Apple halted M2 chip production in January amid 'plummeting' Mac sales
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Unsurprisingly, sales declined.
I noticed that a lot of users also seem to go for a used M1 because it got cheaper and it’s still insanely good.
The difference is just insane from a thermal standpoint (plus then you mix in how this thing runs laps around my 16" while staying cooler).
And it isn't just the MacBook Pro line, I have a gaming laptop is horrible to use actually on my lap.
I tried pushing the new m2 MBP with some video rendering and it did not break a sweat (literally).
It does kinda feel like the bar was a bit low for the improvements going from Intel to their chips. But I do wonder what their long term plan is, I can't see needing to upgrade this machine for at least 3 years with the performance I am getting out of it. Even 3 years feels pretty soon.
Good. Laptops shouldn't sweat
Hasn't happened yet. I've got M2 max in mbp for a while and I still have not heard the fan even once.
That means if the dollar was very strong at release, the machines get very expensive in foreign currency.
They are just not realizing they are self sabotaging in terms of opportunity costs.
If they adjust prices to purchasing power, with at least 30% profit marge, windows laptops and chromebooks would be having crisis talks right about now.
People would prefer the Apple stuff, but not at that price. Even if you can easily afford it, if you are from a protestant nation, you couldn't live with yourself spending your money so irresponsibly. The value deal isn't there, unless you are using it professionally. But for leisure? No way.
People delaying purchases, or buying lower spec models or alternatives now may well want to upgrade sooner when their financial situation improves. If Apple sacrifices margins they risk losing out on those high margin sales return in a few years time. In the long term it may be better to take the temporary hit to revenue now in order to preserve their margin structure long term.
What they might do is introduce down market models, or more likely keep older models around in the lineup longer than they otherwise would at a slightly reduced price. That would still mean taking a hit on sales at the top end, as here with M2.
Changing the official price is not the only way to go. Apple is one of very few places which doesn't regularly run sales and promotions to adjust the sales of their products. They could easily run an Easter sale that takes a month, then something else again. This wouldn't change their margins long term.
It seems pretty likely that most of their supply contracts are using USD as the currency, even if the production is not happening in the US.
Apple states its quarterly results in USD, which is all their investors/media care about, so of course Apple cares enormously about profit/revenue in USD. in addition, much of their design/engineering/management/etc costs are in or coupled to USD.
They quite demonstrably don't. They care about profit-share, and about making what they see as the best computers they can.
As others note, Apple already takes either a plurality or a majority of the profit in computer sales. What incentive is there for them to reduce their average margins, take on a lot more support responsibility, and have to ramp up production significantly, just to capture a notoriously fickle and unrewarding segment of the market?
>What ruined Apple was not growth … They got very greedy … Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible … they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years. What this cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share.”
Just look at the BOM cost of MacBook Air and an iPad Pro. There is not reason why MacBook Air cant be $799.
There can't be a grey market if you charge the same price globally.
I don't see why this wouldn't work. It's not like Apple users are going to rebel and refuse to buy Apple products because of something like this.
Here in Mexico Apple products are around 20-25% more expensive than in the US which is way higher than simply adding the 16% VAT.
Not only that, in the US it's common to have Apple sales in multiple retailers like BH etc. These are almost non existent here in Mexico. The best we get is some meager discount at Costco for the models nobody wants.
This is a bigger story that isn’t being told properly often. The recent BRICS currency move is about them panicking over increasing dollar global dominance.
Checking recently I can’t find any major currency that is up against the dollar over last 10 years. US productivity is running away from the rest of the planet is another variable and with rapid on shoring of numerous industries, especially semiconductors, there is a possibility that US economic dominance is about to go into hyperdrive.
That version is something the media never mentions.
Our biggest export is dollars. We accept ship loads of consumer goods and in exchange send the ships back empty. What a deal.
> there is a possibility that US economic dominance is about to go into hyperdrive.
Like a broken clock I’m sure they’ll eventually be correct.
From dictionary.com:
anemic: a lack of power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness
Interesting that you'd characterize the response to 2008 financial crisis as 'lack(ing) power'. The response was unprecedented in scale and scope, at least in terms of intervention from the Federal Reserve. The bail-out of the automakers was also controversial due to its size and lack of precendent.
Or, are you referring to a lack of regulatory response?
And all of that was anemic compared to what was needed. From January 2009:
> I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”
* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0...
The Fed's actions help on the 'back end' of things in the financial sector, but not on the 'front end' of things with regards to the real economy and jobs. Obama had a long slog to get unemployment down because of the lack of stimulus.
The demographics of Europe, China, Japan and S. Korea are all terminal at this point. Outside of UK, France, and to some extent, Germany, most of these countries don't even have an immigrant culture to make up for the shortfall.
America, meanwhile, has decent native birth rate AND a culture that's always willing to accommodate new people.
Not really true, for example: Sweden has been doing above EU average on both immigration and higher birth rates (for its development level) to account for the shortfall, it's not that clear cut in Europe as a whole.
Source ChatGPT.
what is summary of height for every swede person
what is average of 181 and 167
multiply 1.74 by number of swedes
divide 18,064,000 by height of statue of liberty in meters
ChatGPT can't do math right. It did both the multiply and the divide wrong, which makes it even worse than usual to have that many digits on your final answer.
How tall are all Swedes together measured in the Statue of Liberty?
... Therefore, the total height of all Swedes measured in the Statue of Liberty is approximately 0.065 meters, or 6.5 centimeters.
And I'm very confused by what that last number is.
Meanwhile in America, median household income for Vietnamese Americans—who also started immigrating in the 1970s, as refugees—matched the national average sometime in the 1990s.
What are the statistics for Poles, Italians, Russian Germans? Heck, what are the statistics for Vietnamese Germans?
The US has plenty of minority and immigrant groups for which convergence is... far from happening.
Maybe find and share, if you looking to refute the point.
Why don't Americans put all German speakers into the same group as well and call them Germanics?
Household income of these four groups is also higher than median household income. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...
US per capita income is higher than US median personal income (that’s what happens with concentrated-at-the-top instead of normal distributions.) But you probably mean “mean” rather than “median” since that’s what your source actually provides.
Household income is higher than per capita for all groups.
I picked large, visible minority immigrant groups that have been in their destination country for more than a generation.
> What are the statistics for Poles, Italians, Russian Germans?
There’s far fewer of those than Turks, and many are ethnic Germans to begin with.
> The US has plenty of minority and immigrant groups for which convergence is... far from happening
There’s only two: black people and indigenous people, neither of which are immigrant groups. Economic migrants go the US, such as Germans, Italians, and Irish, all economically assimilated decades ago. Hispanics are on the same track: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
Per this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
* France, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland: 1.8
* Iceland, Czech Republic, UK, Latvia, Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Norway: 1.7
* Romania, Slovenia, Estonia, Albania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Germany, Switzerland, Austria: 1.6
Yes, there's some countries that have even lower levels (eg Italy and Greece), but that's a large chunk of Europe with a pretty similar fertility rate to the United States. I wouldn't give America a pass on any future sort of demographic discussion regarding this. Heck, China (which you list at "terminal") has a fertility rate of 1.7.
"Ability to buy a house or similar" and "affordable daycare" are probably enough to have a huge impact. We don't need a long list of possible answers.
- Reasonable maternity leave allowances.
- Good affordable (or free) healthcare.
- Good affordable (or free) child care until school age.
- Free education to university graduate level.
- Affordable housing.
The super-rich have no interest in allowing this to happen, so countries where having a child is a significant cost will continue to have low fertility rates.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong BTW but it's not that simple.
The two main hurdles to increasing birthrate are:
1. Convince couples with no kids to have one. 2. Convince couples with two/three kids to have one more.
The list might help but the question is how much for each.
No, it doesn't. It's about 1.8 and dropping, and most of the higher values in that group are from recent immigrants, which are also having fewer kids. Educated folks also have lower fertility rates.
The US is basically a mirror of Western Europe in this regard:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/226292/us-fertility-rate...
> AND a culture that's always willing to accommodate new people.
I'd argue that the biggest factors by far these days are:
1. English (very accessible due to music, movies, TV shows, etc).
2. Lots and lots of natural resources facilitating lots of businesses which aren't really feasible in say, Germany, France, Japan.
3. Large population bringing economies of scaling facilitating advanced businesses paying high salaries.
Otherwise someone who travels around the US and Western Europe, for example, will be quite surprised at the cultural convergence and immigration levels.
Most of your comment is a perception from 2-3 decades back, at least.
The OECD average is 1.67. America has a relative advantage
Here's a dataset of various countries' fertility rates: https://splash-db.eu/dataset/population-indicators/
And America always has the option of simply opening the gates a little and fill up the gap with practically any immigrant group it wants.
Huh? My understanding is the US scores lowest of any country on objective measures of both.
Which country has less Xenophobia and racism? People throw out Canada often but I believe empirically that is false.
Counter-example: Certain Arab gulf states, extremely large and diverse immigrant populations from all of Eurasia. Yet still super xenophobic to anyone who isn’t an Arab.
Define racism I suppose. Is racism inequality or inequity?
If a "developed" country wanted to stop migration they would work to raise the living standards at the source. There is less chance of that happening than removing xenaphobic behaviour from the natives however.
Or the "developed" society becomes more brutal than the place the migrant are fleeing from, so they stay away out of fear.
Biden at least nominally adopted such as policy. See, for example, "U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America", https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Root-C...
But, AFAICT, it's mostly been a quiet public-private approach that in dollar terms isn't very substantial. See, e.g., https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
If you look at Haiti, Venezuela, etc, it seems the limiting factor here is an unwillingness of the U.S. to leverage any political muscle, either domestically or internationally. I presume that's partly a consequence of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also probably because for some large factions, especially on the left but increasingly on the right, in American politics any form of involvement is unacceptable. It's almost like a radical ecological argument: the rest of the world is in a state of nature, and any intervention by an external agency is per se morally evil; the moral imperative is non-intervention, outcomes are irrelevant. Even those who don't hold this belief (explicitly or implicitly) at least understand the consequences: any perceived failure in intervention will be blamed on them, and nobody wants to face the ire of the religionists.
The USA will get flack if it meddles and if it doesn't meddle, they really shouldn't worry about world opinion at that point. More to the point, it is impossible for America to fix the rest of the world, even if that were the moral thing to do. Welcoming some immigrants from countries having problems is probably the best we can do.
People being afraid of the warrior princess is probably a good thing.
Not true. If you look at OECD data – https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm – the latest year for which the OECD has complete data is 2021, in which it records a US TFR of 1.6. The following countries all recorded higher TFRs than the US – Israel (2.9); Mexico (2.1); France, Colombia and Turkey (tied at 1.8); Costa Rica, Czechia, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden (all tied at 1.7). The US, at 1.6, was at the OECD Average (1.6), tied with Australia, Belgium, Chile, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovenia and the UK.
I suppose you might argue 2020 was a rather abnormal year due to COVID. Well, 2019 was pre-COVID, in which the US was still only 1.7 – just a a bit above the OECD average (which was 1.6 in 2019 too). In 2019, US fertility was tied with Australia, Costa Rica, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden; it was beaten by France, Colombia and Iceland (all 1.8), Turkey (1.9), Mexico (2.1), and Israel (3.0).
US fertility is not an outlier at all by developed world standards. It is somewhere between average and slightly above average. And I realise some OECD members might not be considered "developed" by everyone's standards – such as Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico or Turkey – but the US is regularly equalled or bettered by countries which generally are accepted as such, e.g. Australia, Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Sweden.
This doesn't seem to be a big factor in the boom industries in the US: tech, finance, pharma. It does matter for construction, the biggest employer.
The US still seems like a more welcoming place than western Europe. Or at least you can take comfort in a suburban home and drive to people/institutions that are from your immigrant group.
We have an immigrant ethos that exceeds that of the UK, France, and Germany. Plus, our large number of decent universities means the masters/F1->OPT->H1B pipeline works well for many educated workers.
Exxon, Chevron, Marathon, Valero, Philips 66.
5 American oil and gas companies in the worldwide top 100 by revenue. A bunch of pharma & co, also dependent on cheap oil and gas.
Again with the outdated mindset. Those countries have as many immigrants or more, per capita, as the US.
> Plus, our large number of decent universities means the masters/F1->OPT->H1B pipeline works well for many educated workers.
Those work well for drawing people in, but how well do they serve second generation immigrants or minorities? Universities in Europe are cheap or free, that's a whole lot more egalitarian.
The US speaks English, is big and has a TON of money. The US basically brute forces everything, which I guess works.
I personally know peolle that left US for UK because they found your immigration system unacceptable.
If you are from india, you might have to wait 10 years to get citizenship after fulfilling all requirements.
Uk immigration system itself is worse than that of France and many other countries.
It costs $10,000 to apply for visas for a family of 4. Thats just the money you pay to the government, assuming you never need a solicitor to help with the paperwork.
I read somewhere that the waiting line for Indian people is 180 years, not 10.
Of course that makes it very difficult if you are from India for example, but it doesn't make the system as a whole less welcoming.
And a society that burdens people with debt causing them to work every waking moment while avoiding costly things like health care, because they might miss a day of work or become even more indebted through the cost of said health care. People just pick up opioids so they can handle the pain and keep working two jobs.
I know hardly anyone in my country that works more than 40 hours a week. In fact, most people I know work 36 or 32. Two jobs is pretty much unheard of over here. I hear plenty of stories in the US though, about teachers working a second job somewhere else.
Yeah, the smart ones find a better school district to work in or leave the profession entirely. None of my friends in teaching are working 2 jobs. They can find a better paying non-teaching job, easily. Our son has 8 classes and 6 teachers. The school proudly announced at the beginning of the school year they were fully staffed. Currently they are at 85% with a revolving door of educators. We're in a HCOL city and school board is going forward with plans to build housing for teachers because they simply can't recruit them any other way.
This is a good policy also found in safety-net-having countries like Finland.
Implying I don't know America in real life, never lived there, never visited and don't know actual people there. All not being true. I have zero friends in my home country who work multiple jobs. I have multiple in the US.
> The Americans work 34.5 hours a week.
In my country it's 32. So almost 8% less. Which I'd call significant if working hours is directly correlated to productivity as a country.
In the bottom 10-15% of the society there is some truth to what you wrote. However are you sure you are comparing that with the same segment in your country?
Yes, I come from the bottom of society in my country. I grew up surrounded by people without jobs, blue collar workers and parents that worked in factory and hospitality jobs. Luckily, my country takes care of people in these situations, provides them affordable homes and health care and income and helps them to go to school without ending up with crippling debt.
And of course, gender also matters here with men working around 40.5hr/wk and women working around 36.5hr/wk.
The real question is why average hours have dropped so much in just a year or so. The most likely answer has a lot to do with underemployment.
What America are you talking about? Immigration to the USA has always been hard and a very contentious topic.
The previous president was largely voted in on his anti immigrant policy (both for legal and illegal immigration). We’re still undoing his damage to the immigration system today.
Prior to that, America has had a very fraught history with immigrants and abuse.
