I would love to be able to socket one of these suckers in a Linux desktop for a reasonable price. I'm loving seeing competition in this field, but I don't like using MacOS and don't want to pay the Apple hardware tax.
The products do come at a bit of a premium, but, in my experience, it's well earned and is a premium experience as well. There have been occasional periods of sub-par hardware, but generally (and especially current generation) Apple's hardware is extremely well designed and durable.
On top of that, I don't get the software engineer aversion to paying for quality tools. How many hours a year do you spend on a computer? How many hours over the lifetime of the computer will you spend? Even if devs weren't generally in top income brackets it would still be easily justifiable to spend several thousand dollars on tools that you were happy with.
Again, I completely understand not wanting to go with Apple in order to have much finer grained control over your system. But if Apple is selling what you're buying, then the pricing is more than fair imho.
It's well designed, yes, but it's certainly not durable. The entire device will have to get scrapped and replaced if even the slightest thing goes wrong with any of it.
Looking at the price estimator, battery service is like $250. That's not cheap.
Completely unsupported by Apple. Doesn't get OS updates or security updates. No apps get updates for it anymore through the App Store.
Saying that using a 2010 computer when it's an Apple computer is actually one of the worst arguments you can make in this context. Virtually any other computer running any other OS is more supported.
My father has been doing embedded software development since the early 80s. Thankfully the only tech support messages I get are when I break things like their email.
Sure but the original point was that the hardware was "certainly not durable". Every one of my Mac laptops (except for the 12" 2012 MacBook which is my local emergency machine) since ~2010 is still in active use by family. There's nothing wrong with the hardwares.
iPad had similar ill fated designs. I went to replace the battery of an iPad Pro and was offered a new one for the price of the battery, as a standard procedure (it's glued to the motherboard under all the other components, so no in-store replacement)
For one the difficulty they engineer into their devices when it comes to repairing and servicing them.
Then there's the use of child and/or slave labor.
(if a child or a slave is making a product I expect it to be priced as such then/s)
Removal or weird choices in terms of ports and which cables you may use.
Question becomes for an independent software developer whether it's better to write off $7k or $3k and have $4k more in your pocket.
Edit: Thank you apple fan boys for your downvotes! :D
And of all the OEMs they have always been the most aggressive at auditing their supply chain.
edit: Here's more to back my point:
https://9to5mac.com/2023/05/22/iphone-maker-wistron-quits/
If Apple isn't paying it's manufacturers enough to turn a profit then how long until a manufacturer cuts corners and abuses labor to make money?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/20/apple-u...
It doesn't make it any better, but let's keep in mind that this is true for ALL current laptop brands unfortunately. They all come from the same factories.
If anything I trust Apple more to audit their supply chain for human rights violations that I would trust eg Dell or Lenovo (and I use those brands exclusively myself).
I trust Apple to behave like a for-profit business. I've seen Apple make changes when it's benefited them (because their image matters to their customers).
And I'm happy to pay for quality tools, but I'm not spending $20 for copy-paste (edit: hyperbole. Every time I find some missing simple functionality that is available for free and easy on Linux, the Apple equivalent is available on the app store for a significant charge. Some games are simply more expensive on iOS than elsewhere because the developers know Apple users will pay more). Apple is still largely in the "luxury designer product with a consumer base of 10% historical savvy users who prefer it and 90% rich kids who like the logo and don't mind flushing money down the drain for a brand".
This is a complete lie. I've used PCs for 30 years and I'm not an apple fanboy but when you actually look at the market, there's only very few products that can compete to the macbooks to begin with and they're always in the same price range or more expensive.
> charges exorbitant prices for modest upgrades (currently $200 difference between 8 and 16 GB RAM.
This is true, but it's also true in the PC world. And PC laptops increasingly come with soldered RAMs so you don't even have the advantage of upgrading it yourself anymore.
And looking at the Framework laptop shop right now, I see a 16GB DDR4 DIMM for $60, and you can throw in a standard M.2 storage module. Maybe Framework is just singularly better, but that's still a reason to not buy Apple for me.
This is just being pedantic. "Mac vs PC" is just a widely known way to distinguish between Mac's and non-Mac's.
