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Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

Computers these days - the more appealing, exciting, cooler desirable, the higher the price, into the stratosphere.

$9499

What ever happening to competition in computing?

Computing hardware competition used to be cut throat, drop dead, knife fight, last man standing brutally competitive. Now it's just a massive gold rush cash grab.

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The Macintosh plus, released in 1986, cost $2600 at the time, or $7460 adjusted for inflation.

It even came with an official display! Nowadays that's a $1,600-$6,000 accessory, depending on whether you own a VESA mount.

You take the top price of the top of the line newest pro chip apple produces and then make this argument?

You're thinking about this as if the average Joe is interested in this. They're not. The tech folk salivating in this discussion are a rounding error when it comes to computing. The vast majority has no need for this.

The MacBook Air with M4 chip 16gb ram and an amazing display and camera is just 999$. During back to school that will happen soon it’s 899$ with free AirPods. That’s really great value given how good the hardware is.

It doesn't even run Linux properly.

Could cost half of that and it would still be uninteresting for my use cases.

For AI, on-demand cloud processing is magnitudes better in speed and software compatibility anyway.

There are legitimate use cases for local LLMs.

For example, I'll happily feed my entire directory of private notes/diary entries into an LLM running offline on my laptop. I would never do that with someone else's LLM running in the cloud.

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