It’s not a culture that’s willing to accommodate new people. It’s a capitalist machine that sees new people as valuable buyers and workers.
Immigrants have always been treated as a form of cheap labor to import. Whether that was the boom of Italians or Chinese or Mexicans in the past. Then they’re immediately vilified after the work is done.
I think what the culture has in difference to others is valuing the results of capitalism more than anything else.
Currently most of immigration works by enslaving the hardest working people for years by not giving them a chance for proper health insurance, bank accounts and a way to live peacefully just because they were born on the wrong side of an imaginary line, it’s disgusting.
The Trump administration's H1B reform was focused on paying immigrants more money [0]. This did not have the effect of reducing high-skilled immigration, nor was it its intention.
> It’s not a culture that’s willing to accommodate new people. It’s a capitalist machine that sees new people as valuable buyers and workers.
The US is one of the few countries that accepts immigrants not based on education/skills merit[1] (except for H1B, which is largely gamed by Silicon Valley to acquire foreign talent). This is in contrast to Canada or Australia, where the only hope you have to immigrate to those countries as a national from a country with a very high volume of immigration (e.g., India or China) is to get an advanced degree.
[0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-administration-announces-...
[1]: https://econofact.org/should-immigrants-be-admitted-to-the-u...
Try getting a green card even as a trained European. Good luck :)
Not that I'd ever be interested in living in the US. I prefer a country with a decent social security safety net and socialized healthcare. And where people can't just run around carrying guns.
Spain is not perfect but I have way fewer things to worry about here. So I can relax and enjoy life more.
I’m confused, my understanding was that changing jobs is much much more frequent within the US middle class than elsewhere. How does that make sense if as you say quitting is so risky.
What specifically is risky about the US setup? Of course it encourages not being unemployed as healthcare when unemployed is a problem but most people just line up a new job before quitting.
Also, being married makes it safer (but you might be relying on two incomes) and Obamacare is good in some states.
Best I can tell for many European countries the situation is significantly worse in terms of access.
There is a lot of strange misconceptions about US quality of life from people in other countries.
I'd love to see where you got that statistic. IME, I have to wait months for any kind of specialist. And when I finally get to see one, my insurance underpays and then I spend endless hours fighting with both the provider and the insurer. This crap happens every single time I need to see a doctor. I can't wait to retire and move to a second world country that has US trained doctors who give you their personal cell number.
Heathcare in the US has become a terrible joke.
Ok sure so just realize when you retire in that 2nd world country the wait is for GPs! forget specialist.
> https://www.england.nhs.uk/gp/case-studies/routine-gp-appoin...
The average has dropped to 10 days! The US wait for equivalent of GP is like next 1-2 days, or even same day if you get triaged by the group.
Also they are seeing 30+ patients a day which even in busier US locations is at least 1/2 that rate.
It’s a myth that US healthcare is worse than other countries.
Again, I'd like to see the stats on that. I wanted to see my Dr for an annual checkup and was told it was a 2+ month wait and if I didn't want to wait I could see some random nurse practitioner.
There are 2nd world countries where it is incredibly cheap to call your doctor's cell phone and have them come to you in a day or two.
I waited 20 min last time I went without appointment.
Specialists is a different story, the worst being psychologists/therapists (wait time counted in years where I live).
Wait for specialists and surgeries are significantly less in the US than all other G20 countries.
Here is an example item, wait time for knee replacement surgery, or any standard surgery. I’m fairly confident the US is lowest among all G20, by significant amounts.
Your annual checkup wait isn’t an appropriate measure, they do that as they are prioritizing care much better than in bureaucratic socialized medical care. That doctor you are calling on cell likely has much less resources than the nurse practitioner you can be seen in 15-20 mins wait almost 24/7 in every major population center in the US at urgent cares, rapid cares, and worst case ERs. Instant testing, imaging, medications on site.
I don’t think you are comparing apples to apples when people claim they would prefer medical care elsewhere, they have some incorrect assumptions about greener grass, or we are discussing the experience of very lowest income segment of the population.
I do agree that bottom 10% might be slightly better off medically in other countries than the US. That is definitely possible. But for 90% I don’t think it is even remotely competitive.
> The average has dropped to 10 days! The US wait for equivalent of GP is like next 1-2 days, or even same day if you get triaged by the group.
Unfortunately NHS is in terrible shape at the moment after many cuts. It is performing at the level of a 2nd world country.
Czechia has canver survival 30% higher than UK does.
I lived in Czechia, we had a proton therapy center for Twenty Years. England got one just recently.
There is a story where larents in Britain had to steal their child from a hospital, to take her to czechia for Proton beam therapy. The UK doctors have declared her terminally ill, refused to let parents take her for other treatment and after parents kidnapped tbeir own child, theyl parents were declared wanted in Interpol, launching internstional manhunt.
They foung in court to get thei4 chance to treat a child, took child to czechia, went through therapy and now child is in scholl and free of cancer
If theu had trusted the NHS their child would be dead.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-32013634
I also know a bloke who was struggling with backpain for 4 years and could not get it sorted in UK, he through he would become handicapped and retuned to Romania to live it out in peace. Turns out it wss really bad Vitamin D deficciency, which makes your bones soft and allows nerved to be pinched. He is living a full life now.
There is state provided insurance and none of the US horror stories ever happen here.
I'm with Anthem and I've gone directly to various specialties with appointments within 1-5 days.
Coming from the UK I would have picked the NHS as it was when I left 10 years ago over what I have access to here, but the Tories have really run that service into the ground in the interim.
Worse than my experiences in nz, Australia and UK.
I'm sure the healthcare in the US is world-class considering how much it costs. But that cost is the biggest problem for me.
But really, I'm a socialist and considering that this is a swearword in the US for many people, I just don't want to ever live there. My world view is just too different. I've never even visited.
The US simultaneously under-treats poor people while over-treating rich people. This is why health outcomes in the US are so bad across a range of indicators.
Gun violence is a tiny fraction of death/injury here. You’re much more likely to die in a car accident.
> From 2019 to 2020, the relative increase in the rate of firearm-related deaths of all types (_suicide_, homicide, unintentional, and undetermined) among children and adolescents was 29.5%
If you control for this, and include rates of homicide using other means of destruction (i.e., explosives or knives), it starts to look a lot more even compared to other OECD countries (albeit still above average).
This is despite all the weird laws in the US against collecting, analysing, and reporting statistics.
Suicide or not, doesn't that seem concerning? Hmm... Some people say it's the top way children die now by gun. I remember growing up and having active shooter drills in elementary school but it's nothing like they are now. I think we are one of the few countries where children dieing by firearm has increased 46% in the last twenty years or so.
Where I grew up it wasn't rare to hear about stabbings or shooting but it does put me on edge hearing about a mall I used to go to having an active shooter etc.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/14/magazine/gun-...
www.kff.org/private-insurance/press-release/firearms-are-the-leading-cause-of-death-for-children-in-the-united-states-but-rank-no-higher-than-fifth-in-other-industrialized-nations/amp/
Only 0.18% of all gun homicides were committed during a mass shooting. https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2022/05/debunking-every-maj.... The chances of you being killed in a shooting are less than being struck by lightning. If you don't plan on joining a gang, frequenting a bad part of Baltimore or St. Louis, or committing suicide, it becomes orders of magnitude less likely, to the point where you're no less safe in the USA than any other country.
Cut it off at 18 and it wouldn't work, since it would exclude gang violence. Start it at birth and it also wouldn't work, since the statistic would include infant mortality. Unfortunately, that would debunk the fact that gun violence is a widespread problem in the US, rather than something that's happening exclusively in a few poorly run municipalities with excessive levels of poverty, violence, and organized crime.
Maybe so, but I believe you are also more likely to die of a car accident in the US. There's no getting around the fact that amongst western nations, the US has certain aspects to its culture that make it a more dangerous place to live in many ways.
Here in Barcelona a flat rate of 20 euros a month takes care of all my travel needs on metro, bus, tram and train <3
The number of non-cops I've seen openly carrying in public is... One.
Having stayed there 1-3 months at a time so far, it’s pretty hard to find fault.
The present phenomenon where unions and local power groups can extract massive rent is coming to an end.
America will fracture unless she accelerates. San Francisco is the earliest example of that.
The old must die or make way and they are not.
Talk about a weirdly polarizing figure. He's like a clock that's right once per day. Every time his name comes up here on HN, it's a flame war. To reinforce what you state though - at least he raises some interesting topics for us to all discuss.
A great example is the price cap -- enacted via insurers -- on Russian oil, which was a remarkably creative measure. PZ was spot-on about the precursive factors, specifically a) that insurance concerns dominate global shipping, and b) that the world was in for some serious pain if Russian oil stops abruptly.
I figured out a while ago that anyone who mentions the "petrodollar" in a geopolitical context knows knothing about geopolitics.
Bonus idiocy points if "BRICS" is mentioned in a way that implies any kind of formal collectivity, as opposed to a catchy nickname Goldman Sachs created 20 years ago for certain large emerging economies.
I'm curious about this. The petrodollar is clearly a real phenomenon and policy decision. You might say that it's the replacement for when the dollar was backed by gold; instead of being convertible into gold, it's now the currency that's de facto required to purchase oil (which is basically liquid gold), as well as being the currency of the world's foremost military that protects the trade of oil.
The problem is... it just doesn't have much relevance to geopolitics. The people who try to link it to such imagine that the US has a major foreign policy plank in upholding the use of dollars to price oil, to the point of starting wars purely to do so, despite such proponents not being able to offer a shred of evidence that any US official cared about this, or even being able to articulate what the supposed benefits the US receives from such pricing is.
A good comparison I got from twitter is Amazon credit. If you get $50, yeah it's fine, you'll spend it. If you get $5000 of it, you'll look very, very closely into all options to get your dollars back.
New Israeli shekel is really, really close — 3.56 to 3.62 both now and 10 years ago.
CHF, but not by much.
While I think you're correct regarding the crypto bros, every fiat currency is imaginary.
Well, the USD is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States government" which, however you may feel about it, isn't imaginary. Each dollar is a claim to a piece of output of the world's largest economy with the strongest military.
Generally at some point a person wants to get some goods and services from their neighbors and barter only goes so far.
The fact that you are in a society with 330M other people who all use the same "imaginary" currency makes it incredibly sticky.
Exactly what I said. It's imaginary, just that it's a collective imagination.
At some point these things we conjure up out of our collective imagination are every bit as real as the ground hitting you if you jump off a building.
I.e. imaginary.
Your phone bill is just another level of abstraction on top of the USD imagination.
In the middle ages witches were believed to be real by enough people to burn them on the stake. The full power of the state was behind this. Unless there's scientific evidence of sorcery now I think witches are imaginary.
It doesn't make the burning sensation less real.
The value of cryptocurrency is just far more imaginary than dollars, euros, or even gold.
False, and you give two examples that disprove the claim:
> The USD will be no exception. Honestly, BTC will be no exception either.
See, that’s two that have not gone to zero (there ate lots more), but which you merely conjecture will.
The minimum wage in the US in 1964 was $1.25/hour. Notably those five quarters were 90% silver worth about $20 US today.
The British Pound Sterling originally referred to £1 being exchangeable for 1 pound of sterling silver or 1/270th of it’s original value.
It’s technically true that they haven’t gone to literally zero, but I would hazard to say it is close enough.
Like, Russia's purported election interference and general political destabilizing activity starts to sound like a (ethically awful but) economically sensible move. In the extreme, the US falling into a civil war would ease that pressure on BRICS etc.
It's important to not paint BRICS as an actual political entity. It literally started as an investment term made up by Goldman Sachs.
Especially India has its own problems with China and China's Israel (Pakistan).
I've seen it a number of times since last summer. Perhaps you're reading the wrong media.
From an economic perspective BRICS (which on a net basis are exporting nations) should really be worried about more dollar weakness. However I think the recent moves away from the dollar are not due to macro economic reasons but due to political ones instead. The confrontation between Russia and the West made these states realize that having dollars (or euros) can quickly turn into a liability: If they do something the US or EU doesn't like then their funds will just be frozen.
Due to higher US productivity even with the strong currency the cost of production for goods is significantly lower for same quality. US companies are generally gaining market shares in all high value goods.
> On the other hand the strong dollar has been great for the US consumer (cheaper to import stuff)
This allows higher quality of life at lower price. I’d like to point out that EU member gdp per capita are worse than the poorest US states. This is surprising to me as well, but true.
> From an economic perspective BRICS (which on a net basis are exporting nations) should really be worried about more dollar weakness.
How is that true? I’m not following. They need dollars to buy imports and with strong dollar it’s harder to buy imports for same exports. Take Turkey as prime example currently.
> If they do something the US or EU doesn't like then their funds will just be frozen.
I agree that is a big concern for them. However I don’t think a currency pact using Yuan will help much. They really want to give that same power to the Chinese? who have even less due process. This is actually a big reason I’m bullish on Bitcoin it’s probably a better reserve in long run.
On a net basis they are exporters. Meaning (again on a net basis) dollars flow into these countries and goods flow out. If the dollar is strong then companies exporting from the US are more expensive then comparable exports from other countries (which can sell for a lower dollar amount and still pay their staff, raw materials). If the dollar is weak then companies exporting from the US are comparably cheaper. The US is usually a net importer because due to a strong dollar (and high wages) it's just cheaper to import stuff from abroad.
The USA is an impressive beast in this regard. It just never fails to lead and now with AI it's simply light years ahead of the nearest competitor. There's literally thousands of AI startups here - it's just amazing.
Lots of people like to opine on the downfall of American hegemony and global financial and cultural dominance but I'm a believer in the lesser traveled idea that the American Empire hasn't even begun yet.
All of Western and Central Europe, Israel, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, parts of South America, and a few other places are already vassal states of America as it is. I expect more to become over the coming decades.
I have yet to see quantitative numbers that suggest a downfall for the American empire. The discussion always turns to hyper political issues and problems, like race or guns, or healthcare systems.
Yet if we look at more practical questions like productivity, innovation, efficiency, energy, food, … etc. What downfall? It looks like it is growing and I agree there is a possibility that the American Empire is only just starting, not ending.
Swissie and BTC make sense as safe havens for the sanctions and seizure risks of USD. I do expect those to continue to strengthen.
The past year it's gone from almost 21 to the dollar to nearly 18. Certainly sucks for me losing 15% on the conversation rate along with the general inflation that has happened. My food bill in Mexico is up like 40% over the past six months in dollar terms.
It really isn't! I actually thought that the dollar was doing very badly because it has been going down in price in comparison to my local currency for the last 9 months or so (around 15%) (back to 2016-2018 levels).
And such a decrease hadn't happened in more than a decade.
Though I'd argue that has hurt shareholders for far longer, they just didn't notice it as drastically.
Not to mention, in the past year the price of almost everything else has gone up too. So, it's easy to see why people have less money to spend on macs.
The crappiest 8GB RAM (?!) 256SSD M2 Air model is 1650EUR. 1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years.
The 16GB model is rounded 2000EUR, which was before reserved for a high-end gaming laptops. It's bonkers.
