Hacker News Reader

Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

As stated since 2017, as soon as Apple move to their own Silicon now known as Apple Silicon, there is no reason why they cant have a MacBook SE for $699 all while keeping the same margin. ( Edit: Although in typical Apple fashion, low cost probably mean $799, which still would allow them to claim this is a historical new low cost MacBook, as the previous was $899 MacBook Air 11". Probably worth pointing out in case anyone dont know, Apple already sell an M1 MacBook Air with 128GB storage at $799, but it is only to education only. )

I am just surprised it took them this long. Although the sales of Mac were so good I guess they had zero reason to play this card until now.

View on HN

Why sell MacBooks for $699 when you can sell them for $1200?

Now they have probably hit the limit for the number of $1200 laptops they can sell, so probably want to broaden their market position (being careful not to cannibalise the number of $1200 laptops they are selling).

They have to be REALLY careful. I have a MacBook Air with 8GB of RAM and an M1 for personal use, work insisted on getting a 16" MacBook Pro M2 with 32GB of RAM and it's completely wasted.

There is zero reason for me to have anything but the cheapest MacBook Pro/Air, in fact the smaller screen size mean I'm more likely to use it outside the office, meaning I get more use from it. I'm not allow to use it without a monitor an keyboard most of the time anyway, so for most hours of the day the screen size isn't important.

For Go, Python, shell scripting and admin tasks the M1 Air is perfectly fine and if they made a cheaper version that would probably cover most/all of my home usage.

Air only supports 1 monitor (without using a DisplayLink software and dock), but other than that, I can't see any tangible difference for most power users.

I forgot about the one monitor, really should be a minimum of two for professional use.

I'm using 2 via a DisplayLink dock, but it's less than ideal, and comes with some compromises.

What Apple loses from existing customers downgrading could be made up for by new customers who appreciate the lower price (students, early career professionals, countries with weak currencies). Many of these new customers may stick with the Apple ecosystem. The low cost MacBook could be a 'gateway' product.

I went for 16GB of RAM because it cannot be upgraded and have already found one situation where it was a life saver (some Docker x86 image that ran poorly on Aarch64 and required 9GB of RAM to finish). Also I cannot see how 8GB of RAM can be sufficient. What is your RAM usage when having just a browser open with a few tabs?

I own one, and I found 8GB to be a bit limiting. If you work with something like emacs or vim probably you're fine, but if you try to run Xcode or you program in Java, good luck.

Because of price discrimination. By offering a cheaper product, a producer can capture more producer surplus by capturing users who would never have bought at the previous price point. This also allows the company to sell their higher end product at a greater price because the efficient price moves upwards when the lower demand folks get factored out.

True, but suspect that they might have been worried about cannibalisation previously.

You can get MacBook Air for $700 at Costco.

Is this in store?

Cheapest in stock I see on their site is M2 Air for 899

You have to wait for the deals that occur regularly. At least here in Costco Mexico so I assume these also happen in the US.

My wife got an M1 Air for less than $700 some months ago.

Ah nice! Yeah I do see them in the monthly ads from time to time. I'll keep an eye out, thanks!

I thought I heard sales of Macs were way below expected over the last year?

Almost everything is way below expectation over the last year due to 2022 with whiplash effect and abnormal growth + this year recession.

Maybe they pulled an instapot and made a great product that lasts (with only incremental improvements in the next gen).

I got an M1 Air when it came out and an M2 Pro for work, and other than the 16 vs 32 GB, it’s very similar in terms of performance.

I assume it’d be more apparent if i did 3d modeling or video production, but it works very well as a dev machine.

> Maybe they pulled an instapot and made a great product that lasts

This is a longstanding position by apple since ~ the iMac.* The long lifetime (hw quality + software support) means higher resale value and pays off for companies like Apple and Toyota. Why didn’t it help instapot?

Resale value means the investment for a buyer of a new device is (conceptually) lower and signals quality, so you can charge more. And the resold devices serve a customer who can’t pay full retail, keeping the, from giving their money to a competitor.

Now this works bc the new buyer values the new features (else they’d just hang on to the equipment for longer, as I do). Instapot’s problem was they lacked a “killer feature upgrade”: the 2023 model is basically the 2017 model.

* dunno before but I somehow can’t believe a company that shipped the Performa line had the same attitude.

Edit: I had a brain fart and said BMW had a high resale value, while actually they are notorious the other way (since I’ve owned one myself, I shouldn’t have made this mistake). Thanks to Our_Benefactors for pointing this out.

BMW have some of the worst retained value in the car industry.

What a stupid brainfart — thanks for pointing it out. I’ve even owned a BMW so what a thinko! I edited my comment.

One thing that BMW does do well is supporting their vehicles on the road. IIRC they keep the parts production active for a minimum of 10 years past the final model year. Compared to finding parts for domestic American vehicles less than 10 years old (looking at you, Ford), BMW support is leaps and bounds ahead of many alternatives.

> Why didn’t it help instapot?

it's not expensive enough to warrant buying second hand. Also i don't want to use someone else's cooking utensils for my own food. Never know what they've done with it!

A mac book, on the other hand, is fine, since the most i would touch it is with my hands. The 2nd hand condition doesn't bother me, as long as i just clean it up with nice wipes.

M2 Air here that I use as my dev machine. All I do is backend dev running on Docker, and it's works as well as the M1 Pro 32gb and M2 Max 64gb I've used before. (the challenge in running multiple monitors is the main issue, not performance)

> M2 Air here that I use as my dev machine. All I do is backend dev running on Docker, and it's works as well as the M1 Pro 32gb and M2 Max 64gb I've used before. (the challenge in running multiple monitors is the main issue, not performance)

I'm doing similar stuff, and I think the big thing I'm worried about is SSD write exhaustion. The 8 GB of ram is just not enough to prevent the system using a lot of swap. Especially if I ever need to use Rosetta.

And the way Apple's pricing around ram works, if you're going to upgrade to 16 GB, you might as well just get a pro, which comes base with 16 GB. At least with the Mac Mini/Studio. I'll admit that I'm less familiar with the laptop pricing.

I'm using an Air with 16gb of RAM.

Having had both a 14" M1 Pro and a 16" M2 Max, I feel like the 14" Pro are probably the best value.

I think this is a big part of the problem: the M1 air is basically the perfect laptop for casual use. Powerful enough, very light weight, great screen, and killer battery life.

Luckily for Apple and sadly for everyone else, the SSD is soldiered onto the motherboard, which means that when it gets enough writes, the machine will be toast (short of component level repair, which is possible but difficult and rare).

How often do SSDs wear out? I've never heard of an example in real life even for the heaviest users. Every time I've looked at SSD lifespan metadata out of idle curiosity it has never been particularly close to end-of-life even after years of use.

I've worn out multiple SSDs.

But wearing them out isnt the only issue with soldered on planned obsolescence BS. The real issue is parts like SSDs can just up and fail. And now you have a ticking time bomb in a machine that could otherwise last damn near indefinitely just so Apple can shave a few cents off production and enforce upgrading.

It was down YoY, but I am not sure it was below "expectation".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com