Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

> The Framework Desktop with 64GB RAM + 2TB NVMe is $1,876. To get a Mac Studio with similar specs [...] you'll literally spend nearly twice as much [...] The Framework Desktop is simply a great deal.

Wow, someone managed to beat Apple on price??

I don't know that it logically follows that anything is a great deal when it undercuts Apple. Half sounds about right -- I thought Apple was a bit more competitive these days than ×2 actually, but apparently not, also considering that Framework comes with a (totally fair) niche-vendor premium

View on HN

He's comparing to a studio when he should compare to the mini for this performance. They are almost the same price at a 64gb RAM + 500gb storage config (CAD).

- Framework, Max+ 64GB: $2,861.16

- Apple Mini M4 Pro, 64GB: $2,899.00

Apple does charge way too much for integrated storage, but Apple is only a 25% premium at 2TB not double (if you compare to the mini instead of the studio). Plug in a NVMe SSD if you're building an Apple desktop.

Not to defend Apple here, but it's also a bit apples to oranges (heh) because the power consumption is not easily comparable.

I would hazard a guess and say: at that spec, if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar.

Since they're in spitting distance of each other, just get the one you're most comfortable with. Personally I prefer Linux and I'm really happy that non-Apple machines are starting to get closer to the same efficiency and performance!

You have to account for resale when it comes to TCO. Resale value for a non-Apple PC is essentially zero - i.e. no one will buy it, or you'll get pennies on the dollar if they do. Whereas there's a strong market for used Apple hardware, and you can easily recover 50% or more.

So you recover what you spent extra, per the article?

This is an exaggeration, or you're not comparing apples to apples.

The used market for high performance PC gear is quite efficient. You're not going to get a high-end CPU or GPU from the past several years for pennies on the dollar.

Likewise, the resale market for Apple products doesn't guarantee 50% or more unless you're only looking at resale value of very new hardware. For example, you can pick up an M1 Max MacBook Pro (not that old) for closer to 1/3 of the original price.

Do people actually buy used computers and sell them? Like, apart from graphics cards...

Seems odd to me. Most computers I've ever had last for ~10 years, at which point resale value is definitely zero...

Similar with phones and tablets: yes, people do that, but it's not the common case. I've only ever sold computing devices within the first month of ownership, after realising I made a mistake in purchasing it (not a broken device, but just not meeting my needs), but on second-hand sites you can also see various people offering them up after 1 or 2 years because they want something shinier and the old system still has value. I've bought my current phone from someone like that, and as a student I also bought such a laptop

yeah, I buy preowned laptops fairly often to be fair.

I don't sell them but I buy exclusively used computers. All of them coming from the refurbishing market of business computers.

From a purely financial perspective buying a computer or vehicle brand new is a very bad idea.

> I would hazard a guess and say: at that spec, if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar.

The two systems aren't that different in power consumption. The Strix Halo part has a 55W default TDP but I would assume Framework customized it to be higher. A comparable M4 Pro Mac Mini can easily pull 80W during an AI workload.

Apple has a slight edge in power efficiency, but it's not going to make a massive difference.

> if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar.

Only if you're buying artesinal single source electricity sustainably sourced from trained dolphins.

Average US electrical power is $.18/kWh per google. Figure the desktop draws 300W continuous (which it almost certainly can't), and that's 0.3 kW * 24 hr/day * 365.2425 days/yr == $473/year. So even if the mac was completely free you'd be looking at crossover in 5 years, or longer than the expected life of the device.

A device with no moving parts, only 5 years of expected life?!

I understand if you say that high-performance users will want a newer system after 5 years, but I'd be very surprised if this 64GB RAM machine doesn't suffice for 98% of people, including those who want to play then-common games at default settings

Good to have some concrete figures nonetheless of course, it's always useful as a starting point

First: it's not five years. It's five years if you posit that macs are magic and use no energy[1]. In practice they're 40-70% the consumption of a competing desktop (depends on usage and specific model, yada yada yada). So figure a few decades or thereabouts.

But even so: I'm not sure I know a single new-device Apple customer who has a single unit older than five years. The comment about power implied that you'd make up the big Mac price tag on power savings, and no, you won't, not nearly, before you hawk it on eBay to buy another.

[1] And also that you posit that the device is in a compute farm or something and pumped at full load 24/7. Average consumption for real development hardware (that spends 60% of its life in suspend and 90% of the remainder in idle) is much, much, much closer to zero than it is to 300W!

Also judging from the state of 5 and 10y old mac computers on the second hand market, you quickly realize they aren't very reliable machines.

My 2012 mbp is still going strong, only needed a new battery. Great keyboard, great screen, great trackpad. The second hand market seems to reflect this in my experience if you look at resale prices vs non-mac equivalents.

Resale price does not mean anything if most units have hardware issues which was largely the case for most +5y macs when I looked for them out of curiosity.

Granted this is also the case of many brands but I found it was easier to find old thinkpad, fujitsu and dell business laptops in good shape than it was to find Apple ones.

Maybe this is biased and it has more to do with professional vs personal use. I guess you are a bit more cautious with a laptop your employer is lending you.

