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Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

They are overpriced to the extent that I am discouraged to even buy a MBP now because I would have to baby it so much given the absurd price tag. It would just end up sitting on a desk for its entire life, and at that point I might as well buy a Mac mini.

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Baseline models are relatively affordable but they charge about 5x more for memory and storage than the prices of corresponding PC parts.

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.

I remember buying a Macbook Pro a long time ago (I want to say around 6 years ago? Back in the dark Ive days...) and I can relatively confidently say that it's always been approximately this bad. Inflation plus mental factors are likely the trick that's playing on some folk's mind. They always charged e.g. 200$ for memory increments and 400$/800$ for storage increments, IIRC.

The Apple tax on ram and storage has always been ridiculous, but a long long time ago in a galaxy far away you could use aftermarket RAM and drives, and batteries even used to be removable (and give easy access to RAM and drive, on the old polycarbonate macbooks). On my 2010 I could even replace the DVD drive by an aftermarket drive caddy.

With soldered ram and drives, Apple’s the only game in town, and that means the Apple tax is a lot dearer.

"The Apple tax on ram and storage has always been ridiculous, but a long long time ago in a galaxy far away you could use aftermarket RAM and drives, and batteries even used to be removable (and give easy access to RAM and drive, on the old polycarbonate macbooks). On my 2010 I could even replace the DVD drive by an aftermarket drive caddy."

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.

Software also uses a lot more RAM than it did 10 years ago.

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.

I’m agreeing with you on the absurdity now; this weekend though, I happened to click through to a video of a guy who upgraded the RAM on a MacBook Air. The video title isn’t clickbait; he did it successfully, but it was a pretty advanced project (as in "let me put the circuit board on my rework preheater to get started")

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxbVxaScZQ4

TBF Dell is equally as bad if not worse. A 128GB ram upgrade on my Precision 7670 has been £1800. It's insane.

For a Dell you can buy that RAM from anywhere.

Except you can't because their new precision workstations use their own new proprietary format. You can only buy it from Dell. They said they will make a SO-DIMM adapter but it doesn't support 128GB.

The base prices have also gone up. Base M1 MacBook Air was about 1100€ new and could even be found for pretty good discounts (I bought one new for 880€). But the base M2 MacBook Air is 1400€.

Is the M1 Air still being sold? It still is in the US. If so, at what price? That is the relevant figure to compare.

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...

Yeah, it's still being sold. A couple of sites have it discounted at 999€ with normal price of 1159€ on the rest.

> seems like the multiplier has been getting higher lately

The SSD now being soldered to the system board has of course ZERO correlation with that price gouging.

Because they have almost nothing else to differentiate prices on for the various models.

Buy yourself Apple Care+ for your MBP. No need to baby it.

Apple care+ isn't available everywhere. Here in Poland a basic Air is about 1.5x national average monthly wage and apple won't sell you apple care+ for any apple device(you can only buy regular apple care which is just an extension of original warranty,nothing more). So yes, if I had one I'd also baby it.

And besides, there's nothing wrong with looking after things we own, instead of treating everything as disposable.

If "looking after" means not using your thing for what it was made for (in this case, carrying your laptop around with you), then everything is wrong with it.

No, I mean just being careful with it.

Sure. There's really not giant risk of damage though. I don't use a case and my mbp has been going from home to office and around the city for four years with just a dent in the corner to show for it. MBPs are very hard to damage if you just keep it in a sleeve in your backpack and don't have liquids right next to the keyboard :-)

Oh, so pay extra on top of already absurd price...

What comparable would you buy in place of a MBP?

I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro, which was significantly cheaper in my market and comes with a gorgeous OLED screen.

But, of course, the situation varies between market and time since there's significant pricing differences.

While it is OLED, it's also unfortunately only 1080P resolution. When I was comparison shopping before picking up my MBP the displays were always the sticking point - tons of great specced laptops with disappointing screens compared to what Apple offers.

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