> And looking at the Framework laptop shop right now, I see a 16GB DDR4 DIMM for $60, and you can throw in a standard M.2 storage module. Maybe Framework is just singularly better, but that's still a reason to not buy Apple for me.
Ok now instead of looking at number of GB of RAM you get per price and show me quality and efficiency between these. I'm no hardware nerd/genius but from what I understand the Apple Silicon was out performing even what Apple CLAIMED in their keynotes and that caused everyone to scramble because they couldn't sit on their thumbs anymore. (Cough Intel)
So yeah, you may get same numbers of RAM, but that RAM isn't equal.
Apple Silicon is really good for what it does. Apple does not create its RAM and the RAM is indeed equal for a significant markup.
"Mac vs PC" was way after Windows software was already not compatible with IBM PCs, so by that point, the implication was just "PC == x86", and Apple was already transitioning to Intel as well. "PC" being tied to a specific Intel processor is confusing. It's all very bizarre and mostly marketing.
This relentless self-othering has a dark side; apart from being good marketing, it also conveniently excuses behavior that might otherwise be regarded as unacceptable - much like how rebranding small LTE-enabled computers as "mobile" reset user expectations across the board for things like admin control, advertising in the UI, the worth of software, and other pesky social mores inconvenient to the money-extracting classes.
Pedantic perhaps, but not a terrible thing to draw attention to.
To be fair to Apple, theirs is LPDDR5 rather than DDR4, and it’s built into the SOC so it’s a different product.
You can currently only buy a system with 16gb of DDR5 from framework as part of a preorder bundle, not separately, and that’s a c£400 bump which makes the system much more expensive than the mac.
To be fair to framework, they are going to release a separate ddr5 module according to their store which will be cheaper than the Mac option, but if you are buying right now (which is what counts) then Mac is cheaper.
So basically you'll exploit the charitable developer who spent countless hours developing the software rather than pay them a fair price for their work. This is why people develop for Apple platforms first - because the people who buy Apple will actually pay them for their time and labour.
I am a programmer, and I contribute plenty of FOSS code. Very often, I find a solution with some issues and submit PRs. I'm not arrogant enough to do a couple hours of work and charge $20 per download for it, and I'm not a useful enough idiot to work for free for Apple, so I guess that bars me from doing the same on MacOS (even though I have to work with it for work). I guess if some of my code is general enough, some well-meaning Apple FOSS users can port it over.
It's interesting to me how much comradery and work for the general community is done in the open for and among Linux and BSD users with only the expectation that others will do the same for them, but many Apple users I've run into are like you, treating the simple desire to make things better for people with absolute derision and disgust. I guess if you aren't maximizing profit, why do anything at all, right?
How do you know it took whoever "a couple of hours of work"? How much time and effort do they have to put in to maintaining the software? And how much training and work did it take to get them to the point of being able to make the program in the first place?
> Ever heard the story of Picasso and the napkin? Legend has it that Picasso was at a Paris market when an admirer approached and asked if he could do a quick sketch on a paper napkin for her. Picasso politely agreed, promptly created a drawing, and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a million Francs.
> The lady was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you five minutes to draw this!” “No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.”
It's not about maximising profit, it's about people getting paid for their time and work.
Somehow, I constantly come across lifelong programmers who insist on working for free. They get software for free, give their software away for free, and very often have encompassing philosophies of software freedom (and often freedom of information and data in general). I find it very sad that the idea of mutual support and love of software and art without money changing hands is regularly met with such resistance from people who haven't experienced the joy of being in a community that doesn't constantly look to extract cash from their own.
I know what exploitation is, but it's not the group of programmers working for the good of one another.
Money is the best system we've come up with for the exchange of value of labour across industries, but you are welcome to go visit a farmer and attempt to agree on how many lines of code are equivalent to five parsnips and a dozen eggs.
The reason is quite simple. A stable job is much like inherited wealth. Because your income is reasonably guaranteed, you can live your life without trying to turn every opportunity into a business transaction.