That did not have enough ram 3 years ago... the fact they are still trying to sell 8GB as an useful amount outside of extremely budget laptops is insane.
This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.
I will say the Macbook Pro really should start from 16GB RAM and at least 1TB SSD; it's for professionals, isn't it?
Cost of materials should not dictate the final price. There's always a lot more to it.
Personally, my newest main machine has 64GB of RAM (for now) simply because I never want to run out of RAM ever; RAM is cheap (when it ain't coming from Apple) and I hate dealing with swap thrashing.
Speaking more generally, I sincerely wouldn't suggest any lower than 32GB to any person asking for advice on a Windows setup today. Far too many programs demand far too much RAM now, with Chrome being just the leading example.
Lightroom Classic on my desktop uses less than 8GB of RAM.
That's BS. I ran Win 11 on a 8GB tablet PC just fine (although I wouldn't recommend it, get 16 instead).
I get it, we all hate windows, but can we please stick to reality and stop spreading FUD on HN?
With that said, I can easily break past 16GB just running Windows and Chrome. 32GB is the new minimum if you want an enjoyable time; swapping into the page file even with PCIE4 and PCIE5 SSDs is still miserable.
Opening task manager and checking if windows is using more than 16gb is not a method to tell how much you should spec, my PC has 128gb ram with page file disabled and regularly sits at 40gb ram, because windows will allocate ram if there is ram to allocate.
I run 1000s of users on vdi 4/16 is more than enough for 99% of users.
I've since upgraded from that machine to a new build with 64GB of RAM simply because so many programs demand too much RAM now, and I hate even the mere thought of hitting swap.
I find that hard to believe since Chrome now sleeps tabs. I have Chrome with 60+ tabs open right now (yes, I'm one of those hoarders) and only eats 2,7GB RAM with a total system usage of ~9GB including all my other apps I have minimized right now (Signal, Torrent, Weather, PotPlayer, etc).
So I seriously doubt you're blowing past the 16GB just with Chrome alone.
wut. I have a 16GB Windows machine and it's fine.
https://www.osnews.com/story/16675/vista-minimum-requirement...
https://winaero.com/the-real-system-requirements-for-windows...
Here's one for Windows 11
https://www.makeuseof.com/is-4gb-ram-enough-for-windows-11/
Seems Windows 8 was ok
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2221048/will-windows-8-...
Not all that much open and the memory usage is at 27 GB. Chrome, Teams etc. messaging apps, Xcode and other SW dev stuff.
Kinda regret I didn't go for 64 GB.
MemRegions: 1744370 total, 5771M resident, 234M private, 4726M shared. PhysMem: 31G used (2888M wired, 15G compressor), 74M unused.
A bit confusing even for someone who is comfortable dealing with low level kernel stuff...
I guess I'll need to install Homebrew, MacPorts or something.
Edit vm_stat says this. Looks like more reasonable output:
% vm_stat
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 16384 bytes)
Pages free: 4070.
Pages active: 387530.
Pages inactive: 385599.
Pages speculative: 241.
Pages throttled: 0.
Pages wired down: 185222.
Pages purgeable: 2.
"Translation faults": 458286513.
Pages copy-on-write: 18032218.
Pages zero filled: 230111374.
Pages reactivated: 9982494.
Pages purged: 4086524.
File-backed pages: 197104.
Anonymous pages: 576266.
Pages stored in compressor: 2007280.
Pages occupied by compressor: 1062310.
Decompressions: 6355861.
Compressions: 10204603.
Pageins: 13150790.
Pageouts: 252630.
Swapins: 52.
Swapouts: 30380.Physical Memory: 32,00 GB
Memory Used: 21 GB
Cached Files: 10,45 GB
Swap Used: 0 GB
I use both MacOS and Windows, both in a VM using Linux as the host OS, on a laptop with 64GB of RAM, and honestly Windows 11, not considering the fact that it tries to run ads on the start menu, feels lighter and snappier than MacOS.
Of course if you give it a lot of of RAM it will try to use as much as it can to aggressively cache stuff, but not differently from what MacOS does.
Speaking as someone who has and uses a Windows laptop with 8GB of RAM, that's an absurd statement. The "new minimum" in terms of what you usually see for sale, is (still) more like 16GB.
I wish I had 16GB but 8GB is _still perfectly fine_.
Hopefully it will work for a long time, but I think development could be good on a quarter of the mem/storage hardware. More cores would be nice, as always, but even there, go compile will light them all up but for far less than a second.
4GB of RAM.[0]
It's the stupid websites that require GB of RAM to display a couple pieces of written text and the hundreds of MB of JS that tally up to the additional 28GB you may be thinking of. Oh and all the electron apps which add additional browser requirements where there shouldn't be any. I guess Mac OS is somehow exempt from this particular fault though, I would be curious to know how they accomplished it.
[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/windows-...
MacOS isn’t, but Apple Silicon laptops sort of are. Seems the onboard flash and flash controller integrated into M1 and M2 chips are fast enough that disk paging doesn’t impact performance for most day-to-day task. I’ve personally been very surprised at how much performance Apple have squeezed out of 8GB of RAM, it’s certainly far more than I was accustomed to in the Intel era.
Windows laptops on the other hands hold incredibly well at 16GB of RAM. There are also windows laptops with the same weight as Macbook Air at half the cost and double the specs.
It tells a lot regarding how that application is written.
Maybe I'm an extreme case, typically running all the time: phpStorm, Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Excel, Terminal, TextMate, WhatsApp, Messages, Calendar, MS RDP Client, Mail, Notes, Reminders.
Also kind of a trip, I installed Stats at home to troubleshoot bottlenecks. Just noticed I didn't install it at work.
98% of users can live with 8 just fine, and 16 is great. 32 is a waste for most folks.
Generally 8 works for me but I do sometimes end up needing more. At which point I curse my financial situation when I had to purchase my computer which I am otherwise happy with.
Also remember, the GPU also uses memory. 8GB isn't even the same as 8GB when iGPU wasn't a thing.
There are only two things that prevent me from going cheap: poor video performance when I plug it into my large USB-C external monitor; and, my addiction to the Apple Watch that is a device that makes me rethink how I expect technology to fit into my lifestyle.
One friend uses the Air for business only and an iPad Pro for personal/family use.
But I bought a M2 Mini with base everything (8gb/256gb) and it is still absolutely killer for 99% of things. I do a lot of dev, gaming, and casual stuff. It plays WoW at 100fps, Dota, streams all my GFN games, and the swap is fine when doing web dev.
Most of the people who are saying that that 8gb is not enough haven’t actually used one.
A lot of them extrapolate that because their Mac with 16/24/32gb uses more than 8gb doing basic tasks, 8gb is not enough.
They don’t consider that modern OS’s and browsers are happy to use RAM that they don’t need because it is just sitting there otherwise.
The rest have memory heavy workflows (docker or VMs, usually).
If you are doing development, video work, lots of multitasking and if your productivity per hour is important, then you probably need more RAM.
Maybe your argument applies when running Chrome (?), but I had no issues whatsoever running Safari, and not even using an ad blocker.
The price is still stupid, but a potential customer not needing to give a crap about his new computer might just make the steep price worth it.
But I think they were also talking about the overall convenience-quality tradeoff.
I mean, you can get a light and thin Surface laptop. But it’s in the same price range as Macs. But M2 definitely beats Intel on battery life.
I'm sure the resale value is much, much higher. I purchased my very first iPhone, an iPhone 13 pro, largely due to the fact that it will still be worth a significant amount after 2 or 3 years.
If you take that into account, the difference probably isn't as noticeable.
Although I’d probably just buy a 3 year old Air for 800euro rather than buy a new one at that price point.
For durability, I would expect that old Air to last longer than a brand new Lenovo.
If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so this corresponds to perhaps a $100k salary.
Reliability is king. A failed device will typically cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity, IT costs, etc. A device which fails at a critical moment can have almost arbitrary costs.
From a business perspective, Apple, Latitude / Precision / XPS, and Thinkpads are usually the only devices which make sense.
From a home perspective, there are plenty of $200 machines which get the job done. That's one of Apple's problems.
Another one is that most businesses spent a lot on upgrades during COVID, and those machines are still within their lifecycle. As we're entering a predicted recession, delaying upgrades is the #1 thing to go. Layoffs also mean there's a glut of machines (there's a ton of nice off-lease stuff on refurbished web sites right now at bottom-barrel prices; I saw a Precision laptop with 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Xeon, and NVidia Tesla for under $500 a few weeks back).
That's more the OS scheduling and userspace software than actual hardware. I don't experience any lag even on my father's 10yr old laptop.
Is there added taxes / tarrifs for the european prices? That's much worse than just the EUR/USD exchange rate.
My m2 air 24/1tb from work was 2300 or so, my personal m1 air 16/512 was 1850 a year earlier. Don’t see a huge difference between them, but the work one in particular is a giant leap ahead of the 5tr old mbp it replaced.
No doubt they’re pricey
So to fairly compare prices by exchange rate you always need to discount the European price to subtract its VAT first.
Even then, it's imperfect. Some of us in the US do not pay sales tax.
Because then you're simply comparing the price without tax in both places, the money Apple actually receives.
they'll sell just fine in the US and parts of Asia
the EU is becoming poor, and its being reflected in the costs of imported goods
On what do you make that prediction?
My 12-year-old MacBook Air runs Safari fine. I used it just this past weekend.
I don't think an M2 is going to be unusable in 2025.
Needless to say I use my own computer instead.
With the way some of us use tabs, that's not enough RAM to run the browser now. :-)
>The PC market has experienced its largest decline ever, according to analyst Gartner. Preliminary results by Gartner shows that worldwide PC shipments totalled 65.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022, a 28.5% decrease from the fourth quarter of 2021.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252529126/PC-industry-se...
The returns are diminishing, it's not worth to get a 4090 RTX with DDR5 and a compatible mobo, if for 1/3 of the price you can get 90% of the performance with a used 3090 and DDR4.
I also built a desktop 2 years ago and that's so smooth and fast that unless something physically breaks, I can easily stretch it out for 5 years.
Sure, my work zen 3 laptop is somewhat faster for compiling and stuff and only eats a fraction of the power, but for what I do, it wouldn't make enough of a difference to justify buying a new computer.
Only if you go for the really stupid RGB "gamer" motherboards sprinkled with more fairy dust than sense.
Something like this ASUS Prime Z690-P[1] is reasonably priced at just north of ~$200, it even has luxuries like 2.5gig ethernet and onboard wireless.
If you want a DDR5 setup, this ASUS Prime Z690-A[2] is still ~$260 with plenty of luxuries.
If you can do without a top-tier chipset, H670[3] and B660[4] motherboards can be had for somewhere around $100 give or take.
A quick glance at AMD's side of things also seems to paint a similar picture.
The only computer component currently way out of wack in price are GPUs, everything else is either reasonable or downright cheap.
-------------
[1]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119510?Item=N82E1681311951...
[2]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119507?Item=N82E1681311950...
[3]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119536?Item=N82E1681311953...
[4]: https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813162055?Item=N82E1681316205...
The high-end chipsets are for people who think they still need lots of SATA ports, or lots of high-speed USB ports. Or for people who want features that are artificially restricted to only be available on boards using the high-end chipsets.
Always has been. Buying top of the line technology is paying an early adopter penalty. People talk about FPS (frames per second) with gaming PC's and I think its an unnoticeable arms race about numbers. If the human eye can't observe more than 60 FPS and you aren't playing competitively (aka professionally) what will that extra FPS boost get you? Paying for bragging rights (ironic observation for gamers)?
Paying for that difference makes sense for some games/genres. For some that doesn't matter.
After about 160Hz/FPS you start to not be able to tell the difference.
The difference between 60hz and 120hz is night and day. The difference between 120hz and 144hz is noticably better, the difference between 144hz and 165hz is very slightly better, the difference between 165hz and 240hz is not really noticable, the difference between 240hz and 360hz is imperceptible.
Doing just fine with computers from 2009 at home, work is another matter, but only because they are bound by project deliveries.
I think we've just hit the end of the COVID-era hardware refresh wave. Literally everyone has already bought new hardware they've been wanting to buy, the supply chain crush ended months ago. In addition, the number of people who were desperately waiting on Apple to move away from Intel have now all bought in. We've just entered a quiet period.
Maybe a little bit overall market trend, but primarily I would wager it’s because many, many people bought the M1 when it came out and it’s so good that the only people buying M2 are those who waited - it’s a fine spec bump, but not something you would be tempted to upgrade from M1 for.
Regular consumers do not buy a regular laptop for 2000+ €.
Which is precisely the market this batch was intended for, also
The group meant in my comment above was not the set of people buying Apple, but the set of people buying expensive $2K+ laptops.
And that's a group that includes buyers of the expensive models from all of the above manufacturers.
Those would be enough, if they did start to buy M2, and not settle for cheaper M1 or hold for now
(Also I think Apple have a long term issue that the MacOS software story is very, very bad and getting worse and now the sheer performance hype of the M chips has worn off customers might actually look at things like "this is literally no use whatsoever for gaming" and get put off by it.)
But major gaming studios like Blizzard who have normally made Mac versions of their titles are abandoning the Mac now. Epic is banned. The great white (and always misguided) hope that iOS games would come en-masse has not panned out at all. The library has been decimated by the withdrawal of 32bit support. Metal is not gaining development traction. Boot Camp is no longer an option.
The software story for the Mac is getting worse not better, and that is a problem for Apple.
I’m thinking about going back to Windows and learning into WSL where needed. If that gets annoying, I’ll go full Linux and put Windows in a VM.
I’m not excited at all about Window 11’s telemetry, advertising, and general infestations by Microsoft tendrils. Still, Windows 10 is pretty good from a productivity standpoint. I figure I should be able to configure things to keep annoyances under control.
For work I have a 16" i9 from 2021. The M1 is so much faster and nicer to use.
Maybe if work gives me a M2 Ultra/Pro/Super/Titanium/whatever in 2024 that will make me want to replace the personal machine. But I doubt it. 90% of my computing is on my work machine and I don't get to use my personal machine for much that strains it. The personal things I do that "strain" a machine have become trivial these days in terms of non-pro photo & video editing.
Realistically I bet it's late 2025 or late 2026 I would be starting to think about upgrading it.
The difference in the experience between the two has been night and day. The M1 Max just handles everything I throw at it, only gets warm when I'm running something with heavy load for a long period, and never gets hot like the Intel MBP did.
Here's hoping you can get yours replaced too!
Still should get more for your money, I agree.
On the other hand purposefully gimping M1 would gimp ARM adoption. By delivering great performance, they've build up a lot of goodwill - people willingly port their stuff to macs.
(You can do a hacky thing with DisplayLink adapters that emulate a virtual screen somehow but it IS hacky - https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/19166... )
Which laptop or pc is dying after 3 years?
