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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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