offer anything under 1000 EUR.

It's the entry level configuration of that model.

Apple is doing the same as car companies: Make the base price of each model as low as possible and then charge ridiculous sums for extras.

Apple charges what the market will bear (and their guessing, mostly accurately, that people who want an extra 16 GB of memory would rather pay an extra $400 than switch to another laptop manufacturer). Claiming that they are selling their entry levels models at a discount is just silly, Apple has considerably higher margins than other manufacturers. I'm not sure what are their exact margins on laptops, but the 2500€ is more close to being an 1300€ machine than a 5000€ one (since their margins on storage and memory upgrades are almost definitely above 100% this gets worse the more upgrades you get).

Not that I'm trying to blame Apple, they've done a great job and it would be irrational for a company to not take the free money (I'd do the same and it's not that their competitors are better, high end PC laptops have similar margins it's just that less people want them so Dell, Lenovo etc. tend to sell them at massive ~50% discounts eventually (same with Android phones) which Apple never does, since their prefer to sell at relatively low volumes but with huge margins). However their prices for ram/storage are objectively predatory and the only reason they can get away with it is because there is no viable competition, it has nothing to do with "subsidizing" entry levels Macs. If they wanted to they could easily cut their prices by 500-1500 across the entire 14/16" mbp range and still remain more profitable than all the other laptop manufacturers.

Average margins on Macs are high because they charge huge amounts on updates. But I really doubt that the margin on the 2500€ Macbook Pro is 50% as you claim. Maybe the high end has big margins like that (since they overcharge on RAM/SSD), but I really doubt the low end machines have high margins like that.

I own one of the new Macbook Pros, and the build quality of them is fantastic. It's the sturdiest computer I've ever seen. It's a huge jump from their previous models, it's even better than the 2015 models, which were already very good. I've opened it up to look at the internals, and there's so much material everywhere. No wonder it's heavier. Even the base plate is a lot stiffer than in the previous models.

Now, I must concede that I'm not too familiar with windows laptops, but I've never seen anything remotely comparable to this. If you could point me to a 1300€ windows laptop that's even close to the Macbook Pro in build quality, I'd love to hear about it.

And that's not even mentioning how fantastic the display and the speakers are, because they are unbelievable.

The only thing that's cheap about the new Macbook Pros is the camera, which unfortunately is still a piece of crap, just with some machine learning algorithms applied (they don't help).

My point is that Apple is not subsidizing lower end models by selling overpriced ram, if they were fine with the margins other laptop manufacturers have, they could sell their products much cheaper (they could still cut their prices significantly and have considerably higher margins than others) but they don't, because they don't have to (their products are good, there is a huge demand for them and they don't have as much competition as PC makers).

Obviously I don't Apple's exact margins, they are probably lower than 50% but not by much however: "But there's no way they could keep their entry level prices as low if they charged a fair price for upgrades." is simply just not true, they obviously could do that if any of the conditions I mentioned changed, they just don't because as any other company Apple seeks to maximize it's profits.

Dell XPS, Thinkpad X1, Razer Blade and Surface Laptop lines have pretty decent build quality, of course they all have inferior CPUs which use more power and generate way more heat compared to the Mac (I didn't say you can get one for 1300€, just that that other manufacturers try to price their premium laptop lines at similar level as Apple but usually end up having to sell them at significant discounts)

Note that the PC that pulled off these numbers cost almost double what the Mac did. $2500 vs $4000. It includes the GPU (not cheap these days) but still a big difference.

The PC comes with 32GB of RAM and 4TB SSD. A similar specced Macbook Pro costs $4100, not $2500

Realistically, I think that the argument of Apple being way more expensive is simply now outdated. It was true in the past, but I don't think it's the case anymore.

It's still true outside the US.

Apple's base spec is super price competitive -- no $1000 laptop is even in the same universe of quality as a Macbook Air. But when you start upgrading the memory and storage is where Apple really takes you to the cleaners.

Yeah but it's locked down, unupgradable future e-waste.

I would argue the opposite, still using my 2012 15” MacBook Pro… a decade later. Go to Walmart and look at the laptops on display, and tell me any of those are capable lasting near a decade.

That’s not true of the current Macs though.

I still have a 2011 era MacBook that I can use, and was very pleasant to use until an OS update a couple of years ago.

But that was because I was able to upgrade the RAM, the SSD, and replace the battery.

None of those things are possible with macs from the last few years, so their longevity is much more likely to resemble phones than older macs.

The secondary market simply doesn't agree with the weird obsession with calling Apple's hardware future e-waste just because you can't change out an SSD.

Mac hardware holds value because it's well built, supported for a long time, has specs that are enough for a wide range of users...

For every power user running through battery cycles every day, there's people who just need a solid well built machine and won't feel the need to upgrade just because their machine gets less battery life, or a given IDE needs more RAM.

Those people don't replace hardware because it's broken, they replace it because it feels old. Design wise, materials wise, etc. Not having crummy bloatware slowly accreting gigabytes of junk and a dozen extra startup items.

Compare a sub $1000 M1 Air to any other sub $1000 laptop coming out today. You'd be incredibly hard pressed to find anything even half as well designed... that's how you get people to keep their hardware.

I bought Dell 3410 for $600 and upgraded it for another $200 to 16 GB/500 GB SSD. It's a perfect little beast. Air with those specs will be around $2000 in my country.

I bought my 2013 MacBook Pro with a 1TB SSD and 32GB of RAM, with the highest specced i7 at the time.

