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Comment by mschild | Hacker News Reader

The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive.

Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. That's not within reach for a large majority of the worlds population. Not even within reach for a lot people in richer western countries.

Most people need a Webbrowser that can do Email, Streaming, and some social media.

What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease.

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You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m...

I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up.

Looking at the best selling laptops at Microcenter, they're $600, $700, $700, $1100, $800, $800, $750, $900... Having an M1 Air slotted in at $800 seems right in-line with the market.

8GB is pretty sad though and it’s soldered on with no ability to upgrade

Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years. Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't actually need the M1.

BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200 EUR.

But it’s more than RAM and it’s enough even for web dev so for most people it’s way enough

I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you have things like browser windows open, you will have a bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of the question which made mobile app development difficult.

If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.

Did you try it on an Apple Silicon Mac?

There was a lot of discussion of this at the time the M1s first came out, with loads of people (who had never touched one) confidently declaring that 8GB of RAM was far too little...and then nearly everyone who actually bought an 8GB M1 Mac saying "yeah, it might not handle heavy loads well, but that's what the Pro machines are for—in normal use, it has no problem at all with 8GB."

And then a bunch more people talking in a fair amount of detail (that kind of went over my head) about what Apple did to improve memory management with the M1 so that this would be possible.

So don't assume that 8GB on an Intel Mac is the same as 8GB on an Apple Silicon Mac.

Now, it does sound like you were trying to run a whole bunch of rather heavy stuff on it—y'know, the stuff that one might call "pro", and possibly even buy a "pro" machine for? The kind of thing where if you're buying the absolute bottom of the line, you might be able to expect that it wouldn't work well.

I don’t assume, I currently have a MacBook Pro M1 with 8gb of ram. It all depends on what kind of tools and IDE you have. When I avoid a having 50 tabs on chrome and only the apps I need it’s perfectly usable for web dev. Of course 16go is more confortable but I’m working with 8 with no problem on light web dev.

I honestly think it was all just hype, or some sort of FOMO of every reviewer not jumping on the M1 hype-train.

I own a base Macbook Pro 14", 16GB RAM. If anything, it feels like less than 16GB (maybe because the shared video memory or macos bloat) saved by the fast SSD that's inevitably going to fail not too far and turn the laptop into e-waste.

I feel like every single talk point of the early review cycle was a huge exaggeration:

1. battery life just browsing the web is no more than 4/5 hours. Like any other windows laptop.

2. Performance is really nothing special really. Things like maximizing/minimizing a youtube video are choppy and lag for 2/3 seconds.

I mean, it's still the best value in the market for the screen, keyboard, chassis, speakers combo but Apple Silicon is extremely overrated.

> Now, it does sound like you were trying to run a whole bunch of rather heavy stuff on it—y'know, the stuff that one might call "pro", and possibly even buy a "pro" machine for? The kind of thing where if you're buying the absolute bottom of the line, you might be able to expect that it wouldn't work well.

That's nice, but I can buy a much cheaper non-"pro" computer with better specs that can handle a basic workload that involves a browser, IDE and maybe Docker. Like I've run all of that on entry level machines without a problem.

Agreed. My personal laptop has 8GB of ram. It's fine for web browsing, sorta usable-ish for light development, but limiting for power use.

I bought my laptop in 2015. This underscores your point: Buy something upgradable with decent specs and you'll get a lot more bang for your buck.

> 5 years

Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break.

But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who don't own a laptop.

> Windows machines keep going until they physically break.

That's interesting, as I just this month replaced the two kids' Dell 9020s with new PCs because the 9020s didn't support TPM 2.0, required by Windows 11.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o...

"Most PCs that have shipped in the last 5 years are capable of running Trusted Platform Module version 2.0 (TPM 2.0). TPM 2.0 is required to run Windows 11, as an important building block for security-related features. TPM 2.0 is used in Windows 11 for a number of features, including Windows Hello for identity protection and BitLocker for data protection."

The 9 year old Dells were running just fine on Windows 10 (same as the 9 year old Air was on Catalina), but upgrading to the latest OS in both cases required a purchase.

I'm curious why you felt you needed to upgrade. To my knowledge Windows 11 doesn't do anything that Windows 10 cannot, except for support Intel e cores.