I'm running the same machine, but for me it's the best Mac I ever had. Decent keyboard very similar to my prior 2015 MBP, larger screen while at the same time keeping the exterior footprint of the 2015, it can run virtually everything you throw at it (sans 32-bit legacy games, but not because of the hardware), and if you remember to restart MS Teams after a videocall (because Teams "hogs" the external GPU and doesn't release it after a video/screenshare call ends) the battery lasts hours, even after three years of extremely intensive abuse.
The only (but massive) issue I have with all post-2013 MacBooks is that their storage cannot be easily recovered in another machine in a disaster event, and with the 2019ff it is completely impossible "thanks" to Apple soldering the flash chips and locking the encryption keys in the T2 processor - without TimeMachine and an expensive NAS you're completely and utterly fucked.
Switching to an M-series Mac would provide me with even longer battery life and probably a notch better performance with IntelliJ, but that's it - I'd have to give up on running x86 Docker images which is a real problem as a lot of third party images don't provide ARM images.
The people who can develop on ARM have moved, while a good chunk of the rest can't even if they wanted to.
That might be different in the future, but it's the reality today.
I don't think it's absurd at all. A similarly capable laptop could be had for a much lower price, so people that complain they cannot get this luxury item for an "affordable" price just sounds entitled to me.
I'm simply pointing out the absurdy of the pricing in context of this news story about falling sales.
I use a 16GB M1 Air with 1TB hard drive myself and it does everything I want and I don’t have to worry with tinkering on it. I used to be really into tweaking performance on my desktop but it’s just not worth it anymore.
luxury items tend to be the first to suffer drops in sales in the face of a recession. I dont think it's there's any implication other than that apple's sales are going to drop.
The point of the GP comment was to imply that the price is too high, and that it shouldn't have been, and the drop in sales was the fault of said high price. I'm countering it with the idea that as a luxury good, the drop in sales is totally expected in a recession.
I’m sure apple is excited about cultivating this brand identity. If there is one way I can think that they could get away from the “Sony” or Nike model, it’s being seen as a luxury item, a tool of the select few, instead of just a high quality brand, that yes, might be a little more expensive.
-- Just adding a bit that I'd prefer to be less sarcastic than I was in this comment: My point is that I like the Mac brand better as an bit more costly, but upscale, quality tool than a "luxury". Luxury implies that it is impractically expensive (which I think is what is being argued) Maybe it was just the choice of that word.
I'm not sure they even really view themselves as prosumer, but it is a fine line.
I say that as a former Mac/Apple hater, I used to think all the usual tropes: how overpriced it was for the configuration, how all Mac users were part of a cult, brainwashed for status, so on and so forth. Until I got a Mac for work, planning to just install Linux on it but after seeing some coworkers having headaches doing that I stuck with MacOS for a while and... I never left.
I never had anything close to the issues I had when using Linux as a daily driver, I do believe Linux has got much better for desktop these days but I simply don't want to care about fixing my machine/OS when something inevitably goes awry as it's done multiple times in the past for me.
Apple might not fix their issues as timely as I'd like sometimes but I've been on this boat for 10+ years and the amount of accumulated pain from using a Mac vs what I suffered on Linux/Windows-land machines before is not really comparable, at all, it's been orders of magnitude less painful to me.
My experience is absolutely personal and anecdotal so I just want to disclaim that I'm not saying people who don't use/like Macs and Apple are wrong, or advocating for anyone to switch, etc. I don't buy into the Apple cult, if some other company creates a product that works better than what I have I will switch in an instant. I just don't think it's very clear when comparisons are made simply on tech specs rather than the experience as a whole.
The thing is that right now my Macs have done everything I ever wanted from a desktop machine, very high reliability compared to any other option I've used in almost 3 decades on computers, so I stick with them.
On my Mac I can do my job as a SWE, do my photography stuff, as well as my music production. And I never had more than a hiccup here and there from a major OS upgrade in 10+ years.
By a few months in I was a convert. Having to use another OS for anything serious and involving a GUI makes me grumpy now. Everything before that looked like half-broken garbage, in hindsight. I had no idea how much time I'd been losing to glitchy software and bad hardware until about 90% of that was taken away. Felt like an idiot for not giving Macs a real chance much sooner.
I was also an Android user at the time, and that was a dual-platform mobile dev job—using both those operating systems extensively on a range of hardware converted me to iOS, too, in a hurry. Much smoother, better UI, and better battery life. Sold.
In other words you would love to hear people confirm your opinion of Apple and and why they use them. Must suck to find out that many, if not most people use macOS machines because they like the performance, the design, and support.
I will never understand people that a) care about why other people buy computers and b) assume that the only reason people choose differently than they do is due to vanity/ignorance/status. Apple is the only company whose success people take personally. Wishing that people would finally admit to being as shallow and status chasing as you know they are is an excellent view into your mindset.
Nah, NVIDIA has the same thing.
> I will never understand people that a) care about why other people buy computers and b) assume that the only reason people choose differently than they do is due to vanity/ignorance/status.
Yeah these things almost always come down to values differences. You value different things than the other person, leading you to a different conclusion. There is a side helping of sometimes different observations too... like all the people insisting that macs are super slow or whatever, even into the era of apple silicon (there are many many people who continued to dive onto that grenade on the basis of cinebench tests or whatever too).
But nobody is generally making irrational decisions here. The question is "what alternative machines can I get at a similar price and how does the overall big-picture compare". And they're ending up with the other machines at that price not comparing well.
It's a tough lump to swallow for a lot of people but the M1s were very compellingly priced, with the usual apple caveats. The MBPs are within the range of reason overall, the MBAs are actually probably better than you will find at an equivalent price in the wintel market. Even for engineers - it's *nix on the desktop, that's part of why a decent number of companies are switching.
> Wishing that people would finally admit to being as shallow and status chasing as you know they are is an excellent view into your mindset.
Yeah. All you have to do to redeem yourself in the eyes of this random internet commentator is announce you're a big dumb idiot baby! Why isn't anybody willing to do that!? Really says a lot about society imo. /s
https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Mac-Leander-Kahney/dp/1886411832...
I would love something like my M1 Max MBP running macOS for less money. Since my first G4 PB, I have never thought of it as a status thing. I like the mac GUI with unix underpinnings. It's also popular enough that most common software runs w/o issue, and it has a lot great indie programs (though that market is sadly shrinking).
EDIT
At least in nerd circles while growing up, the high status thing to do was run linux on the desktop. /shrug
8GB of Ram is luxury?
Rolls Royce is luxury. Luxury means status. A gold plated car is luxury ( for some). It's a whole different league.
Macbooks used to be premium - better performance, better experience. Limited storage is not premium.
If Porshe releases a car with 30 horsepower, and asks for £100,000, we have a word for that.
A joke.
The cheapest iPhone they sell you is the SE, a phone with a low-res, dim display, that's worse than what Android phones had 10 years ago (have the SE from work and my dusty old 2012 Samsung Note 2's OLED display just blows it out of the water), all starting at a whopping 549 Euros, more than my rent.
Apple's pricing is just nuts in Europe. For up to 399 I might give it a pass, but at 549 they're just taking the mickey.
The iPad 9 was also a pretty good deal at ~380 Euros until they replaced it with the iPad 10 at ~540 Euros. Absolutely mental. It fells they're pulling "an Nvidia" on us and just jacking up the prices for no reason.
It was a horrendous experience. The camera is unquestionably better in the Samsung but that is about all the positives I could take from my week of using it.
Android was just an abysmal experience from my perspective. Nothing on it seems intuitive and everything feels like a ploy to get you to use a product which will siphon your data off to Google.
Obviously this is just my own personal anecdotal experience so take it with a pinch of salt. But there will no doubt be others feeling the same.
I miss my old 3310 if I am honest. I’ve been looking at dumb phones recently. I just need one with WhatApp so I can talk to my family around the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBxBUIoeNYo&t=603s
I'm always amused by this kind of comment.
I have been from ios to Android back to ios in the last few years. The two of them are so similar nowadays it's laughable. The UX is nearly identical.
Creating a mental process like this: - "I'd like an M1 Pro 14, but it's too expensive" - "A 16GB M1 Air would more than suffice and they're now at okayish prices refurbished" - "Oh! there's a new M2 Air and it's like a pretty nice middle point between the M1 Air and the M1 Pro" - "Oh wait, 16GB is only a few hundred less than an M1 Pro" - "...I guess I should just splash out and get the M1 Pro??"
I'm probably still just gonna get an M1 Air when I need to instead but the amount of time I've entertained getting an M2 Air versus using it to compare against alternatives on either side has been absolutely minimal.
My work M1 Pro has drastically improved my quality of life so I'm not entertaining anything other than Apple, but the M2 is decidedly underwhelming comparing to the seismic shift that was the M1.
M2 Air might be good too, I don't know. But if I could go back, I'd go to M1 Pro.
The only thing I miss on my M1 Pro, is USB-A (which I'm invested in, e.g. my YubiKeys and something like a HackRF or Proxmark), but its got 3 (!!) USB-C and I got adapters. I would've gone to Framework, but while the Linux desktop has come from a long, long way (my reference point being I started using WMs in the 90s, with my first being FVWM on RedHat 5.2) I prefer macOS with a plethora of FOSS utilities, and I am not disappointed by macOS on the ARM-based M-series. With a Framework, I could open it up myself and it seems pretty idiot-proof. I love the modularity of the ports but in the end they're just internal USB-C adapters. So while aesthetically nice, with 3 USB-C (and a SD and HDMI) I'm good to go.
The inclusion of the HDMI port, and generally how far along we are in the usb-c transition, means that I can probably get away without one of those mini dock dongles that generally are no more than a few usb-a ports, an HDMI port and maybe an ethernet port. I have a couple of tiny usb-c(male) to usb-a(female) in my bag for interfacing if I need to.
Previously I had a 13" M1 work machine and it was also great but skated a bit too close to the 'air' sun. It was almost perfect except I felt like I had to carry that stupid mini-dock dongle with me just about everywhere given that it only had 2 ports, one of which was probably going to be for power. (and no magsafe... boooooo)
The cheapest MacBook Air, which is fine for most of my needs is €1260/$1370 and while it's a wonderful laptop, it's just a bit much for running Safari, VSCode and a terminal. It really is a €950 laptop, but if they could hit that price then what else would you really want to buy?
A major issue for me is that I wouldn't know what else to get. Given the current state of Windows, I'm not running out to get a Windows machine. Honestly, if the layout of my house was different, so I could get my desk closer to the living room and family, I'd go for a desktop running Linux next time around.
Other than that, I think Apple have the market cornered. You want a great laptop, with an OS that just works (for most people), then what else are you going to buy?
(But the second adapter is 110$ and requires a separate 120$ shipment).
Hell even when it comes to development, you can't just build your iOS/MacOS app on a regular Linux CI machine, no you must have MacOS machines for building, so you need that special hardware on top of all the other expenses.
I almost feel like Apple setup the developer program with the idea that it's just going to be 15 year old prodogies making apps on their parents computer, their whole stack just seems incompatible and PIA to work with when it comes to actual software development. It should be a sign when you have popular products like CodePush that were designed specifically to address the shortcomings of developing iOS apps.
It’s been over a decade since indy developers really made a dent in the App Store.
Android is not exactly a piece of cake to develop for, the tool chain is slow, the emulator is slow, the device market os fragmented and people are still mostly running old versions of Android you have to support.
Not to mention most Android devices on the market are slow.
xcode itself is 12GB and doesn't support partial updates, the projet file is some hot garbage and plays badly with git, the whole ide is lagging pretty hard on clicka, app upload is so broken Apple themselves had ro release a third party tool to bypass it, the developer portal looks like it hasn't changed since 2010 and has a number of shameful bugs...
How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?
> How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?
I prefer to use my real device since it's not taking any screen space but the Android emulator is much much faster than the one from Apple, every click takes 3s on the Apple one, I don't know what they have done exactly to make it perform so badly. Or maybe it's the mac I used, but again, there's no way to know anyways.
I gave up on Apple because of the overall poor dev experience, I now consider the devices legacy and tell users who ask that I will only support Android to guarantee a better experience, the app used to be available on iOS but I won't upload the app back due to the poor dev ecosystem.
Of course it doesn’t even do that on ARM based Macs.
If you’re not testing on a wide variety of devices for Android or OS’s, how complex is this app?
I don't know how it works, is that the reason it's so slow?
> If you’re not testing on a wide variety of devices for Android or OS’s, how complex is this app?
around 30k lines of code I'd say, I only had minor problems due to screen sizes but that's pretty much the same everywhere.
> You are running into problems that most iOS developers don’t run into
Those problems are real and you have tons of threads online. The thing is, the iOS dev stack looks brittle, you're likely to have the different problems as somebody else and there's no way to debug it anyways.
For the time being, there's apparently a customer base willing to pay those prices. They're not spec-competitive, but once you assign value to the brand, and the moral stance of supporting the idea, and the secondary value of intentionally-not-obsolete components, they have a lot going for them.
And notably, the customers who consider those factors to be important, are generally aiming mid-high in the market anyway.
Could not argue about the price of a Ryzen, can't beat that. :)
Where are you from? I’d rather hire from your pool than mine (and I pay 20-30% above market range).
Mac is just much less troublesome. As I'm aging and (hopefully) becoming a senior dev, I'm getting more and more focused and want to immediately attack the problems I'm paid to solve, and not endlessly fighting and fine-tuning my machines.
I might be wanting to get back to work soon. Hit me up if you need a seasoned dev.
It was in absolute mint condition with 7 cycles on the battery and 1 year left on applecare (which apparently means i can renew it even as the second owner.)
My take is that a lot of people got these wizzbang new laptops through some spending account for WFH during covid, they never left the house with them and now theyre selling them as they go back to the office.
You're right that's a 7% increase in nominal terms but a 5.5% decrease in real dollar terms.
(Realized I can still edit: reply after reply is trying to interpret this as a statement about causality, which it emphatically is not. I'm just saying that ordering is complicated in feedback systems, and that the needed salary growth to compensate for existing inflation largely already happened. This is doubly or triply true for the tech salaries people here are making.)
So an argument of the form "salaries don't keep up with inflation" is backwards (usually). They already did!
Arguments about "why" just aren't helpful here. Everyone thinks they're smarter than everyone else and knows policies that will be perfect, and everyone is wrong for the same reasons. It's a cyclic feedback market and it just does this stuff, for the most part.
But you absolutely can't look at things with a microscope and say "salaries don't keep up with inflation", because that's (almost by definition) never true.
Increased prices of labour or products is always a consequence of inflation and never the cause of inflation.
And to my point upthread: the factors that result in changes in the money supply are themselves subject to influence by lots of things, including stuff like the rate of inflation. It is absolutely, 100%, a feedback network.
No, the are really smart. You have to be very intelligent to be able to contrive a way to support an idea that is completely wrong. Intelligent people almost always support the most idiotic political, economical or cultural ideas, because that is a mental challenge that is satisfying. Using the sheer force of their intellect to "beat" normally gifted people in arguments about these issues, they delude themselves to believe they are right, even though they picked an absurd angle just for the challenge.
>...