As some of us are professional event organizers, we often compare our convention to professionally run events. In some aspects, we are really amateurish, as we are just a bunch of volunteers doing things for cheap. In other aspects, we are better than professionally run events. We can choose to do the right thing without having to worry about business models and profitability.
Sometimes money is what gets boring but necessary things done. And sometimes money is the reason why we can't have nice things.
And you got the audacity to complain that some people try to make a living while providing a presumably valuable service/app for their users. "Treating the simple desire to make things better for people with absolute derision and disgust" eh?
Basically the company is hostile to anyone threatening their control, they're the champion of closed source and proprietary much more than IBM ever was.
As a long time Linux and macOS user, I don't agree. Even though macOS is more polished than your average Linux desktop environment, it's really very hard to ignore the unjustified markup. Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD. Moreover, a Mac mini tops up at 24GB of RAM, and for that you need to pay an additional 460€ for your weak 256GB HD box.
It's justified if people pay it.
>Nowadays I can buy a miniPC with a Ryzen5 and 32GB of RAM for around 400€, but the cheapest Mac mini nowadays sells for over 700€ and comes with 8GB of RAM and an absurd 256GB SSD.
So what's the problem?
If you like running Linux on your Ryzen5 miniPC with 32GB of RAM for 400€, you're more than free to do that. Apple's not stopping you.
Not really. The point is that Apple's products are overpriced, and in particular the Apple Mini underperforms and simply isn't competitive when compared to today's alternatives. I repeat, a mini PC with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB HD on the market for over 700€ simply doesn't compete with miniPCs with Ryzen or Intel i7 or even i5 that ship with 500GB HDs and at least 16GB of RAM which can cost 200 or 300€ less.
Even if they could make the same money by lowering prices (and increasing volume), it'd be a terrible idea based on how consumer behavior and status seeking actually works. If the quality were the same and the product were far cheaper, consumers wouldn't want it as much. The absolute worst place to be in any market tends to be the middle, you go to the middle to die. High margins provide a margin for error in business, it's invaluable.
Minisforum latest 7940HS lines are better than M2. More powerful, fairly close on power efficiency, better GPU, cheaper, and without all the nonsense that comes with buying Macs. Their fully juiced model is $800 (and doesn't lock you in to a model that milks casb from you like a sow).
I've been trying to work it out and the best comparison I've seen is this: https://i.imgur.com/MhM1fap.png
Although https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/138lari/comment/j... indicates it is a reasonable match.
On the other hand, I don't own a Mini, nor I'm on the market for a mini PC, but I don't feel like dropping $800 for a prebuilt PC unless they provide stellar support and warranty, and chinese OEMs aren't really known for that.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/M2-vs-R9-7940HS-vs-M1_14521_14...
You can play Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p at over 60fps. You can produce all the synthetic benchmarks in the world but this is as powerful as a console. This is the most powerful iGPU out there, it is about as powerful as 1060.
I hadn't heard of Minisforum though. But the same goes there - not sure what is is supposed to be mistaken for.
I have one because I was able to get an i5 that was passively cooled, so great for a Plex server that's second hand for only £100. The PSU is more like 1/8th, maybe smaller.
I know that some Intel NUCs have monstrous PSUs [0], which I think should constitute false advertising regarding the actual size of the computers.
[0] https://www.servethehome.com/intel-nuc-11-pro-review-tiger-c...
It's definitely smaller than 1/3 the volume of the unit unless I have a incredibly small form factor rather than an ultra small form factor unit? But I don't think so. It is very small.
The M2 Mac mini's RAM is integrated into the SoC package, which has some advantages (good memory bandwidth, no copying between CPU and GPU RAM) and disadvantages (expensive, non-upgradable DRAM tiers.) Internal flash storage is basically non-upgradable as well (though you can easily plug in external thunderbolt m.2 storage.)
It also doesn't currently run Windows natively, nor does it support eGPUs.
I'm not sure any Mac mini model was ever much of a competitor to cheaper PCs, but mini PCs have gotten a lot better over time, probably inspired somewhat by the Mac mini, while the mini has followed in the footsteps of other Mac models by adopting Apple Silicon and unified memory.
The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac, and compares favorably with the older intel Mac minis in terms of performance, but I'd spring for 16GB of RAM (at least) for my use cases.