They wanted to play Valorant with their friends; the anti-cheat code did not work on the 9020 on Windows 10; there was a limited amount of time I was willing to spend to find a cheaper workaround for a machine that’s 9 years old, with the prospect of doing the same again 6 months later.

That was the actual driver, though this thread is about OS vendors forcing changes in order to run the latest OS, which is why I focused on the Win11 TPM2 requirements and mentioned the 9 year old Air running a still-patched Catalina.

I don't believe you needed to upgrade to windows 11 for valorant compatibility. You just needed to be on a recent build of windows 10, downloaded from windows update.

Maybe. We always have Windows Update turned on, so it was almost surely up-to-date and I spent a period of time over several different evenings trying to get this to work. Whatever error message came up when jumping into the gameplay part of the game led to the TPM issue being the root cause. Ultimately, we'd gotten our 4 years of value out of the Dells (4-ish years old when we bought them) and decided it was reasonable to replace them.

To the point of this sub-thread, it's still an OS vendor forcing a purchase to run the latest OS. 9 year old Macbook running Catalina and 9 year old Dell running Win10, both unable to update to the latest OS seems very close the same to me.

You still would have had ~3 years left before windows 10 goes EoL (consumer version)

There's really no point to upgrading to win 11, especially if it's unsupported by your working PC.

This is the opposite of my experience. My wife still easily uses my old Mac that’s 8 years old. No performance issues.

Most windows machines I had worked for around 3 years. 5 max.

All my Windows machines from 2009 are still pretty much ok, while having been upgraded to Windows 10, came with Windows 7, and went through 8 and 8.1 as well.

> Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break.

This is demonstrably false. My wife continues to use my hand-me-down MacBook Air I bought in 2011. It was supported officially by the macOS until the most recent release, so she’s only one OS revision behind. I also recently retired a 2009 Mac Mini that I used 24/7 as a home server, only because the power supply failed. I used the G4 Mac I bought in 1999 as my daily driver (with some upgrades) until 2009.

A decade or more of use is an incredible value, and I’ve done that multiple times with my Macs. Few of my PCs have had a useful life approaching that length of time (the closest was an Atom machine I ran for 7 years).

> Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates.

Um, I have a 2012 MacBook Air (11"), that I use for my low-end testing, and as a Zoom host. Works fine. Runs lots of software.

It has to run Catalina (Mac OS 10.15), but Apple still pushes out security patches to it (I think we're up to 10.15.7).

Same here. I still have the same, 2012 11" Air, and it's my "travel" laptop. It had a battery replacement a few years ago (and Apple did for free!), but other than being a Netflix machine, I still code low-level stuff and frontend in it.

How'd you get Apple to replace it for free? I thought all coverage would have expired...

It was in 2018, so after only six years. Five years ago, time flies... And the battery was swollen up, it actually damaged the trackpad. I went to the store to get an estimate, but they said they'd do it for free.

I wonder if it was a recall. I didn't speak German that well back then so it might have gotten lost in translation. I recently also had issues with my Airpods Pro and they replaced for free, but they told me it was a recall.

I also had a swollen battery in a 2013 Macbook Pro that was eligible for a free replacement in 2018 or 2019 (I forget exactly when, but it was before the 2019 16" Macbooks came out).

It was covered outside the normal warranty because of the swelling issue. Mine swelled to the point where the trackpad was slightly unreliable.

I'm not sure "forcibly kill" is the adjective/verb I would have used. I have plenty of older Macs still running older versions of Mac OS. In some ways I kind of prefer them (because I still like the older Mac OSes).

Maybe this is more of an indictment rather than a defense of Apple, but one machine I keep on an OS that's over 5 years old because it has the one version of Apple's Photos that didn't yet screw up the retouch tool. (And I use that tool exhaustively in retouching old family photos I scan in.)

*adverb/verb

I'm embarrassed for that one.

My MacBook Pro was supported by OS updates for a DECADE. I have a MS SURFACE Laptop Gen 1 from 2018 I can’t update to Win 11 — and will EOL in 2026. That’s from the flagship microdot branded laptop.

> Windows machines keep going until they physically break.

which isn't good for Intel!

cpus are expensive to develop...