> It isn’t clear that increasing interest rates will have any impact on lowering prices. The nascent resurgence in inflation being experienced across the world is primarily still due to supply chain disruptions. The mechanism by which rising interest rates are supposed to impact inflation is essentially by increasing unemployment, which weakens workers’ bargaining power and thus slows wage growth. But lowering wage growth won’t do anything to address supply side constraints or energy shortages, which are a driver of ‘cost-push’ rather than ‘demand-pull’ inflation.
> ...
> The trade-off for policy makers between creating jobs and wage growth, while simultaneously controlling inflation, goes back to a 1958 paper by economist William Phillips on the relationship between ‘Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957’, which became a cornerstone of macroeconomics. The paper identified the correlation between lower unemployment with higher inflation and vice-versa (see Figure 2).
The explanation for this relationship was that as unemployment decreased the ability of workers to bid for higher wages increased due to less competition in the labour market. Higher wages mean more income to spend on goods and services, which leads to prices going up. This is bad for net creditors and net savers, because the inflation cancels out the interest on savings. By contrast, workers and net borrowers benefit from rising wages and prices, as it allows them to pay off their debt more quickly, which is depreciating in real terms relative to their income.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/11/bank-of-england-rishi-sunak...
Inflation is multifactorial, different types of disruption to the economic web cause different effects on it, the article then goes on to mention the overall lower wages on US and UK post Reagan Thatcher as case study for how labor and wage growth changes inflation rates
(The answer is that only MV is real, not M.)
Many people on HN can probably explain why the price is what it is now. That doesn't mean that people are willing (or capable) to pay that much.
Mom makes X
Prices go up
Mom still makes X
One of the best ways to look at the effects of inflation is how long between "upgrades" of various things like cars, computers, phones, TVs, etc.
Also, everyone and their mother wanted to buy the M1 when it came out, because it was just so much better than what came before; but there's no real pressing reason to upgrade to the M2 from the M1, so most of the new purchases will be the last few Intel hold-outs upgrading, or new customers.
At $999 and a major performance increase, a new laptop might be a no-brainer (especially compared to replacing batteries, etc).
But at $1199 and a minor increase, why bother?
Probably not true in general either except in stagflation.
Inflation usually means wages going up. Of course they don't all go up at the same time and people get shuffled around, which makes them really angry.
But low wage workers in the US have gotten significant pay raises since 2019. In fact, they're the only workers who are making more after inflation.
https://bcf.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Combine...
…This also means wealth and income inequality are down, which maybe people will be happy about.
> Inflation usually means wages going up.
Inflation is a rise in prices, that's what it means. Maybe I am being pedantic about your use of "means".
> But low wage workers in the US have gotten significant pay raises since 2019.
Mom in my example hasn't, so irrelevant. Why do you insist on using generalizations to try to contradict an example? My example is very real, the generalization does not apply.
> Inflation is a rise in prices, that's what it means. Maybe I am being pedantic about your use of "means".
Wages are a price for labor, so prices going up includes wages.
If your country's dollar falls in value, Apple punishes your country. It's not fair to you as an individual, but it's how Apple have operated for at least the last 15 years.
But its the same with a lot of other electronics too - people online will tell you something like "just get a raspberry for $40" but then you look at the European ebay and you're in for at least a 100 euro and that's for a used one.
They still haven't caught up production enough to stifle the price increases.
They should have stuck with their core IMO.
* https://pine64.com/product-category/single-board-computers/
The Rock64 fits in a Pi3 case and is roughly equiv. and runs DietPi (makes a good Pihole).
The RockPro64 is a great media machine.
The A64 doesn't really do it for me but I am sure it has applications.
My one big complaint about the Rock64 design is that the tiny barrel power plug (the same size and voltage used for USB powered hubs) is right next to the 3.5mm audio jack and fits inside and if you mistakenly put it in it will fry the board (ask me how I know). I have taken to popping the connector off shitty headphones and putting it in the audio jack so that can't happen.
For heavier usecases that really there isn't as much of an alternative. Many other boards like the pine64, beagle and orangepi, but their ecosystem lacks sophistication.
And the RPi prices are through the roof everywhere. "Just get a Pi, they are cheap" is basically a pre-2020 sentiment.
Everything in Canada is usually 10-25% more expensive than the US, besides stuff covered under NAFTA. Consumer things like clothes/electronics are usually the biggest victims.
But I just compared the Apple stores and the base Macbook = $999USD vs $1299CAD, doing pure currency conversion $1299CAD = $965.96USD, so it's technically ~$32USD cheaper in Canada? Probably just out-of-step with currency markets/inflation.
... and if I go to trade it in, they'll give me $850 for it ...
Lol, that's a joke :D
I'm really surprised how they let the Pro range suffer though. Every 5-6 years there is a major release bringing it up to spec but in between nothing happens at all, not even a minor redesign for the latest CPUs.
This is what I don't get - the Pro is specifically aimed at those needing the maximum performance out of their machine. But after the first year this has been overtaken by the rest of the market and the remaining years until the next redesign it's a pityful excuse for a high-end workstation. Not to mention they won't even drop the price (ok for the trash can model they actually did that once.)
So, to whom is this still an appealing offer? Who invests top dollar into apple workstations when it's almost guaranteed they're going to be left in an awkward spot with nowhere to upgrade every few years? What's the point of this whole product line this way?
What's that?
I've noticed this as well, but having lived through 2011-2013 when the CAD = USD, Apple has 3-6 month lead times on pricing changes, almost always tied to product releases/store updates.
Maybe it'll get more expensive the next time they release a product, maybe it won't because the difference is currently negligible.
There is only 1 Mac Mini available with M1 CPU and it only has 8GB RAM - that's for $499 and if you add shipping to Europe and tax, probably it will work out closer to $1000 than $499.
It's pricy, but it's not going to double the price.
If you ignore a parcel or reject it, it should be returned to the sender.
€360 * 1.12 * 1.24 = €500
There is only 1 Mac Mini available with M1 CPU
He stated specifically Intel machines. The M1 isn't an Intel processor.
So I went an bout a bunch of mac minis with remote desktop and just looped the digital signage videos via VLC.
I had to do this in some of the salesforce offices I built - like 50 Fremont, Chicago, NYC...
Mac minis were great for the 'bandaid' -- but even then were over priced and a pain to manage...
But I personally do not think Ill be buying another mac object due to appl fking me when my machine was under recall for catching fire, and my machine..... caught fire....
And appl held the machine for two month while 'investigating' and refused to honor the recall because it took them two months to find a moisture sensor that had been set off at some point.
The machine caught fire in my bed while I was watching netflix.
Appls solution was "well you can buy a new machine to replace it at full price" (this was LITERALLY what they said to me in the Union Sq, SF flagship store.
I remember being upset that the same laptop cost more in Australia than it did in the US, then I realized that it had a lot more to do with Australia's corporate tax rates. Turns out... companies do pass on taxes to the end purchasers.
It feels, and I don't mean offense here, that if the EU wants to tell companies which power plugs they can use, and stay heavy-handed with corporate tax rates, that people in the EU will need to just accept higher prices as the outcome of their leaders' actions.
Currency fluctuations, and corporate taxes explain all the price differences. Someone said "Oh it costs 7% more now than it did 2 years ago!" Gosh, compared to the rest of everything a price hike of only 7% seems like a really good deal over the last 3 years. =P (But I get we aren't used to tech prices ever going up over time.)
No company is in the business of giving things away, y'know? Anyway Apple just wants a profit of $X per unit. If your country adds a bunch of rules and costs, that's fine it's your right to self-govern and set whatever laws you want, but Apple is still going to get a profit of $X per unit.
Edit: Later today I'm picking up a laptop for a colleague who is coming in to town next week from an EU country. He wanted to buy it in the US since it was so much cheaper. Good timing on this post. (=
Add into that things like shipping costs in various areas, and it can all add up.
He needs to declare it when he returns to the EU, and pay the same taxes. (Assuming it costs more than €430, which is the limit for bringing personal goods into the EU by plane.)
It seems that everyone buys laptops in the US and brings them home this way; whether they are in Australia, Costa Rica -- or even the EU -- on a personal level, nobody wants to pay more, especially not more taxes.
The only time I have paid import taxes was when I sent a used phone and laptop to a person on Reddit who needed them in Canada. Even though the devices were over five years old, the Canadian tax authorities wanted me to pay new retail prices for them. I paid the taxes so that the kid could receive the devices. I'm pretty sure I could have just declared them as having a value of $100, but by the time I got involved the kid had already said it was an "Apple Laptop" and the Postal Mounties just assumed a new sticker price. Frustrating.
This has been true for Europe for a long time.
In the early 90's, I had a particular Sony Walkman that I was very fond of. I paid about US$100 for it.
A couple of months later, I accidentally left it on the plane as I was transferring in Paris. When I got to Vienna, I was delighted to discover that it was also available there, so I bought a replacement. I was not delighted to find out that it cost nearly double what I paid for it in the U.S.
There's something about Europe and electronics that always seems to equal higher prices. It's been going on for at least a half a century.
I did these calculations a while back on various Mac models and the price difference was actually not that large. The US prices are without VAT. Add the 19 or 21% of VAT that is typical for EU countries and it's almost the same. The difference grew a bit, because the Euro became a bit stronger relative to the USD since Apple made their last announcements.
mini-PC that would be energy efficient and I could run some AI experiments on
Don't do that, an M2 has very limited compute. A cheap RTX2060 Super from some years back will be many many times faster when you use Tensor Cores.
These taxes seem punitive. For essential goods such as computers, that seems way too high.
Apple's value proposition seems to be "pay an arm and a leg for something we will break anytime we think you should give us more money."
Ventura is lower, 4-5 years, but that happens periodically when aligned with major architectural changes.
[edit] Honestly, their support cycle is pretty impressive. And just because they don't release a newer version of macOS doesn't mean software stops working.
Dropping support for hardware that still runs perfectly fine, and isn't a heinous mess of architectural workarounds, is nothing more than a crass money-grab. Which is completely understandable for a company whose job is to make money, but I still don't see why that's praiseworthy.
Historically, Apple seems to prefer to drop support for old hardware rather than maintain a long list of caveats about which features cannot run on older machines. Throughout the Intel Mac era, Apple was clearly trying to raise the bar for baseline GPU performance to ensure the graphical effects really would run "perfectly fine" as you put it, though they were stymied by some of Intel's anti-competitive behavior. Their decision to drop support for the 32-bit kernel and firmware was quite reasonable, though the later decision to drop support for 32-bit applications was more of a problem for users.
Does Windows 11 work on that machine? Does Windows 10?
The cross product matrix is already staggering, but imagine testing 10 years of iPhones, 10 years of iPods, however many years of Watch, AirPods, chargers, etc against every Mac released for 10 years - in every configuration? Every time you ship an OS update? Wild.
It's one of several reasons that I stopped buying macs for my personal dev machine and switched to ubuntu. Linux certainly isn't perfect but updates have been more pleasant than on mac or windows.
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe
And Mac sales increased
Technically it is replaceable - replacement of surface mount components isn't actually too difficult and tools that are needed are affordable. Problem is that the Apple won't give an option to buy memory or SSD chips on an open market. While the replacement wouldn't be feasible for a typical laptop user, plenty of mobile repair shops would have done the upgrade with pleasure provided they could get access to chips.
Something we really need legislators to step in. Unfortunately in the EU the coming right to repair law is completely useless.
It's not user-replaceable. It would not be _that_ difficult for Apple to keep a SODIMM slot free, or even come up with a new standard - as they are wont to do.
Apple sacrificed upgradability in the name of making more money - it's as simple as that.
Considering even the Ryzen 7950x or Intel I9 for desktops are 128 bit wide that's a pretty huge difference. You have to move up to Epyc, Threadripper, Xeon, or a Workstation CPU to get more than 128 bits, and those aren't available on laptops.
So I'm going to have to disagree with the "Apple sacrificed upgradability in the name of making more money".
Well, it's not because Apple doesn't give access to parts, otherwise it would be.
Not sure how use of hot air station suddenly makes it something that a user can't do?
You can buy a hot air station for less than $100 and it will do the job. Only caveat is that the replacement part needs to be new (so it has pre-applied solder balls) - otherwise you'd need to reball which a bit more difficult, but not something that can't be done at home.
My wife needed a laptop for class a year ago, so I gave her my old macbook pro 13 i bought in 2014. I also had a macbook air m1 for personal use, which I replaced recently with a macbook pro 14 m1, and planned to give my wife the air. She refuses the air bc she likes the old 13 so much, and she abuses the shit out of it.
How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years? Even the battery life is still ok. I am going to have to force her to consider the air bc the old 13 is a security risk without OS updates.
The only reason why I replaced the old 13 with the air was bc the 13 could not render 4k 60fps on an external display. Otherwise, I would have kept using it.
The old 13 cost me about $1600 USD new (256GB HD, 8 GB ram). Amortize that cost over 9 years and that doesn't seem so bad. Even my iphone 8 is still going strong.
Another anecdote - my current employer gave me a new macbook pro 15 when I started here back in 2017. It took my abuse well and the only reason I am not still using it is bc my employer forced me to upgrade when the m1 pros came out.
You probably won't need to replace your air for like 7 years, or when apple stops updates for your machine.
EDIT - I am surprised I am getting downvoted. You would think more folks on HN would be happy about long lasting products but the anti-apple bias is strong enough to override the concern of having a more sustainable product.
It's still getting new MacOS releases/updates using OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. Once MacOS is ARM only will put Linux or OpenBSD on it and see how long it goes.
Replacing old batteries is sometimes extremely affordable if you're willing to open the machine yourself.
17 or so year old IBM T41 stopped working about 2 years ago.
also macs were very early to hop on the ssd train and that was an insane advantage over most windows machines. I think that gap has closed substantially at this point.
I have no doubt that Windows laptop build quality has improved in the last decade, in no small part to chasing after Apple, but at this point I can't imagine going back to Windows so I'll never really know.
If anything, the repairability and upgradability that prevented old Macs from being e-waste is gone now. It's hard to imagine Apple pushing the envelope on reusability or device longevity in their current era.
Maybe it's different now (I haven't used Windows in decades, so I don't know) but I will say that it never felt that way to me. Perhaps because Apple controls the OS and the hardware, and has the ability to either spend extra time optimizing for older known hardware that falls within a support window or to delay a feature that would be problematic for older-but-supported hardware, but my lived experience with Apple hardware is that I get a lot more practical longevity out of it without having to work to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it.
Yes, I can always take a $1200 Windows machine and put XFCE or Xubuntu or Mate on it and it'll extend its life considerably, but as someone who has always tried to extend the life of my components as long as possible (the server at my feet is an Athlon FX) -- it's always just felt easier on Apple hardware.
It's even easier still with non-Windows PC operating systems, but ... has Windows gotten better on this regard or is that longevity still bolstered by migrating away from Windows?
I don't think they spend any real time optimizing for old hardware, for example APFS is just a turd on HDD systems and yet they forced everyone on it and worse yet kept selling HDD iMacs on the low end (which really wasn't that low).