My experience is on the contrary. Employer-lent laptop only needs to be _not lost_, especially in MNCs. Replacing an MNC laptop is relatively easy and free for the user - as long as it is not lost, by the way.

> First: it's not five years. It's five years if you posit that macs are magic and use no energy[1].

Huh? I'm not "positing" anything, I'm responding to the longevity you stated:

> you'd be looking at crossover in 5 years, or longer than the expected life of the device.

As for Apple users not having devices older than five years... ehm, yeah: the brand targets an audience that really likes shiny new toys (either because they're lured into thinking they need it, or because it's a status symbol for them). Not sure how that's relevant here though

Well, I know exactly what you're saying, but to be fair to Apple, my 68K Mac that's nearly 40 still works. My iMac G4 is fine. PowerMac G3 is fine. First gen Mac Pro is fine. Meanwhile, the only PCs I know of that survive time quite as well (and I collect old crap) were all nearly equivalent to Apple level pricing at the time of their introduction.

While Apple does charge nearly criminal markup for RAM and storage, they at least make some products that last (except for the TouchBar MacBooks' keyboards). I just hope my Mac Studio lasts too.

> Meanwhile, the only PCs I know of that survive time quite as well

Nah, everything works forever, it's just that no one cares. My younger child retired a 3770K Ivy Bridge box last year that I'd bought at or near release in 2012, so ~11 years of steady use.

People fetishize Apple hardware, but the truth is that modern electronics manufacturing is bulletproof up and down the assembly lines.

The ICs, yeah. Not so much power supplies, screens, etc. I've had the former go up in flames and the later delaminate - my current laptop has small bubbles around the edges of the screen.

I've also had high wattage GPUs inexplicably fail and lost a few SSDs to unexpected catastrophic failure. TBF I haven't lost any halfway decent SSDs within the past 5 years.

I don't think I've ever lost a motherboard, CPU, or RAM though. Even secondhand recycled data center stuff. It seems to just keep working forever.

My 4930K system is over a decade old and it still serves as a NAS. I have a Core 2 Duo kicking around that I'm sure will boot. There's a perfectly usable T520 sitting on my desk running Windows 11. But I must admit that Macbooks outlast most other laptops.

Apple only promises to support devices for 5 years.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772

They do sometimes end up supporting devices for longer than this, but you can't rely on it.

Some VHCOL areas are more than 2x or even near 3x that electric rate

During peak hours (4-9pm daily) in San Diego you can be paying nearly $1/kWh (generation + transmission cost) to SDGE, so at least in certain areas, the running cost is very much relevant even for consumers.

But the price difference is only $38…

Also the size difference

Framework also charges quite a surplus on the SSD. For example "WD_BLACK SN7100 NVMe 2TB" is €229, but a more typical price is around ~€140, so that's about €90 extra. Don't know how that compares to Apple.

Framework absolutely does fleece you on the SSD, so don’t buy SSDs from them if you’re price-sensitive. But compared to Apple it’s nowhere close: per Apple’s website, upgrading a current Mac Mini or Mac Studio from 512 GB to 2 TB costs $600. You can buy a WD_BLACK SN850X 8TB for that much money (or a WD_BLACK SN8100 4TB and still have a quarter of it left over, if you really want PCIe 5.0, but there’s no point at the moment).

I checked and it's €750 extra to get a 2TB here in Ireland (just to compare apples with apples wrt. Framework Desktop). Wahahaha, this is the most ridiculous thing I've seen.

One note is the Mac Mini surprisingly has 3rd party SSD upgrades now as well. Both gauge the storage price a bit, so probably best to just go 3rd party for both unless you're going to stick with the base storage.

I'm not sure where you got $2861 for the Max+ Framework 64gb, unless you put two massively larger drives than the Mac Mini comes with... I got $2100 for the Max+ 64gb with the faster 2tb drive option. +400 to go to 128gb ram.

Btw, you can buy a MacBook Pro Max M1 16" 64GB SoC RAM, 1TB SSD in excellent condition, with warranty, refurbished by Amazon with a brand new battery for $1,500 right now.

Corporations are switching laptops on a 3-year cycle.

Next year, there will be a flood of M2s, in 2 years, M3s, 3 years, M4s, nada, nada.

Apple base models tend to be fairly competitive but they have some of the most extreme margins on RAM and SSDs in the industry.

They charge $600 CAD to go from 16GB -> 32 GB.

They charge $900 CAD for 512 GB -> 2 TB SSD.

> They charge $900 CAD for 512 GB -> 2 TB SSD.

The SSD is user replaceable, so you can replace it with a cheaper third party option.

The Mac Pro is the only Apple system that has user-replaceable storage. The Mac Mini & Studio both feature slotted storage modules, but Apple firmware locks it and so it can't be replaced much less upgraded.

There is no firmware lock, and here's the iFixIt guide for doing it.

> How to Replace the SSD in your Mac mini (2024)

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Replace+the+SSD+in+your+...

...normal M.2 SSDs are incompatible.

This guide is purely instructional for how to replace the SSD with another of the same type.