I don't see the point of your comment. It matters nothing if you underline design differences if in the end you can get a cheaper minipc that's upgradeable and ships with more memory, and you can't do anything about your Mac mini other than scrap it and buy a more expensive model.
> The mini is a perfectly decent Apple Silicon Mac
That's all fine and dandy if you artificially limit comparisons to Apple's product line.
Once you step out of that artificial constraint, you get a wealth of miniPCs which have a smaller form factorz are cheaper, have more RAM and HD, are upgradeable and maintainable, and in some cases have more computational power as a whole.
The M2 GPU is roughly the performance of the notebook edition of the RTX3060.
To get a MiniPC with one of those it is over $1200! https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004771159431.html
I feel your comment reads too much like fanboy excuses. CPU is not the only or even main requirement. I personally want to max out on RAM and HD. I can buy a mini PC with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB nvie for 400€. With a Mac, I need to spend almost twice that to only get 25% of te RAM and 50% of that HD space.
This was the norm since Apple shipped Intel core i5 Mac minis.
There is no way around this. Apple price gouges their kit. It's irrelevant how you feel they fare n artificial benchmarks.
How do you define price gouging?
Why is it wrong for a company to sell their product for the highest price people are willing to pay?
With Dell there's the Inspirons
With HP there's the Pavillion
With Lenovo there's Ideapads and Yoga's and stuff.
With Apple, their cheapest laptop is comparable to a business laptop (Elitebook, Latitude), and their most expensive laptops are comparable to the "creator" laptops like Dell XPS or HP ZBook -- except the Apple computers have better build quality than those.
But people only look at the spec sheet and claim it's overpriced.
Apple are definitely guilty of gouging the price of upgrades, but that's just business sense, if you need the update then you have to trade how much it's worth to you- it's just that other manufacturers do not do that.
Yeah. So it's just that people don't complain about other manufacturers.
Because nobody expects the quality from these manufacturers like they do from Apple, so they don't get uppity about the price.
They want Apple quality without Apple premium, or "to have their cake and eat it too"
With Dell, by contrast, I can buy an Inspiron or a Latitude or a workstation, then wipe out the pre-loaded Windows junk and install the Linux distro of my choice, and it works fine. Then if I don't like the included SSD size, I can easily pop it open and install a bigger Samsung one that I bought on Amazon. And having a Dell laptop doesn't pressure me in any way to own a Dell cellphone (which doesn't exist anyway), or vice versa.
I haven't upgraded my intel macbook pro from 2019 just because the ram and ssd upgrade are irritatingly expensive, but eventually I'm sure it'll be tolerable somehow, either because my current one has become wildly too slow or because the cost comes down.
I have no reason to buy an iPhone, so I don't, what's the problem?
They also wanted another $3,000 for an 8TB SSD. Similarly, I was able to buy a 4xM.2 PCI card, and populate it with 4 x 2TB SSDs for under $1,500. Furthermore my PCI setup is faster than the Apple system drive (7GBps versus 5.5).
Apple-to-apple (heh) comparison is tricky in this case since I don’t see LPDDR5 laptop chips for sale on their own, and this is a soldered-on-laptop chip so DIY after buying isn’t feasible, but an entire 32GB DDR5 desktop set can be had for about $100, so even if the low-power laptop form-factor commanded a premium, that’s still pretty egregious.
Dell is similar: for a desktop they want $200 to bump from 16GB to 32GB DDR5.
Apple might be a bit more daring with those prices than some PC manufacturers, but it’s hardly a behavior unique to them.
The pricing may be standard (a bit higher if we're honest) but the bigger issue is how far Apple goes to make you pay that premium. It borders malicious. It's also not great for waste, considering upgrading is near impossible.
If anything, the rest of the industry has been moving in Apple’s direction with these kinds of limitations. They’re not more evil than their competition, they’re just ahead of the curve.
I agree Apple takes it further with the gouging than others. We should absolutely complain about it and criticize them for gouging! My criticism of the “Apple Tax” complaint is that 1. Nobody ever complains nearly as vociferously about other manufacturers doing similar stuff, and 2. The particular way people complain about Apple’s behavior is always phrased to kind of imply it’s unique and not just a more egregious form of a common behavior.
