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.
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.
I'm simply pointing out the absurdy of the pricing in context of this news story about falling sales.
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
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 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.