I sold it last month to pick up a new 2021 MacBook Pro M1 Max. I bought it with 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD because I don't need anymore, 8 years later. And the i7 I had still beat out last years base model on Geekbench.

Not to take anything away from how long you got to use your computer, but you couldn’t get 32GB of RAM in an Apple laptop until 2018. You likely had 16GB of RAM in 2013 if you had a 15” retina MacBook Pro.

You're correct, just checked my receipt, it was 16GB. I upped it to 32GB with my new laptop.

I'm not arguing for or against, but we've hit a fairly stable period of diminishing returns on specs.

We've solved the storage latency and throughout bottlenecks, scheduling, and CPU core counts, so we don't really need beaucoups of RAM for a functional laptop.

RAM bandwidth doubles with each generation and throughout and latency improve, so less is needed for the same performance.

Batteries are relatively inexpensive to replace through the vendor are improved in energy density, energy density, and cycles, so there's not a big advantage to buying aftermarket even though you can.

For 2014-2016 Macs with flash storage, they're still pretty great to excellent machines. The greatest detriment to the longevity of 2017-2019 Macs is that they contain Intel components, and that every release of MacOS since High Sierra has been designed adversarial against their security flaws. Costco was practically giving away Intel iMacs recently, offering them almost half off.

Also, I remember benchmarking on apfs post-mitigations and seeing up to a 40% performance loss on some syscalls, which translated to an unusable computer on dual core Intels or anything with mechanical storage. How would upgrading components have helped then?

Apple is rather good at planned obsolescence. Intel handed them a few years of unusable machines on a platter (thanks Intel) but I’m sure they’ll find new reasons for MacOS updates to degrade performance on old machines regardless of hardware capability.

They lead the industry in how long they provide OS update support for phones/tablets and desktops/laptops.

They downclock the CPU on mobile devices as the battery ages, to keep the CPU from browning out so you

My system, made in 2013, won't be supported by the next OS release this coming fall, but they usually continue security updates at least one release behind. That's basically ten years of hardware support.

Keep in mind that Windows 10 came out in 2015. A ton of manufacturers simply did not support windows 10 on hardware sold before it, because win10 coming out helps them move new PCs.

Linux leads the industry in support, and additionally, in openness.

Apple leads the industry in using slave labour to create disposable fashion items.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/10/seven-apple-suppliers-alleged...

Linux and Windows both support most hardware for longer than Apple does. It may not have a manufacturer stamp of approval, but Windows 10 supports CPUs back to some Pentium 4s with full security updates. That's a decade farther back than Apple.

> RAM bandwidth doubles with each generation and throughout and latency improve

RAM bandwidth is improving a lot faster than its latency. (The latter is almost as stagnant as max CPU clock frequencies.)

Still using a Note 8. This phone is awesome. I forget how many years...

I would be OK with my M1 Air performing in a similar way.

This is a decent example of what folks are talking about in terms of supported lifespan. Your Note 8 was EOL'd in October 2021. It came out in September of 2017. That's four years of support.

My iPhone came out around the same time and Apple is planning to support devices several generations older than mine with iOS 16...

I am very likely to use this phone another three years.

Just saying.

Otherwise, yeah! My wife has an older iPhone still nicely supported, and older than my Note.

My last Mac was a 2012 i7. I used it 6, 7 years? It is still useful, but got coke on keyboard! I fixed it myself last time. Not doing it again.

What if there is a debilitating security problem with Android within those three years?

I wouldn't choose that kind of uncertainty.

Depends on how one uses the phone for starters. I may ditch it, I may not.

I used a 2011 Core i7 Asus N53SV till last year - full hd and had 4 ddr3 slots. I was able to run the latest Linux, and the latest Windows on it. Apple meanwhile has dropped support for 2014 macbooks. There are apps which won't run on them today, and Apple will stop supporting Catalina this year.

To act like your experience extrapolates out to the wider market is disingenuous at best.

hmmm thinkpad?

Someone will buy an old MacBook, good luck ebaying your old Lenovo…

You're underestimating the hobbyist Thinkpad community.

I’m not, I’m sure for every modder that puts a new motherboard and mech keyboard in, there are 100000 that just get pitched

They're also not purchased at the volumes that Macbooks are, I do think you're underestimating how well they hold their value. You picked an unfortunate laptop line to make your point, especially since this is in no way a recent phenomenon. I'm sure people chuck away their Macbooks instead of reselling them too.

More like put it in a drawer. I question the notion that laptops are thrown away as opposed to put in storage. Especially when they’re used for sensitive information and not normally wiped if they’re not used for resale.

Completely false.

If you do any volume purchasing the resale value of old Acer laptop or asus ones is so bad they really do become w waste quickly. Folks w macs use them forever. And then resale market isMUCh better for apple

With the cpu change I suspect os support to be dropped in a couple of years, and resale values to drop. My friend had a pretty expensive g5 PowerPC that wasn’t worth much and had an end of life much sooner than the hardware should have had.

I'm curious how Apple's competitor Microsoft is handling ARM - I actually always thought Apple did a MUCH better transition / management of these types of tech variations.

Can I really run everything windows runs on windows ARM offerings? Be good if MS has solved things this time around. Some of us still remember Microsoft's "Plays for Sure" campaign against Apple.

Both my wife and I had 2011 MBPs that were only replaced last year. I upgraded the RAM & replaced the HDDs with SSDs over the years, which is reasonable imo.

I'd say 10 years is a pretty good run for a laptop. YMMV

Reply on news.ycombinator.com