I struggle now with 16 GB on my work laptop. 8 is absolutely anemic for anyone planning to get several years out of a machine.

I have 8gig and its completely fine for webdev work. Its faster machine than my desktop. It has to be completely fine for majority of work people do on computers.

You could buy a laptop with 16GB to 32GB of memory and more than double the storage space for $800, and you can buy laptops that you can actually upgrade the hardware on. You can also spend less and get a similarly spec'd laptop. I just picked up a new laptop with 16GB/1TB and 8 cores for $500 and upgraded it to 64GB of memory for $100.

I bought a low end Mac in 2015 with the same 8GB/256GB specs, 8GB wasn't enough even for browsing/chat/media/etc at the same time, and the storage space gets eaten up by the macOS base system and apps.

I have an 8GB/256GB 2015 MacBook Air. I use it for web browsing, messaging, spreadsheets, watching media, email, and photos. It has worked fine for me the whole time, and I usually have it connected to an external display.

I doubt 80%, maybe even 90%, of the population needs anything more than that.

If all that matter to you is RAM and HD space, you can as well buy a cheap desktop tower. As for "similarly spec'd" laptops if you put good perf and low consumption in the equation, they just do not exist. Yes Intel Mac were not extremely interesting at least on the CPU + GPU + RAM + HD + power side of the equation. The M1/M2 is - esp if you also value a decent screen. And the M1 + 8GB is reasonable depending what you are doing with it.

What about the most important laptop spec: the case. Is your 500$ laptop using a metal case, or are you stuck in plastic city?

Yes, the most important spec is a material for a case that cant absorb impact.

Aluminium is incredibly malleable! That’s one if its core qualities. We make paper to cook our stuff with it!

Magnesium aluminum alloy, I won't touch plastic cases.

> That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years

My mom uses a cheap Dell laptop that is 10 years old. I bought at the time for around 350 dollars is memory serves (it was in a different currency, so it is hard to do the conversion).

She is non-technical, and it absolutely suits her needs to this day. Only thing I did in terms of maintenance was buying a new battery.

The cheapest Mac just won't get the same cost/lifespan ratio.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of users are non-technical.

> You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now.

> the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up.

Costs $1575 in my country, and significantly worse spec than laptops in the same price range

> You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum

Some people simply do not care about tech to a point where almmost any price is too high. I just had to persuade a relative to spend $250 to replace a 16+ years old Intel Core Duo with an HDD. It takes 2 minutes to open a browser window on that thing and she didn't even consider that a problem. The replacement will probably last until it refuses to boot.

> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease.

Of what? Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM. I think my observations are a little biased, but not a lot. According to statcounter:

Android 41.56%

Windows 28.29%

iOS 17.29%

OS X 7%

Unknown 3.05%

Chrome OS 1.32%

Critically, it's no longer a monopoly; there's a lot less lock-in than there once was. Even Microsoft Office is gradually moving to the PWA model. Most servers and embedded systems I see run some variant of Linux as well. The market Microsoft has 75% share in seems to increasingly by a niche market within a much larger ecosystem. Microsoft seems to have pivoted, and as someone pointed out, no longer cares too much.

However, the Wintel monopoly is dead. If Intel is tied to Windows, they'll increasingly be swallowed alive. TSMC manufactures most of those ARM chips. There's no way a smaller player can keep up in fabs and manufacturing technology.

>Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM

Comparing cell phone OS to a desktop OS is a bit silly. Nobody in the corporate world is doing work on Android.

Intel is in the CPU market, not in the "corporate desktop" market.

If you'd like to see how well trying to focus on that niche works, have a look at DEC Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, Itanium, Sparc, PowerPC, etc.

At the end of the day, it comes down to manufacturing volume. Volume leads to investment in next-generation technologies. More investment means, at some point, competitors can't keep up. Manufacturing doesn't care too much about who the ultimate end user is.

Why not

His point was trying to measure OS market-share by checking desktop-only is no longer a valid approach.

Even big players like Microsoft are forced to offer their software and services on non-Windows platforms (like mobile and tablets!) if they want to remain relevant.

So counting desktop only paints a false picture, wrt where users are and where computing is happening.

And that last bit is what is relevant from a Intel POV. An increasing amount of compute is now done outside the Intel-chip arena of desktops, like it used to be before.