"They don't want us to live in Hell, they just pave shiny roads that can only lead us there".
That's the "evil". Your next sentence doesn't justify the former. Apple is the one pushing the bounds. Others see Apple can get away with it, so they follow. There's good reason to believe that if Apple didn't push this then we wouldn't be in this state (right to repair is another piece of evidence related to Apple too).
But there's 2 things I need to say:
1) In a system of bad actors, it is still useful to point fingers and discuss the largest (or small subset) that are doing this. Because
2) Certain actors are driving forces, which others follow. This is Apple. They even brag about having this position. They even have the credentials to do so! They earned that right. They took away the headphone jack. They got us all on ear buds. They got us all on smart phones in the first place. They made podcasts a thing. The aren't the cause of everything, but they are one of the drivers, and definitely the most powerful one. It would be naive to be under the impression that Apple doesn't have significant influence on the entire market. They've done things that resulted in significant backlash, had lots of consumer complaints, and have no become the status quo (e.g. headphone jack). They were the only major company to solder RAM for decades, and people complained about it for just as long. They have weight, they know it, and they know how to use it. That weight allows them to make markets that don't even exist.
Because of this, I will point fingers. My complaint with your comment is that you characterize Apple as just another player being pulled along by forces outside their control. But let's be real, Apple was the first $1T company (late 2018), the first $2T company (late 2020), AND the first $3T company (Jan 2022). No one else even comes close. Microsoft is #2 market cap, but has a 12% gap, then Google with a 43% gap. There are only 4 trillion dollar companies (Amazon being the next) and realistically only one builds laptops (MSFT isn't as hardware focused). Apple sets the tone. Yes, the system sucks and is problematic, but that doesn't mean we should ignore the one dictating that system.
The primary reason is now performance. Don't believe me? Look at how RAM is arranged on a GPU or in a game console. The RAM chips are located as close to the CPU/GPU as physically possible, limited only by thermal constraints.
You will never see DIMM slots on an NVIDIA card because the compromises would be untenable. Longer traces means lower performance, while sockets will make the cards thicker and with poorer thermals. The reasons why NVIDIA cards are the way they are correlates with why Apple's latest comptuers are the way they are.
What Apple did with packaging RAM so close to the M1/M2 chip is a big part of the Apple Silicon performance story.
Are those ram chips on a CPU carrier in a POP configuration? or are they fanned out on the PCB allowing technician to replace individual components?
Part of the reason for Apple move to ram on SOC carrier was killing third party market. Now its impossible to repair/upgrade ram. Similar with T1/T2 proprietary pcie NAND in raid configuration.
I love how you've pushed your opinion as fact here, spinning the positives and conveniently omitting the clear anti-consumer advantage that soldering RAM achieved: non-serviceability meant shorter lifetimes, i.e. more replacement sales (and hence more e-waste, but who cares about externalized costs, right?) and more money minted during the original sale (since people couldn't buy and upgrade with cheaper components, they were forced to pay Apple prices). At the time it was implemented, there was no real technical advantage.
Performance benefits have now come along as a bonus, a happy side-effect. But the main mover has always been (and always will be, with Apple) pure and distilled greed.
Not "always". This is an artifact of the MacBook Air modern "appliance" era of Apple (and laptops / computing in general) where thin and light bodied laptops and compactness are the highest priorities, prized above self-service, upgradability, etc.
PowerBooks, by contrast, were amazingly and easily upgradable. You didn't even have to open up the case to do a memory upgrade — the keyboard just popped right up.
Two decades ago, the Framework laptop would have never needed to exist. And for the most part, likewise with Hackintoshes.
To the best of my knowledge / memory / experience, all of the Mac models introduced prior to the Air in 2008 had upgradable memory and storage.
Sure AMD Epyc, Intel Xeon, Threadripper Pro and similar to improve memory bandwidth, but at a substantial penalty in size and power.
Today AM5 boards max out at 128GB, so to beat that it seems that you must go and shop at places where you must request a quote to help them know how much you can be charged.