Meanwhile MS announces in advance what the support window will be. With Windows 10 there was barely any difference in requirements from Windows 8 so pretty much everything that wasn't a bottom tier netbook or tablet from 2010 still works fine and is supported until 2025. Meanwhile the 2013 Mac Pro which was an expensive beast and sold until late 2019 won't even get some security updates in 2025.
Linux and the BSDs also announce ahead of time the support period and there's a plethora of options for aging hardware.
Nearly all machines, DIY included, would have met these requirements. Intel PTT has been built into their processors since 2013. AMD for at least a few years.
Hardware as high quality as Apple is harder to come by though, and generally commands the same price premium.
I'm currently using a Dell XPS laptop that will turn 12 years old in a few months. Since I bought it, I've been able to
1. Replace the AC adapter and battery multiple times (the most common failure point for this model).
2. Upgrade the screen (yes, really!) to a wide color gamut model that can do photo editing in the AdobeRGB space. (New Macs have good screens, but not so long ago even the MBP only had an sRGB screen).
3. Add an SSD.
4. Upgrade the memory (supports up to 32 GB).
5. Upgrade the WiFi adapter card to a new model that supports WiFi 5 (née AC), getting me much faster wireless without having to buy a new laptop.
And ... a bunch of other stuff. All this has cost me less money, in total, than a brand new bottom-of-the-line Dell model would have cost me at any point in the last 12 years. The point being, if you're going to replace your device after 4 years anyway, may as well get a Macbook Air at this point (especially with the M1/M2 chip). But I've been delighted by the longevity of my old Dell.
Ignore 'build quality' that is marketing nonsense that companies use to exploit you.
Last year I picked up a computer with these requirements for $550. Its been flawless.
If I was going to spend another $700, I'd either get 2, or upgrade my video card.
I've worked at orgs that used a variety of expensive windows laptops, because they kept having abysmal failure rates and switching every year.
They already had stacks of failed Surface Books and ASUS Zenbooks.
Maybe my HP Elitebook would have lasted, but it was terrible to use the whole time.
Not that my Mac experience has been flawless, but the odds seem to be far better.
Come on...can we tone down the ridiculous statements here, please?
I don't know what your friends did to this hardware, but there isn't anything out there you HAVE to replace "almost yearly". Not even for that price.
Other people have noted that shelling out the same for Windows hardware might get you better quality, but there's also the possibility that people who spend that much don't want to shell that out again so they take better care of their stuff.
My ASUS G73 is 12 years old. I stuffed it with 32GB RAM and it works just fine. I use it to create 3D models and assemblies. I do clone the SSD once in a while but still there was no need to replace.
Since I use it mostly as a portable desktop (external keyboard, mouse and 4K monitor) the relevant parts are pristine.
Well, nothing went wrong with all the computers I've ever had, but that's just an anecdotal measure of reliability, not of sustainability.
Very weird logic.
OTOH, literally every Mac owner I know has had to replace their Mac laptop multiple times due to various hardware issues. (And yes, that includes Macbook Pros, Airs, etc.)
It's great that Apple has such good support. I couldn't tell you what Dell or IBM's support is like; I've never had to use it.
A small part of the reasons I downvoted you is this flamey statement here, because you seem more worried about the downvotes you were getting than with the content of your message and seem to base your opinion an what you think other people will like to hear, and when that doesn't work and people downvote you, you then resort to generalize and perhaps falsely calling people who disagree with you that they must have an anti Apple bias when that's not true.
You should always speak your mind free regardless of other people's upvotes or downvotes, and not start to attack those who don't agree with you as if only your opinion is the right one and everyone else who disagrees must certainly be biased.
Back on topic, no, I don't have an Apple bias, and the main reason I downvoted you is that I don't agree with your assessment of Apple making sustainable products when they've demonstrated time and time again being at the forefront of the anti right-to-repair movement and did everything they could to make sure to restrict, disable and discourage third party repairs as much as possible. See Luis Rossman's and Linus Tech Tips's videos. That's not what a sustainable company does.
I'm glad you've never had any issue with your Macbooks, but one, that's survivorship bias of sample size one, and two, that's just shows reliability, and in no way proves anything about sustainability.
Sustainability would be if you would have had issues and Apple would have provided you with assistance to reapir your old devices on the cheap. But your anecdotal experience of something never going wrong is no proof of sustainability as nothing ever went wrong with my Acer, HP, and Lenovo machines either, but that doesn't mean they're models of sustainability.
Framework is an example of sustainability, not Apple, because sell you with the parts to keep your machines going, in case something goes wrong. Apple does not do that, in fact the opposite:
"Oh, the display cable of your out of warranty Macbook is toast? Bummer. How about buying a new laptop then?"
That's not what a sustainable company does. Ever.
Based on these facts, I would encourage you to reevaluate your stance on what sustainability actually means and how it's defined on a consumer company and products. Peace.
That was also true for older macs, which were cheaper.
I believe that the Apple Silicon macs are the highest-margin macs Apple has ever made, since they no longer have to pay Intel for the CPUs or AMD for the GPUs.
I can see no technical or logistical reason why Apple had to increase prices, and believe it is entirely driven by the idea that the market can bear it.
That doesn't sound right. The m series chips are literally copy pasted from their a series and they operate at a scale where they probably get nice economies of scale. I bet they increased their margins a substancial amount.
I am not convinced. Most of the development cost for Apple Silicon is already covered by the iphone and ipad. They always had to pay for manufacturing and logistics so that's not a new thing, and I bet they paid AMD and Intel way more than they pay TSMC even now.
Then they recalled the 2012 MBAs because of failing SSDs in October 2013 and refused to refund my Apple care because they did me a "favour" and I got a good "deal" with getting Apple care because I shouldn't have been able to buy it post-warranty. It didn't matter that they recalled the SSD literally 2 months later free of charge, they wouldn't let me get rid of the Apple care and have it refunded.
In April 2016 the battery died on me and it was out of Apple care warranty because the Apple care was June 2012 - June 2015 instead of the August 2013 I purchased it on and being valid until August 2016. So that cost me another $250 to replace. Another repair I had to pay for that should have been free.
Finally in 2019 I updated to Catalina and it hosed the entire laptop which was working flawlessly before the update. It started randomly beach balling after about an hour of use and would stutter every couple of minutes until it eventually would lock up and turn off completely. Then it would randomly show the flashing question mark when booting up and it stopped working completely. The laptop couldn't even factory restore itself or stay on long enough to be restored over the internet. I brought it to Apple a few times, they didn't detect anything wrong with the laptop, and I eventually gave up on it. I still have no clue what that update did to kill my entire laptop but I was done putting money into it at that point.
I'd guess that the compounding exceptions of your situtation (paying for AppleCare in liu of paying for a repair, then that repair being being of a service program) were sufficiently illegible to Apple that you didn't (couldn't?) get a refund.
It really annoys me that the laptop died for no reason overnight after an OS upgrade and Apple couldn't even come up with an explanation or attempt to fix it. I've done some Googling recently because this was in my mind again and apparently Catalina bricked a lot of laptops but I can't seem to find any acknowledgment from Apple on that.
> I am surprised I am getting downvoted
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
> You would think more folks on HN would be happy about long lasting products but the anti-apple bias is strong enough to override the concern of having a more sustainable product.
- 2013 MB (Glorious, ran forever, needed more RAM and speed)
- 2016 MBP (bad keyboard, then rapid battery expansion)
- 2018 MBP (battery expansion, then logic board failure)
- 2019/2020 MBP (logic board failure)
- M1 MBP 13" (nothing, it's running beautifully.)
IIRC, all of the above failures happened just outside of the warranty period. For personal MacBooks, I will no longer go without AppleCare+. The risk of failure and accidental damage is too great.
We have an org with thousands of MBPs with similar experiences. It got bad enough that discussions were had about switching staff to Chromebooks or Windows laptops. (Chromebooks didn't meet requirements and Windows laptops are even worse for hardware and software reasons)
All of these devices basically sat on a desk in a ~68F office most of the time.
2016-2020 the dark ages but outside of that 4 year period (that Apple has firmly reversed course on), Apple's reputation for excellent laptops is well deserved.
Baking on the memory? It's frustrating and gimps the device lifespan, but arguably unavoidable with the bandwidth Apple is targeting. Without replaceable storage though, every Apple Silicon device is effectively a ticking time-bomb. These devices will all hit their TBW limit long before they're unusable, and Apple refused to anticipate this because... it side-steps their pricing scheme?
The current Macbook lineup is a step in the right direction, but far from perfect. Even ignoring my hundred gripes with MacOS, I think there are clear hardware improvements they can make with future iterations. None of these improvements seem particularly profitable though, so I'm not counting on Apple adding them.
However, Apple’s base model is frankly silly. A solid 2TB NVME drive is only 150$, slapping the equivalent of 20$ worth of storage on a 1,500$ laptop is crazy.
The point of the parent comment was not about saving data from the drive, but that the devices are landfill material once they hit tbw limits on their drives, even if they were otherwise in good condition.
> So if the internal drive on your M1 Mac fails completely, even an external bootable drive won't boot. Yep, your Mac is bricked.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-bad-is-the-m1-macs-ssd-fai...
Constant backups are a necessity even if your computer has RAID-6 storage built on enterprise-grade storage.
Your office can catch fire. You can be hit by ransomware. Multiple devices in the array can fail in rapid sequence (happened to me once). Your computer can get stolen (happened to me, twice).
Have an offsite backup always on hand.
A failure != a brand new laptop, especially with applecare.
IMO chromebooks are worse but cheaper so you feel better just tossing them out. Windows laptops are worse .. so your position is Apple sux bucause the laptops fai sometimes. But window laptops fail more ... so ...
so what? Hardware fails sometimes, Apple has great support and actually own up to defective products. Sure I'm a little miffed that I can't generally fix them myself (and especially miffed that they solder storage onto a mainboard and don't use something like m.2). But every last apple laptop i've owned that I have replaced for speed reasons has gone to someone else who's used it for years after i've been done with it. (Well save one that took an unfortunate tumble into a lake.. no saving that one, RIP last macbook I ever owned with an optical drive)
Apple does not have support good enough for professionals, my colleagues are suffering with defective MacBooks until they can justify a full replacement, because Apple repairs cost a lot of time, while Lenovo sends a repairperson with tools and replacement parts to my office.
On the other hand, an Apple store once took over 3 weeks to order a replacement battery for my macbook air. I never even received an explanation for this incredible incompetence. And when I finally got the battery, the apple store employee made sure to add insult to injury by criticizing my android phone...
It's night and day. My take is that Dell has something to prove while Apple rests on their laurels.
It handles it just fine at 8-10% CPU usage on an M1.
This one is pricier but also doubles as a docking station/100w PD:
https://www.kensington.com/p/products/device-docking-connect...
They have some cheaper, more basic models too.
edit: for the record I think this limit is stupid and the biggest flaw of the Air. You're right that other than that, it's a damn near perfect daily driver.
This limitation is purely artificial/for market segmentation purposes.
It's still for market segmentation but there is a hardware reason.
I don't know anyone who went "Ah! only one monitor support!? I better move up the range to get that 2nd display support..." etc. You would really need to get into the weeds on the spec sheets to notice ahead of purchase.
I actually find many more people doing the opposite - choosing to move "down range" to the Air for the form factor, given it still has a great CPU. These power users who choose based on the great form factor get hurt the worst on this.
I just took it for-granted that every laptop in this price range on sale today will by and large be able to drive two external displays, but nope!
I ended up using a "double wide"/32:9 style monitor - the Samsung CRG9 - these 32:9 panels can be had in 5120 x 1440 resolution, which is exactly the size and res of two 27 inch 1440p panels side by side but in a single display. Works great on the Air, although its not a super cheap option.
> https://www.samsung.com/ca/monitors/gaming/super-ultra-wide-...
A replacement display is basically 70+% the cost of the entire machine.
AppleCare had to replace two of them on my Sandy Bridge MacBook Air. They blamed the bag I kept it in(when replacing it the second time), but they also sold me the bag.
That's the problem. You need to discharge the battery once in a while or it builds up gas and expands. I had a 2015 that was perfect until I stopped going anywhere in March 2020. So I basically didn't unplug it for a year, and then the battery got explodey.
So now that I still work at home, I make sure to unplug my laptop once in a while just to drain it down a bit.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted here. You still need to unplug your older Macs that don't have the software and firmware updates that do this automatically now.
I'm simply pointing out why OP had battery problems.
That's still a defect; the laptop battery management should do that for you. As an example, the Dell laptops I'm used to automatically drain the battery to ~95% when plugged in all the time (it appears to be at 100% while on AC, but when you unplug it you can see the true charge).
They are, though.
I'm on my 4th MacBook and all have lasted me at least 5 years. The reason I upgrade them is to get more speed/specs, not because they stopped working, I even sold them and made back some small $$.
PS The touchbar thing was nonsense, I didn't jump on that, as well as other gimmicks. Still the MBP is a solid option.
I use my MBP 6-8 hours every. single. day. I plug two monitors to it and leave everything on 24/7 (I only dim the screen but never close it). I'm sure I put way more use into them than the average user. I once went close to two years without a restart.
No other laptop I've owned has been as reliable as the MBPs.
... but yes this is still an anecdote.
Of course not. An anecdote is bad data. A diverse sample is good data.
You: sample size = 1
Maybe parents opinion is coloured negatively by hearing about failing machines of colleagues. They even said that Windows machines were worse.
Maybe you have been lucky.
Zero snark intended.
My wife has been using Macs for a long time now while I use both Macs and Dells with Linux and, occasionally, a Lenovo or an HP. We have gone through at least 10 Macs in total and none of them failed in less than 8 years. One got a puffy battery (replaced in warranty), one got chipped when it fell from the desk (a white MacBook, Apple replaced the bottom, keyboard, and palm rest for free, even though the machine was out of warranty, but was listed in a recall for the palm rest). Some HDs died and some flash got upgraded. While it's not a daily driver, even the white MacBook is still going strong (as is the Bondi Blue iMac, the eMac, and the dual G5, none of which get much uptime these days, but boot up just fine every month or so). Both our current Macs (a 13" Pro and an i5 Mini) are from 2014 and will be replaced by M2 ones because they can't get the newest OS (while I can get away with it, my wife won't for long due to professional compliance rules).
No consumer-grade PC laptop or desktop of mine lasted that long in active use (some x86 servers did, as all the Sun and IBM PPC/POWER stuff) without extensive overhauling. Even my Thinkpads got cracks after five years.
The thing that worries me the most with the newer Macs is the flash storage - when it dies, I don't expect them to be repairable. I hope Apple includes M.2 slots in the future, even if the laptops need to be bulkier because of that.
He basically never used it as a laptop, and it's been plugged in to an external monitor and keyboard for many years. He used to stack paper on top of it until I told him to stop it so it could vent better. I would update the software, but I think it's been a while since there's been a new security update. I picked it up recently while visiting and noticed it wouldn't close all the way - uh oh.
So I told him his battery was going bad and could explode. He took it to an independent repair shop the next day. They replaced it with a new battery and cleaned out over a decade of dust in the chassis for $120.