The "niche" market is corporate and gouv.

These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design)

No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon from those.

The android market share is mainly mobile devices and Microsoft gave that market up a few years ago, focusing on azure and office. Here again, focusing the corporate/gouv world.

The corporate/gouv world has many windows only app and processes that would cost a fortune to replace.

Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.

(Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.)

I generally agree with your point though but I am seeing that as more and more of office work moves to living within a web browser, it is becoming more hardware agnostic.

> (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.)

No. It's reality. Mainframes are here to stay. IBM continues to develop and sell plenty of mainframes. Several other manufacturers do as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z16

Where I work has applications dating back decades with complex data analysis algorithms developed by very smart people. Strict backwards-compatibility is critical. We have mainframes.

There are many other reasons to run mainframes. For example, mainframes offer pretty incredible features with regards to redundancy, and making everything hot-swappable in case of failure without interrupting workloads. That's especially useful in places like the financial industry. There, a single failure or error can cost much more than a mainframe.

They're a niche, but a big enough one to support a multi-billion dollar business. It shrunk for many years, but it's currently even growing.

I was doing work on an IBM AS/400 mainframe in my previous job, just over a decade ago. It supported Java and Tomcat (which was fairly current at the time) out of the box. The only oddity I needed to deal with was making sure I had a proper JDBC driver for its DB/2 database.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't have to deal with it anymore, but mainframes are definitely still around.

Mainframes don't get that much recognition outside of the niche they occupy, but they really aren't going anywhere.

No, I was referring to mainframes.

Back in the day, they cost a fortune to set up and replacing them is a high risk - low value for many CEO's.

In Québec, the SAAQ (provincial DIV) decided to get rid of the mainframe by replacing it with SAP and with the amount of data they had, the migration took them a month of downtime.

Then they completely mismanaged the startup of the new system and a lot of people complained. The CEO was fired. https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/head-of-saaq-loses-his-job-eric-...

I'm sure that Windows Server will gradually be replaced by containerized app running in some cloud but windows desktop will take a long time to be replaced, especially because of office.

"These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design)"

I'm not convinced. About ten years ago one could say exactly the same thing about Macs companies located outside of California. I only had my first work Mac in 2012, when I convinced my boss to let inherit one from a graphic designer. Since then, I've worked in two extremely traditional corporates that gave me the choice to use macOS. And plenty of executives were/are using macOS too.

In the meantime things got actually easier than 10 years ago: web apps became prevalent and even Microsoft joined the party.

> Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.

but if it continues to shrink (and it almost certainly will), then Intel (and AMD) are in big trouble

Intel can't exist servicing a niche

IBM isn't trying to float a multibillion market cap solely on the back of their mainframe CPUs...

and of course let's not forget that Microsoft is also continuing to hint at future Windows-on-ARM...the first try failed but I have heard more talk...

Macs are incredibly good value. The M1 Air actually starts at 800$ if you chase the deals and $900 if you buy from Apple with education discount.

Nothing ever comes to the quality at that price, so even if you can buy much cheaper laptops those suffer in quality and performance. This means the value per dollar is not any better than MacBook Air, unless you are extremely short on dollars.

Also the re-sell value of Apple products is good and combined with the durability of Apple laptops(this is where the repairability folks fail to convince most people because for most people Apple devices don't break down, they become obsolete after extensive use) the money spent on Macs turns to be an investment. The "Apple premium" you pay when you buy an iDevice is actually a recoverable when you sell it.

I agree they are but what if you can't afford to spend 800 or 900 on a laptop?

There's also plenty of people who use their laptop until it's dead. Infact, I'd argue it's probably more economical to purchase a repairable laptop and replace parts as needed.

If you can't afford $900 you shouldn't be buying a laptop unless you absolutely need it in short term to get out of your current situation. You are probably in a precarious state, not really a chooser at this time and all you can do is to sort by price and buy the cheapest.

Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world doesn't run high paying western salaries. Most people earn significantly less. The average monthly indian salary, by now the largest country in the world population wise, is roundabout 450 USD.

Your advice boils down to just get richer and don't be poor.