The only saving grace for Apple here is that all other manufacturers outcompete them on the unforgivable sins front.
The thing is it often isn't. I mean there are many vendors way worse then Apple. But it often just seems/looks/feels to be extremely well designed and durable. But if you ask someone with expertise they often can point out docents of "corners cut" which are not well designed and hurt durability. E.g. for saving some mm of high, some cents of production cost, some very small amount of weight, or likely but not provable intentional fragility to enforce their ecosystem. IMHO it's very clear that reliability and stability are secondary and looks and feel are main priority.
Doesn't mean that they don't have some very good engines giving their best to make things durable but when other constraints matter more it can be hard.
But it puts the reason ability of their sometimes very excessive premium prices in question.
Especially if you learn of they squeeze out their supply chain in ethical extremely questionable ways while hypocritically pretending to care about issue like child labor (if you squeeze your assembly line provider so hard that they can only make profit by using child labor and disgusting working conditions then no you do not care about child labor no matter how many times you force them to sign a contract where they agree to not use child labor and have proper working conditions).
That said, I agree that Apple’s strategy of maximising shareholder returns by squeezing their supply chain to just under breaking point is disgusting and that they are ethically culpable for the inevitable results. They’re probably not alone in this, but they have the most market power and probably push it the furthest. This is definitely an instance where you can hate the player and the game.
In other videos he shows how Apple puts display data lines right next to high-voltage lines instead of separating them with a ground line, which means you’ll fry the board if you get a tiny bit of moisture in that area.
So you will notice these cut corners when your device breaks and the repair costs almost as much as the original device.
the problems with the kind of corners apple tends to cut is that they don't matter until they do (i.e. just for a small set of users) in which case you often run into fun things like needing whole motherboard replacements or similar which tends to mean getting anew laptop and hoping you did a data backup properly and apple repair doing everything they can to push off any blame (i.e. cost).
I mean it's not worse then other laptops, definitely not.
But for the price a "developer laptop" costs I would expect more (i.e. _lowest possible spec_ of M2 14" which allows 64GiB of RAM + 2TB SSD == 4619€). Mainly I would expect better service when it comes to repair, especially if it's needed due to not so perfect design of Apple. I mean that price are 2 and a half Framwork semi 14" laptops with maxed out Ryzen CPU and 64GiB or RAM + 2 TB SSD. For most (but not all) use cases this Framework laptop will perform comparable. And sure the Framework laptop isn't as good as Apple but it's not "just half as good" (assuming the .5 missing framework laptop is for a hypothetical expensive OS license) and Framework isn't even "cheap" for what you get ... the balance is just not right.
I mean if they did other things to fill the gap like very good flexible support, actually ethical supply chain handling and/or similar it would be reasonable price I would love to pay (well and put Linux on it, but implicitly paying for a hypothetical OS license is my issue).
Software and such has taken a bit of a dive of late imo but it’s still a viable platform for devs to sell apps and services into. So shrug.
It's called the "price". Unlike taxes, you can choose to not buy it and not pay it.
If you live outside the US, however, you can probably get away with this as the total value is likely under the customs exemption threshold, or if you use the device for a bit before you get on the plane, you can claim it's "used".
As a Washingtonian, I would always list and pay use taxes on my purchases from the Portland Apple Store cough if I ever shopped there before.
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=brand%20tax
It's not meant to imply that it's exactly the same thing as a tax. It's meant to suggest that e.g. Apple hardware is significantly higher margin than alternatives, an affordance allowed due to the reputation conveyed by the brand.
Like all analogies and metaphors, it does not imply equality, so showing how the two things are actually different isn't very interesting or constructive unless the statement being made hinges on wrongly comparing aspects that don't line up (doesn't seem to.)
Calling it a tax implies there's no added value, which is entirely false. If their products are more expensive for a similarly capable device from another manufacturer (that's a big if), it's because Apple's products have a reputation for being higher quality. Many people will always be willing to pay a lot more for a little more quality, in the least.
