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Comment by mathverse | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue I have with macbooks is that they are ridiculously expensive. They are intended to be portable devices but bringing them anywhere outside my apartment or office is just a huge risk.

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> are ridiculously expensive

What makes you say this? Have you speced two systems lately? Last I did, the MacBook was comparable to cheaper for the price/performance. Of course, a 10lb mobile desktop with a 30 minute battery was closest.

What comparable notebook do you have in mind?

It depends on how you spec it. Apple charges an arm and a leg for ram/storage upgrades

I was about to say the same thing but I've just had a look at Dell for a product comparison.

It seems crazy to me that in 2023 Apple offer a £2,699.00 laptop with just 512Gb of non-upgradable storage.

Looking at Dell's Precision line bundled with Ubuntu, they might be user upgradable but they're still roughly a similar ball park to Apple price wise.

Personally I'm going to need to see some full package benchmarks before I can form an opinion and will be weeping either way.

>they're still roughly a similar ball park

The PC industry uses wildly inflated prices, especially MSRP. A more realistic price for laptops can be found on various deal sites. A comparable Dell, Lenovo, or HP laptop will cost about .5-.6 of the equivalent macbook pro price. The vast majority of laptops, even after accounting for 1-2 TB of storage and 32 GB RAM cost less than $1.5k. MBPs start around $2k.

That’s interesting could post a specific comparison?

I’ve actually been considering an M1 MBP from a deal site in the UK. They seem to be about £300 off MSRP at the moment.

Not too familiar with the UK market, but in the US, various AMD Thinkpad T14(s)/T16/P16 gen 3 configurations as well as some HP elitebook ones were in the 1-1.5k price bracket around Black Friday. I got an elitebook 845 g9 with 6850 HS and added a 2 TB nvme ssd and 64 GB RAM to it as aftermarket purchases for a total of ~$1200 after tax, additional warranty and a thunderbolt dock.

> bracket around Black Friday

I think the other 364 days of the year are more relevant, since Black Friday sales often have extremely limited quantities, and are anything it predictable.

People are claiming 4-6 hours on the hidpi display version. That’s definitely not comparable. I leave my charger at home with my M1.

All x86 power metrics pale in comparison to apple silicon. That is a given. The decision is about whether you can match other aspects.

> The decision is about whether you can match other aspects.

I disagree. The whole package should be compared, because that's what you're paying for. If 2x battery life cost a few hundred more, it's a no brainer, for me.

edit: We're out of reply depth, but this all started with "they're ridiculously expensive" and ended with "there's nothing else in the market".

You need to decide what it is that you're looking for. If you are in the apple battery efficiency camp, there is nothing else to look at. You won't be swayed by pricing. There is nothing else in the market, and all the pricing talk is meaningless. Will you be swayed if I offered you a laptop for $500 ?

This all started with "they're ridiculously expensive" and ended with "there's nothing else in the market". Those two are intimately related.

The complete package is reasonably priced, when compared to other systems. If you completely ignore one part of the package, then sure, you can find something comparable, as my initial comment pointed out with the portable desktop replacements.

But the price on the shelf is for the complete package.

They’re not much more expensive than a Windows laptop of similar specs and quality. AppleCare is fairly cheap if you’re concerned about damage.

Yeah, they’re just not Barry’s Bargain Basement laptops. Comparable models from Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc cost just as much.

“Apple is so expensive” is essentially a meme at this point.

I paid $2,869.00 + $269 for a 2015 MBP 2.8GHz/1TB/16GB/Radeon R9 M370X in Nov 2015. It's still going strong and does everything I need it to do, though as of a few months ago Apple finally dropped support for their latest version of macOS Ventura.

This comes out to $440/year.

I could probably sell it on eBay for $3-400 (actual recent sales data), bringing that cost down to <$400/year.

What are you comparing it to cost-wise?

Dunno, I dropped mine pretty hard at airport security, skidded across the floor, left a very small dent. My wife had hers placed on a lectern and someone bumped into to and it fell off stage, bigger dent but the show went on. And our kid has sat on or stepped on both multiple times. They hold up well enough.

Interesting that you though his reasoning was about accidental damage and not thieves.

Oh, yeah, I don’t live in SF. Theft isn’t common enough to be a big deal in my city in India, but Apple’s anti theft is pretty good either way.

I'm a sucker for robustness and build quality so that's why I like thinkpads. Dropped one on the tarmac of a race track as an engineer and the magnesium body held up like it should.

Renters insurance is cheap piece of mind for stuff like laptops, or bikes you lock up publicly. Regular backups of course too.

Last time I was looking into this (Lemonade) any expensive electronics had to be covered separately by the $, at additional cost.

I do pay separately for things like my roadbike, camera, laptop, etc, and for these things to not have a deductible, but all in I am only paying like $15 a month for my entire renters insurance policy.

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