My advice is, don't spend your money on low quality stuff unless you absolutely have to(i.e. maybe you will do some data entry stuff to buy food, then maybe you can spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop but if you are not in that kind of a situation save up buy something of good value later).

> Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world doesn't run high paying western salaries

but that hurts Intel too...their profit margins are in their high-end CPUs

people keep talking about the cost of Macs but they're cheaper than most Windows laptops...

go look at the HP, Lenovo sites...they're not steering people toward $400 laptops

Not massively advertising low cost options and not having any at all are wildly different things.

Of course companies push the items with the highest margins. They want to make money after all, but they still have plenty of options in the sub 600 category that will last 5+ years under normal use without issue. There's obviously a market for low priced laptops, otherwise so many companies wouldn't build them. And it doesn't hurt Intel. If the choice for them is to sell a low margin CPU or none at all, they're gonna sell the low margin CPU.

Not to mention, Apple can be significantly more expensive in other countries due to tariffs and exchange rates.

If you're looking for value and durability, you can buy a used business laptop like thinkpad or dell latitude.

You can get a used thinkpad with an 8th gen intel and 16gb ram for $200 maybe.

Sure the cpu will be slower but with 8gb ram on a mac you're not going to be doing much anyway.

The screen will be terrible, the performance will be 1/3 of the M1 air, the battery life will be useless and the device itself will be heavy.

Bad deal overall. At that price I would prefer a Chromebook.

AMD's 5nm chips compete with and outperform the M1, low end laptops ship with 16GB of media by default, 8-10h of battery life is good enough for most people and Dell XPS laptops, for example, weigh 1.17kg, which is less than the M1 Air.

Can you give me a link to such a device? Sub 1000 laptop with 10H battery life, lighter and smaller than Air, higher performance than M1 sounds good.

I wonder why people buy those about Air heavy, about Air performing premium and expensive laptops then.

Grabbed a Dev On on sale for $500 and I'm very happy with it.

Good for you, what's this "Dev" laptop exactly?

Dev One*, https://hpdevone.com/

That's significantly slower machine than M1 Air. The screen is much worse, the actual battery life appears to be half of the M1 Air and there are all kind of other things like the sound quality or the trackpad that fall pretty short.

I'm glad you are happy with it, for 500 bucks seems like a fair deal, but this is nothing like Macbook Air.

The M1 MacBook Air lasts over 12 hours on battery and runs silently and cool while being fanless. I purchased mine new on sale for $750. Where is this magical laptop that beats the M1 Air?

I mean not really, I have a x1 tablet here and the performance and battery is fine, the screen is very nice, and it's not heavy.

Thing about ThinkPads is that there's almost always a premium option for hardware like screens that can be dropped in with nearly tool-less effort. I have an old X250 that I recently upgraded from the crappy 1366x768 shipping display to a new 1920x1080 for $60. The real problem with that model (besides the ancient 2 core CPU) is there's only a single RAM slot, and anythinng more that 8 GB is hard to find (and way more expensive than warranted).

> performance will be 1/3 of the M1 air

I run an old (I think maybe 4 or 5 years) thinkpad with 64GB RAM. I see often these claims of superior performance of new macs, and it leaves me scratching my head. I do not have (almost) any workflows where the performance is not sufficient. For the ones where performance is not sufficient, I am happy to turn on my desktop. So my question is, what are the workflows people have benefit from the superior performance of new macs and at the same time do not justify working on a beefy desktop?

The primary thing you notice is the snappiness. It's like going from an HDD to SDD. Everything happens faster.

Beyond that, it depends on what you do.

> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share

The biggest threat to Windows isn’t Apple and Linux, it’s mobile phones. People aren’t buying computers like they used to. Most day to day things can be done on a smartphone now.

I see this first hand in my own family. My wife and mom both use their phones for pretty much everything. Email, web browsing, etc. If my wife needs a bigger screen for something like a yoga video, she usually uses a TV in the house which has a Roku, chrome cast, or similar attached.

> The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax.

Get the MacMini. The low end M2 Mac mini is $599.00 USD right now, although the one I run for my desktop is the more expensive one at $2,199 with 32GB, more cores, more gpu and more drive space.

That's not a laptop so you still need to buy a screen, keyboard, and mouse.

Adding that will add another $150 if you buy it at Walmart. You are correct.

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