That said, the evidence that Apple has difficult to justify prices is definitely present in their product line. Love it or hate it, it's extremely difficult to justify a $1,000 monitor stand; even if it's actually not a result of high margins, it's really hard to see how they can add so much value into the concept of a reticulating monitor stand that it would be worth such a price tag. Or perhaps the $700 caster kit for the Mac Pro (a price that hasn't changed: I looked!) They may be the nicest casters ever made, but if it's an option you happen to want, the price from Apple is $700. They don't offer a cheaper option, so that's what you get with Apple. You may want it anyways, because well, it's just so nice and you don't care. That's fine, but that's definitely what most people call the "Apple Tax".
It is extremely difficult in same sense as I'd find difficult to justify million dollar home / 100K car with custom finishes and pleasing interiors. Are they really need to for basic dwelling and transporting from point A->B? Nope. However any reasonable person would set me right pointing out that I am in market of 400K home and 30K car.
But when it comes to tech product people have this thought that pricing should be what they have calculated is correct. And any reasonable person would agree to it.
Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable for running Linux on high end Apple Hardware.
Another thing is that the memory consumption is under 20W when idle and 100W when compiling the Linux Kernel. I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years.
So, 10x faster than my Macbook, nearly exactly. While using 10x the power. Utilizing larger batching with the extra 3090 vram can actually result in even more throughput.
But I find it interesting that it winds up being nearly the same in images-per-$.
Apple’s marketing about how they compare to nVidia GPUs has been exaggerated, to put it lightly.
A pair of high end nVidia GPUs will be substantially faster than an M2 Ultra. They don’t really compare.
> I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years.
You might want to check those numbers. At least where I live, I’d have to burn almost a thousand watts constantly at idle 24/7 for several years to start marking up the electricity premium.
The power savings is great, but it’s not going to justify spending thousands of dollars more. I love the quietness of my M1/M2 machines, but I’m under no illusions that I’m saving money by using them.
By how much?
I currently use macos, the software is tolerable, but when I need some serious computation power the server is running Linux. You can have more cores, you can have more memory, what else do you need?
don't matter for many applications but for some
and the it's a server unit you are buying not a prosumer desktop (with a ryzen CPU you get 2 channels, threadripper 4 channels and 8 with a threadripper pro)
Why do you believe that the "Apple hardware tax" here is being applied to some pieces of aluminium, rather than to their extremely-high-CapEx investment into a new SoC?
I would bet money that when the Mac Pro logic board becomes available as a component through the repair program, that a replacement of it will be 90-95% of the cost of replacing the full machine.
Sometimes it does seem to be applied to pieces of aluminum, like the $999 stand for the Pro Display XDR.
But your point is a good one that many people seem to forget: a lot of the tax is to recoup their massive investment in developing their own Apple Silicon SoCs as well as the OS and other software.
Apple's profit margin says otherwise. :)
> Apple net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 24.49%.
Let's put it this way: it would be a lot harder for Apple to do what it wants if it didn't have a stupendous amount of cash to fund it. That money pile means that they can shoulder the risks of their own plans, and the fact that they just pile on more and more profit every year just means these plans are largely successful.
If it's just chiclet keyboards you like there are no shortage of those. Logitech's MX Keys for example.
If you've got a high end current generation Intel or AMD workstation processor plus an RTX 4090, you've got a more powerful and probably cheaper system than Apple's desktops that have the M2 Ultra (which start at $4000).
Performance per watt is where Apple Silicon shines, so the only thing a Windows/Linux user should have envy over is the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. I would personally stay away from Apple's desktops even though I like macOS well enough.
the main issue I would have with buying such system is repair-ability
For one the questionable anti-repair, e.g. what they did with hard drives on their last desktop systems. I mean wtf. do you mean I can't just easily replace a worn hard drive that is a _must have basic essential feature for commercial usage in larger scale.
for the other that fact that RAM can not be replaced at all, which is most times not an issue for desktop systems on normal consumer use, but is an issue for a workstation system which might run 24/7 for most days on high utilization
Linux is awesome on the desktop but the only place where we are lagging behind is the laptop space.
As you point out, the power efficiency isn't as great a benefit in a desktop form factor where cooling is a lot easier to accomplish.
Wasn’t everybody against systemd?