I tried to impress upon him that having the same computer for over 10 years without ever having to take it in (or really do any kind of maintenance besides software updates) is extraordinary - he understands now that computers are a little more like cars. They need to be serviced sometimes. Not nearly as frequently as cars. And those laptops were not known for having good thermals.
I'm on the verge of buying him a new MacBook just so he will be on the latest software - but for what he does (email, web browsing) the Air works just as well as it did in 2011.
I think I might end up getting him a gently used M1 Mac Mini though since it never moves from his desk and it would be under $500.
Anyways, I'm on an M1 MacBook Pro and it's hard to see myself buying a new Macbook Pro in the next 5 years minimum. I just don't need to. They fixed pretty much all of the problems their laptops had.
Perhaps i'm just lucky... but I use it everyday for hours. It traveled to super remote places.
I want to use it for 2 or 3 more years (10 years in total would be nice!)
A $200 Chromebook will work fine.
I assume Windows is doing better on that front than ChromeOS. MacOS sure as hell is.
How much memory do you have? Seemed like my biggest concern when it came to this generation of MacBooks and longevity.
I could imagine upgrading to the M3 or even M4 MBA, but at that point it will have been 4–5 years on the M1.
This isn't to defend Apple's stingy memory and storage specs, I just don't end up needing more than that really for the kind of work I do.
The base SSD was 500GB too. Which I'm using like... half of? It's the same thing with iPhones. The base storage amount for Pro models is 128GB and I never run up against that limit. Maybe if I took way more pictures and videos.
I store all my important data in different versions of the cloud (code I write in remote Github repos, files in Google Drive) so on device stuff is more ephemeral.
If I was a professional photographer or video editor, I'd care a lot more. Again, I think they should offer more a base but I don't ever run into actually needing it so it's not a pain point for me.
There is an application called "AlDente" that lets you control this more precisely - not only can you essentially force it to hold at a specific charge level at any time, but you can also configure battery temperature limits (battery won't charge above, eg, 35C) and also "sailing mode" which gives it some hysteresis so it won't immediately charge up to 80% (or whatever you set) but rather stay at (eg) 76% if you run unplugged for a few minutes.
Except when they’re not and Apple tries very hard to bury the problem while the machine is still relevant, so your choices are either to pay for (expensive) repairs out of pocket or dump it and buy a different model. Then years later once the machine is obsolete for most, will they finally give in and offer a free repair to the lucky ones who have been left holding these hot potatoes of a defective model. Not every time though, sometimes they just won’t accept responsibility at all, ever.
See the GPU issues, the battery issues, the butterfly keyboards, the yellow tinted panels…
So we are talking about ~ 30 years cumulative ownership with 3 battery changes and 3 MagSafes. Not bad in my book. If you want to nuke e waste, buy a Mac and hope it’s not a lemon. They rarely are
I very much enjoy using my Macbook over any windows laptop (the trackpad and keyboard are just so much better), but I am concerned about spending $3k on another laptop in a year or so when this one runs into an issue again.
My own experience (4 MacBooks Pros) and that of providing MacBook Air and Pros to a dozen or so staff (with 50 or so on non-Mac kit) leads me to conclude this statement is not true.
They are great as long as they work but no better in terms of longevity to equivalent kit from other manufacturers, at least in my limited, non-scientific, IMHO experience.
- M1 mba, 1 usb port dead.
- 15' mbp 2019, all ports dead. I have been told that the logicboard is dead, and they wanted 850 euro to replace it.
On about 2000 macbooks, 2000 thinkbooks and 6000 hp elitebooks, all of various generations, the macbooks scored best on reliability and best on 'how many tickets do these users create for our service desk'.
The cost savings are there. But obviously there was still a significant amount of issues with these laptops. They are not perfect, but they performed better than the other two families.
The big issue with macbooks is usually that if they fail after 3 years, they are an immediate write off. The others get repaired. Oh and those butterfly keyboard years were horrible and nearly stopped us from allowing macbooks apparently.
But new Macs with soldered RAM and soldered storage and glued batteries may feel nicer on the Apple Store shelf, but a few years down the road when the base model specs are no longer adequate and the latest OSX releases drop them from support, you won't be able to repeat that process.
Or alternatively there were 3rd party providers of them
this isn't "anti-apple bias", i like macs and will keep buying them. but the claim that they're more durable or longer-lasting than equivalent windows laptops is just nonsense. you can't expect 9 years out of one, but if you're very very lucky it might last that long.
my Acer chromebook that i bought in 2013 is "still going strong". so is the pair of the absolute cheapest possible dell inspiron i bought in 2012 for rental customers to use at outdoor events. but i'm not going around telling people they should expect acer or dell laptops to last a decade.
you simply don't need to upgrade computers like you did in the 90s and early 2000s.
My own personal anecdote is that I spilled a trivial amount of booze on my MacBook 9 years ago and was left with the option of whether I wanted to replace the entire lower case. While it was my fault for drinking and computing, I just see it as being an expensive device to maintain when you accidentally damage it. I'd rather play a lower stakes game with a cheaper product that I'd buy more frequently as my needs change over the years.
Take it in, thinking okay, maybe $300 for parts and labor.
Hah, no. "So we're looking at $950..."
followed by the Apple guy then saying "How about we look at getting you into a new MacBook instead?"
Nah. It worked fine, and was mostly attached to her desk and digital piano, and continued to work just fine on AC power.
I've spilled more drinks onto a single Thinkpad than I've killed Apples with. Thinkpads (used to?) have a pan under the keys with a drainage hole that goes out below the laptop. No damage whatsoever from several spills.
Apple has a lot of fanboys that are not entirely rational about their fanboyism.
At the risk of sounding like a dead meme, "a laptop going strong for over 9 years" is already the default for the kinds of folks who would opt for Linux and who would replace their laptops HDD with an SSD.
My $800 laptop from 2015 has been 16GiB RAM and 512TB SSD and it still works perfectly (save for an Ethernet port which I regrettably damaged). It's running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is supported for three more years as of this comment.
This is kind of a standard experience for people in Linux land. So by comparison, a $1600 laptop with 8GiB RAM and a 256GB HDD which is no longer receiving security updates does not sound like a good deal.
yeah, Apple computers do last long. But it is ridiculous that you can’t upgrade RAM or hard disk or pretty much anything, after spending THAT much money.
In my experience, this was true during the 68k and PPC days, but after the x64 transition quality went downhill, fast.
The problem with these kinds of anecdotes is they lack a control. If you compared an identically priced PC laptop you might find that there's almost no difference. You're just making an assumption without any actual contrasting data to back it up.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32474827
And the problem with apple hardware is you barely can fix anything yourself and without Apple care it costs a lot of money because they can't replace single parts but only complete modules.
Personally I have a mid-2012 13" MBP, 16GB, 1TB SSD, 2K external display and a third displayLink display running Ventura and it's still going strong. I have several more for giving coding lessons / as backups for me ;) I dream of the day Apple goes back to making something as serviceable as them, but I won't lose sleep waiting.
I think this is standard for most laptops that cost over $600
Or at least my experience with my Asus and Acer brand 'gaming' laptops.
My computer from 2014 is still my daily driver and I use it for modern gaming. This 2014 computer even does CAD with no slowdowns, its really hard to justify buying something new. I can afford a new computer, I just havent had a reason to. Maybe with AI, I might spend like 35k on a tower so I can run my own LLMs.
My mother still uses my even more cheapo laptop from 2010 - my brother in law replaced the HDD with an SSD, but that's the extent of maintenance done. The battery sort of works, but barely.
Meanwhile my work MBP in 2019 started developing keyboard issues after a few months of use - just like the units my two coworkers from the same room had. To be fair that was a particularly bad model year.
A laptop generally should last seven years, but most people here don't see their devices reach that age because they pass them on after less than three.
> and she abuses the shit out of it.
It is all own stories. Go to any university or school. Give the student a mac. Wait for a few months and see.
Don't use an Apple Reseller for this without checking Apple's battery replacement price first. The reseller I went to quoted 2.5x the price, and said they were unaware of Apple's price (seems unlikely), which they could not match.
You got my upvote because I have a similar experience - still using my 2014 MacBook Pro.
However, I also agree with the other take I’m seeing in these comments: the current prices do seem disproportionately high (at least in the EU).
I feel I have to go back about 25 years to see the same level of expense for high-end electronics. I genuinely thought we were past that era of rarefied ‘professional’ hardware.
And as others have also pointed out, adding RAM or disk capacity is ridiculously expensive.
Very often! I'm not an Apple person, but every laptop I've ever owned has kept going strong well past the 10 year mark.
Apple should start at 512GB. It doesn't meaningfully increase their BOM, and gets rid of a lot of user frustration.
Also, I notice you had a 2014 machine, so you skipped the keyboard issues that plagued Apple until ~2021.
Macbooks are great if you get a model without some serious design fault - like screen protection peeling off, or butterly keyboard breaking.
No. The spare parts are available 5 years since the end of sale of the product; may be longer, if they are available, but max for 7 years. Batteries for 10.
See here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
I also have 2015 13" MBP. It is perfectly fine hardware-wise, but it is not supported by the current OS already. (It is supported by Monterey, which still receives security updates). I also have 2012 Thinkpad (T430s). It is also perfectly fine hardware-wise, and it is supported by current OS (both Windows and Linux), and neither of them even plans to obsolete them. (Heck, Linux distributions are just starting carefully considering x86-64 microarchitectures).
> the anti-apple bias is strong enough
You should consider whether you are not having apple-bias. The Job's RDF joke existed not without a reason.
It may last, but a laptop with 8GB of RAM becomes less and less useful over time
I agree with you, but that doesn’t change the fact outside the US, many Apple products are 15+% more expensive than they were a few years ago. In the UK we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis—my bills have shot up and I simply don’t have the extra disposable income.
I mean shit, I’m a decently paid developer (for the north of the UK, so not London) and until my most recent rise a base 16” MacBook Pro cost almost an entire month’s take-home salary.
Have a look at Open Core Legacy Patcher (https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/), it’s great! My wife is using my old 2011 17” MBP as a desktop laptop, it works flawlessly on Ventura 13.3 :)
As other posters have demonstrated, having a laptop last this long is part good design and part good luck.
There is no Apple-bias. Apple hardware is not really any better than other brands, but they are chic and you pay for it. That's almost always been the case, speaking as a Mac guy before it became cool (pre-iPod). Stories of longevity for any brand are generally from people who take care of their stuff, but you can find exceptions even here.
I bought a refurbished Lenovo laptop 10 years ago for $300, it's still going strong after updating to an SSD a couple of years ago. The comparable Apple hardware would have cost 3x that. I also don't have to worry about losing security updates because my hardware doesn't go EOL like you just described.
I suspect many of us agree, and full disclaimer I am an Apple customer since about 1990. That said - that so many base units across their product line come with paltry specs is really upsetting. Frankly, it feels like environmental waste for them to still be selling machines with only 8gb ram / less than 1TB min storage. Sure, I've heard their song-and-dance about storage in the cloud and how because of their memory management 8gb isn't really just 8gb - and I find those arguments to be horse pucky.
Also - if your battery is still kicking after 9 years consider yourself very, very, weirdly lucky. I bet if you put our a survey you would find a number of us who didn't come close to that, whether due to keyboard issues, battery, etc.
The fact that these people keep updating devices constantly is a testament to Apple's marketing.
I would be astounded if ~80% of users get any material benefit from a laptop newer than a high-end device from 4 years ago.
Seems apt to post this exceptionally cheesy Mac ad: https://youtu.be/8kF5x2D3rqo
That said, I know plenty of Mac users who upgrade maybe every 4 or 5 years.
So I was asking myself if I "need" the fancy laptop screen and excellent audio of a 14" MBP for $2K (no video production, no graphic design, no VR/AR, but hey, Electron apps all day long!).
Answer is no, clearly. But any Apple Silicon at this point is (hopefully) another ten year machine.
* my previous MBP 16" lasted me 29 months, salvage value was around 50%, and the amortized cost was around 42€/month
* for my current 16" MBP (M1) I'm assuming 24 months with similar salvage value, which puts me at around 60€/month
The M1 MBP is a spectacular machine. It's faster than nearly anything else I can get. It's also portable, which means I only need one machine for home, office or travel work. At 60€/month I find it to be a fantastic value proposition and I don't think it's overpriced at all.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just showing that a totally different point of view is possible, especially if you use the machine for work.
Sure, newer devices are faster and their lifecycle is longer, but the prices are becoming really out of reality.
I wonder why the Apple executive leadership doens't come together and say:
1. let's lower prices
2. let's keep prices the same but offer 16GB + 512GB of storage
my hypothetical retort would be "they don't need to if people keep buying their product" but, if the article headline is true about sales being down, then they need to run some kind of sale or re-evaulate i guess
i wonder what their margins are on their M2 Mac line of hardware
> It is generally believed that Apple has a profit margin of around 40-45% on its products.
> Using the mid-point of that range (42.5%), we can approximate the hypothetical cost of manufacturing an Apple M2 laptop as follows:
> Hypothetical Cost = Sale Price / (1 + Margin)
> Hypothetical Cost = $1200 / (1 + 0.425)
> Hypothetical Cost = $842.11
For me my M1 Macbook Pro has the following pros:
* It just works. I detest Windows. I love Linux but lately I started spending too much time maintaining it, I have busy life and decided that taking care of my OS is a luxury and I would rather use something that is acceptable than spend a lot of time getting to perfect.
* It is viable powerful workstation. I just connect it to a good docking station and have a nice setup with two 60Hz 4k monitors. It is silent and usually cold while in this setup. And it is surprisingly (and I mean it) powerful.
* It has gorgeous display. For hugging together and watching movies with my kids and wife.
* It is a status symbol. All people at my company who mean anything have one and it is easier for me to just fit in and pick other, more meaningful battles.
* It is durable. It will last me a long time, hopefully. It is true that it is fragile, but it is mostly fragile in certain ways that I can manage around. I am generally gentle and caring about my gadgets. If I don't kill it in a stupid way there is good chance it will be perfectly good working laptop for many, many years to come. I can hand it down to one of my family while I get a newer machine.
* the power efficiency of the M1 means you can _actually_ use it an entire day on a charge _without_ having to compromise on performance. That is a huge issue.
I'd amend your last point with: at least in North America, getting service for the Apple products is very streamlined and that has enabled me to keep even a 2008 MBP alive until today. For me that is a huge deal as I hate donating to the landfill.
Watching all this unfold as the DevOps guy was funny. "Don't go buy the new Macbooks, it breaks our build pipeline and you can no longer run production locall- wait, what's that? We ordered 20 last week before anyone even tested it? Sigh..."
It doesn't matter to them. They're content spending 5 hours tweaking their Mac setup for every 60 minutes they spend improving production. Do I envy that naivete? I'm not sure anymore.
This is a huge factor for me. I have linux on my desktop but my laptops are Mac - I do a lot of graphics and video editing and the color reproduction of Mac displays is reliably faithful at both the hardware and software level. And the M1 is a champ, its performance seems like a miracle for such a quiet cool machine
This is what kills it for me. When the M1 macs came out I was quite enthusiastic to use them, but just wasn't ready to drop that kind of money on an unknown OS. So I brought a cheaper, refurbished MBA (8gb ram, 256gb ssd) and loved it. The trouble is, 256gb ssd would be too small for me as a daily driver, ideally I'd want at least 1tb, but my only option to get that is to buy a whole new mac. Its hard to justify spending ~£3000 on what is effectively for me just a bigger ssd.
IMHO, the Mac and Framework are different products for different people: The Mac is for generalists who just need a computer that's easy to use and gets things done whereas the framework is for techies who need to get things done, but also care about open architecture, upgradability, and tinkering with esoteric Linux distros.
Many of these generalists on the Mac side don't need more than a web browser for most of their tasks and are willing to pay more because they don't want to care about the details: they just want a computer that works.
This isn't to say one or the other is better, but that they are solving for fundamentally different problems.
For me, the hardware is still without a doubt premium. Great build quality, fantastic processors etc.
iOS is still pretty good as well. But MacOS…damn what a mess. I’m starting to think I’m better of using a framework laptop with a user friendly Linux GUI running on it.
https://www.galaxus.de/de/s1/product/apple-macbook-air-2022-...
Apple is a long way from putting tabloid headlines into Spotlight results
"We don't put ads in your desktop search" is an incredibly low bar. Apple can't do that because Spotlight is too busy reindexing itself again, for some reason. It's embarrassing.
Perhaps sales are just going back to the normal apple-laptop level?
This happened back with the iPhone 6 big-screen upgrade cycle as well. So many people bought the iPhone 6 series for the new design and larger screens that the following iPhone 6S was portrayed as a sales flop, despite it selling better than the gen before the iPhone 6.
That's been their trick for decades but it seems like the multiplier has been getting higher lately?
$800 + tax for a 2TB SSD is insane.
The SSD now being soldered to the system board has of course ZERO correlation with that price gouging.
With soldered ram and drives, Apple’s the only game in town, and that means the Apple tax is a lot dearer.
Those were the good days. I loved dropping dual SSDs and additional RAM in my MBP. I harvested guts from broken ones off craigslist and kept it going for about 13 years before it finally kicked out.
10 years ago I lived easily inside 8GB with all native apps.
Nowadays I have 16GB and I’m constantly running into swap. That’s without running any demanding workloads. Granted the swap is a lot faster with modern SSDs, but it’s not good for the drive.
Apple thinks that anyone who needs more than 16GB of RAM is a professional color grader or audio producer or something. But I just want to run Discord.
In the US, M1 Air is 8GB/256GB for $1,000 and 16GB/512GB for $1,400. I think those are the same prices from original release. And so due to decreasing purchasing power of USD since 2020, they have gotten cheaper.
Edit: yes, the M1 Air has the same nominal price as when it was released 2.5 years ago:
https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/10/new-macbook-air-apple-silicon...
But, of course, the situation varies between market and time since there's significant pricing differences.
I wonder with all the talk of layoffs, cost-cutting, and chasing short-term cashflow if we're seeing most businesses say to themselves 'let's just get one more year out of the laptops we have'. A lot of companies have a 2-3 year turnover on laptops and pushing things out a bit for most people wouldn't be an issue.
In the short term that kind of change would have a severe impact on sales, but will smooth out a bit over the long term.
If Apple overpriced their gear as much as people complain then they wouldn't be one of the largest corporations on the planet. That doesn't mean it makes sense for you of course but I'm sure they spend a lot of time considering how they are going to price their products.
They are expensive, but in the same range as other manufacturers in the similar segment. It’s just that Apple doesn’t make a cheap laptop, unlike Lenovos and HPs.
P.S. And we haven’t even touched Razer Blade.
There's really not much that still runs on a Mac that needs more than the base Air. Some more RAM would be nice, but unless you're a high end video editor the use case of higher powered Macs for the price differential seems pretty small.
In my case, it is a start of the day, every single day, issue where I'm unplugging and re-plugging in monitors waiting for it to 'take' and then it's fine for the day.
Yes, there's a lot of great things about these machines. But there's also some very real downsides (repairability/upgradeability and a non-user-replacable battery), and the higher the prices get, the more those downsides need to be considered.
The problem I've seen WRT apple is techie type people see specs and salivate over the numbers, but the subjective experience of this years products is no different than the old products for the general public. Not even styling for conspicuous consumption sales. My wife's friendd with this anesthesiologist's wife, and her response to the new products fits the above; aside from numbers she doesn't understand or care about, there's nothing exciting about the latest model year, so she's not buying.
If I want a premium car there are a ton of brands I can choose from. Don't want a BMW then go for a Lexus instead, or an Audi or Jaguar and so on. If I want a premium PC then it's Apple or I can grit my teeth and go for a Lenovo with all the Microsoft crapware installed.
My gut feeling is Sony, HP and all the others gave up too early and allowed WinTel to dominate. We have been paying the price ever since.
Apple has more than 50% of the US market for phones. 10% for PC's.
It had a chunk of metal ( paperweight? ) in the keyboard to make it heavier. It was extensible.
The enclosure was made out of steel and it had a power switch which originated from a mainframe.
It was built to withstand nuclear war and it only lasted for a couple of years.
The kids are getting new gaming PCs this week, but we got a solid 5 years from those Dells (after a business got 4) without feeling like it was a painful sacrifice. The kids gaming PCs are definitely faster, but the killer must-have is they support the anti-cheat checks for Valorant, otherwise I might have only upgraded GPUs.
The i7 is still going strong, brings back memories considering that at the time it was the latest generation of i7's and I was one of the first to buy it from my town according to the people working there.
My issue is less about the hardware and more about the OS upgrades.
The real key is to make software more efficient.
My gaming PC is a decade old. Apple iPhones usually get feature updates for 70 months (sometimes more) and bug fix updates for 100 months or more. iPads are similar. This is longer than a single battery usually lasts, so you either get an external battery pack or you replace the battery.
Beyond a decade, and you need to throw Linux on them. But things physically wear out at that point. And the increased power consumption of older devices means that much past a decade, you’re paying much more in electricity costs than you would if you had replaced it with a similarly-specced modern device. …at least in principle.
If it’s a rarely used machine, you’re still better off with the old one.
Not saying you're wrong, I'd just love to know what percent of sales are B2B.
Sadly they didn't bring out a Mac Studio M2 max, but clearly if they can fit that in 14" laptop they could fit the same in the studio.
Most users wanting to get into Apple Silicon are either getting M1 machines or waiting to see what happens with M3.
Also, temps increased significantly from M1 to M2 which isn't really good marketing.
Unless Apple integrates a new accelerated ML chip next year that’s going to revolutionize the way we’re able to train and interact with small, specialized AI models in macOS.
Separating them out would hamstring them, since they wouldn't be able to process the frames as they're being rendrered without performance penalty.
I think we've all seen a trend among users away from general-purpose PC's and toward phones and/or tablets.
My bigger fear is that the rest of us, like some kind of ham radio enthusiasts, are going to become a dwindling market segment that fewer and fewer computer companies will continue to produce for.
Seems to be going up again in value, but prices are sticky. MSRPs made when the it was down to 1:0.9 (USD:EURO) are probably gonna be permanent. PS5 was hiked up to 550 Euros. Even if Euro goes up again, Sony's just going to pocket the difference and move on with their lives.
What is happening are OEMs fighting to get the margins back from those days, and most people besides enthusiasts don't care.
I'm buying a new developer-class laptop today. Not one from Apple. It's not even a close decision.
Not sure why this anti-competive behaviour has been accepted for a whole industry. There is no valid technical reason for it.
The small-ish company I'm a consultant at has started buying apple hardware to some of its developers. Not because they prefer the hardware, not because they prefer the operating system. But, we need someone to run xcode to build software.
My sister was given a M2 and had to use external dongles which then needed DisplayLink to be installed.
None of this is necessary.
There are a couple of companies that make aluminum trays sized to exactly fill the sd card slot on older Macbooks and remain flush (there's a detente for sticking a wire in to pull it out. The tray has wiring for a microSD card. On that machine, I moved my iTunes library there. Since it's read-only, I don't need to worry too much about wear or write IO bandwidth.
is it? AFAIK kids these days need less storage than ever before, because everything's cloud based. No one has itunes libraries, its spotify/applemusic subscriptions. etc.
Nintendo switch or gaming computer might be a more common problem than music collection.
There are clear market reasons at play: for example Samsung Electronics have estimated a 96% drop in profit for the quarter and have subsequently reduced production of memory chips.
Demand for new hardware is expected to be softer:
- WFH brought forward a lot of purchases
- Inflation/cost of living pressures will slow upgrade cycles
- Consumers are forced to redirect funds to mortgages due to higher interest rates
- The global economy is slowing, with large corporations already laying off significant numbers of staff
However it's also worth noting that this is a small serving of data with a big serving of conjecture: Whenever Apple decreases production it's always toted in the media as some kind of fuck up or failure, only for the quarterly results to convincingly disprove that theory.
The HN talk about the strong dollar isn't entirely relevant, the USA alone is a massive buyer of apple hardware, and a strong dollar is common.
Also, I bought the MacBook with 32GB RAM, and later found out I needed 64GB, and I wasn’t willing to pay the extra price of selling my old MacBook to buy a new one with twice the RAM.
I have been using Macs for work since around 2014, and for me it was a combination of missing x86 Linux emulation, a high price, and lack of flexibility (e.g. adding more RAM or disk space) that made be stop using Macs for work.
What are you doing with your computer?
I’m writing Haskell.
* Transpiling Haskell into JavaScript using GHCJS 8.10.7 requires more than 32GB RAM
* haskell-language-server uses about 40% (~26 GB) of my total memory after running for a day or so. Add a couple of REPL sessions and I’m over 32 GB.
In other words, even Mac people don't feel an urge to upgrade their systems so often anymore. A slowdown of consumption, in these times of climate crisis, is nothing but good.
I use a 2012 mac. It only shows its age when I try and run a game on it. Other than that, for writing code, for watching things, reading, browsing, emails, zoom, etc, its no slower than anything modern I could buy. I hear the fans and it gets hot but there's no lag or anything, and it boots in a minute with the ssd I put in a few years ago. I did have a new mac for a bit recently, but I went back to this one because it was clear there wasn't much of a point with my usage for how much it cost. No withdraw from retina either, because at the distance you use a laptop you can't see the pixels on the 2012 anyhow. Maybe I can get another 11 years out of it at this rate.
But if they all succeed in paying their employees little, noone can afford their products.
Tragedy of the Commons, corporate edition.
The solution to tragedy of the commons is usually to privatise the commons. Once it's private properly, people take care of it.
Clearly that means companies need to privatise workers.
Lots of docker images and other virtualized software just can’t be emulated like it used to on them. We’re how many years in on this issue?
When most of your customers won’t be on a high priced Mac that’s a real issue and it forces businesses off the platform.
I'm using Colima along with Rosetta for Linux.
Additionally, while they kill it in perf per watt, sometimes I just want performance. Ex. their current GPUs don’t compare well to NVidia but the machines are priced like they do.
Machines used to get more base RAM over time but they don’t anymore. I’m shocked 16GB isn’t the standard on every machine they sell. It should be cheap to get to 32GB. The base SSD is absolutely shameful, Apple at the price should have a TB minimum. It’s fucking 2023 for godsakes, it’s been like 10+ years of fucking people for a useful amount of storage. Isn’t that enough?
That might decouple screen size from premium specs and bring the cost down.
A 16GB with 1TB storage laptop shouldn't cost £2700. I really do think Apple are pricing themselves out of most markets.
Salaries in many jobs in the UK have barely increased in the past 15 years, and of those that have, many have not kept up with inflation. It's not the whole picture, but the UK (and it seems Europe generally) is increasingly poor by comparison to the US, and US products too have become increasingly unaffordable for many.
> The suspension is said to have continued through February, after which production of M2 series chips resumed, but they were "only half the level of the previous year," said the Korean-language report, quoting a person familiar with the matter.
[emphasis mine]
So they temporarily paused it for two months in response to a shift in the entire PC market. Headline is pretty clickbaity, this seems like a non-story
So, I just picked up a refurb 13" XPS with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD from the Dell Outlet for under a thousand bucks and slapped Ubuntu on it. A similarly appointed MBP 13 would have been over double the cost.
Mac Studio should have been updated to M2 already imo.
This trend will worsen. Hold on to your panties, gentlemen.
Yes, it has more cores and is more power efficient but the end user experience of browsing HN and running Xcode wouldn't be improved much. Not enough to shell out for a new machine at least.
The M1 is just too good. Unless Apple adds some insane stuff to the M3 I think I'll be upgrading with the M5.
The only thing that would make me upgrade is Apple sponsoring a Proton port to M-series CPUs/Metal. I could play thousands of "Windows only" games on my Mac without hassle.
Until then, I'm sticking with a M1.
Either that, or it’s just made up… More than once I’ve seen reports like this about Apple and then strong or even record sales announced the next quarter.
Please Broadcom, send some potential Raspberry Pi 5 chips their way!!!
Even with just a terminal, if you can talk to a chat agent, then you can practically do anything from a basic computer.
All we need now is an Internet connection with a terminal.
Is someone building “ChatOS”?
A chat-based OS, where everything is done via chat?
1. don't use soldered ram
2. don't use soldered ssd
3. nobody needs or wants a T2 chip
4. use a standard UEFI booter
5. stop making accessories (including the iphone) that use lightning connectors. Use use usb-c
6. stop embedding chips in cords
7. stop using custom screws for everything
I know I'm missing a few, but these alone would make it far cheaper to manufacture without specialty components
its all broken & proprietary by design. performance aspect a distant second but apple fanboys love it when apple fleeces them even more.
I expect Apple will make some more concessions to repairability in order to maximize their ROI after buying out TSMC's leading edge node.
Maybe there might be some acceptance that having no gaming strategy whatsoever is actually not great?
In my experience they are far less brittle and far more capable than they used to be and we spend most of our time either running web browsers on them.
The modern internet is a joke.
A little off topic, but also illustrative: I found an old 3tb external NAS from 2011. I thought I would copy my backups onto it just to have some redundancy. I realized that the file 5MB/s transfer was going to take literally 7 days. I decided to hop on Amazon and get a 1000MB/s external SSD that could do the job in an hour. Tech really has changed a lot in the past decade+.
I would love to buy a new Mac, but I need them to entice me and give me confidence in their new direction.
Also right after 2020 I cannot imagine a lot of people are still using whatever computer / machine they bought during that time window, and those still work just fine.
I have a 9 year old laptop, and 3 in use desktops that are between 9 and 10 years old. Once you have 4 cores and 16+ gigs of ram, it's hard to need any more performance in typical day to day tasks.
Now if you got to laptops it's absolutely ridiculous. Given the inflation numbers, people having their dollars bills flying out of their pockets and the post-pandemic lull after everyone have bought a computer, I'm not surprised they have to adjust the production numbers.
Or maybe just take screw driver and move it to next machine.