You can indeed purchase third party replacements up to the maximum size supported by that model.

This is incorrect. Mac minis (starting with the M4 model) and Mac Studios simply need to be restored via DFU mode following physical installation of another SSD (be it a larger one or simply a replacement) to function. There are third parties who have reverse engineered the design of the PCB and paired it with the same Hynix and Sandisk NAND chips Apple use.

I would still call this practice malicious. There's no justifiable reason for that much of a jump in price in the first place.

Unless I'm misunderstanding their store page, Framework charges $687 CAD ($500 USD) to go from 16GB → 32 GB RAM.

They do only charge $214 CAD ($156 USD) to 512 GB → 2 TB SSD, thanks to it just being an NVMe stick.

> Unless I'm misunderstanding their store page, Framework charges $687 CAD ($500 USD) to go from 16GB → 32 GB RAM.

That doesn't seem accurate for any of their computers? There is a pretty big leap from 32GB -> 64GB for the Desktop, but that is also a different processor.

Others in this thread already pointed out Apple is price competitive at mac mini, and Apple is extremely price competitive since they switched to their own chips.

I would love it if PC was in a better state, but ever since Intel started flopping everyone in the PC land is praising AMD while ignoring the fact that both of them are just underdelivering compared to Apple. You cannot even get a consumer grade CPU on PC with >128 bit memory bus other than this strix halo chip - and it happened by accident. There is nothing on roadmap in the mainstream that will bump it - industry is years away from adding it. Meanwhile Apple is benefiting from this since M1, and the AI workloads just made it an even larger win.

Apple charges an increased premium as you get further away from the base models. It’s really hard to find a better deal that the M4 base models

That's purely due to Apple's ridiculous SSD pricing. You can save a lot of money by using an external SSD.

Don't forget how Apple rips you off on RAM. Always.

RAM isn’t cheap but it’s not awful, or as bad as it once was, especially in their laptops. One of the primary things that has kept me from buying a new Apple desktop or laptop is honestly SSD pricing.

It’s absolutely ridiculous given how cheap 1TB or 2TB drives are. And generally, in my experience, the ones Apple uses have had subpar performance compared to what’s available for the PC market for less than half the price. Not to mention their base configuration machines usually have subtly crappier SSDs than a tier up.

I haven’t bought a new Mac since Apple released the M-series. I’ve wanted to multiple times, but the value just isn’t there for me personally.

Except they keep making it harder and harder to install your own drives into apple machines.

You don’t install it but run over Thunderbolt which is plenty fast.

Right but external drives are no replacement for internal drives, so your point is moot.

Thunderbolt drives are almost native speed so unless whatever work you are doing is heavily IO bound, external drives are cheap way to boost storage for most people.

Sure, Macs should not be so restricted but unless government take action, that's not going to happen.

It's not difficult at all.

> How to Replace the SSD in your Mac mini (2024)

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Replace+the+SSD+in+your+...

from the link:

> Apple integrates the storage controllers into the Apple Silicon SoC, which means that normal M.2 SSDs are incompatible.

Nevertheless, third parties have created compatible replacements that are much cheaper.

They just don't need to include a SSD controller, since that is already built into the SOC.

Notice how you specifically chose the mac mini for your example, the easiest upgradable machine in the lineup.

iMacs and macbook pros on the other hand are significantly more difficult. Apple could easily rectify this but choose not to, so that you are more likely to buy their overpriced upsells on the initial purchase.

Thunderbolt 5 is plenty fast for an external SSD. In fact you'd be hard-pressed to find an external SSD that even goes that fast

Why are you mentioning external SSDs? We were talking about how difficult Apple makes it to swap internal drives.

External drives are not a replacement for internal drives. I have a laptop for a reason, and on crowded trains and planes needing some desk space to plug in dongles, huibs, and external drives just doesnt cut it.

Strix Halo is one of the tier-1 out-of-the-box perfect targets for for // hypermodern // nixos so I'm tuning it for the EVO-X2 which was the first desktop one available (and we'll support omarchy's hyprland rice out of the box, its a nice rice even if I prefer Ono-Sendai).

That's getting you twice the RAM for the same price. Now the Framework has both intangible cool factor and scope for more upgrades, so if money is no object, get the Framework.

But I can vouch for the EVO-X2 as the real Strix Halo experience: its thermals are solid, and even under sustained 100W+ its quieter than the average gaming PC. Obviously an elite ITX build can do better, but it's jaw-dropping at the price point: great ports, plenty of M.2 capacity, stable under extreme load, and a lot cheaper.

obligatory Neuromancer reference to get those sweet upvotes.

Well played sir! <3

> Wow, someone managed to beat Apple on price??

He didn't pick the equivalent Mac to compare to. The closest Mac would be a an M4 Pro Mac Mini, not a Mac Studio.

Right now I see a 64GB M4 Pro Mac Mini with 2TB SSD is $2600. Still more expensive, but not double the price. The Apple refurbished store has the same model for $2200.

The M4 Pro Mac Mini probably has the edge in performance, though I can't say how much. The Ryzen platform driver and software support is still early.

I think these Strix Halo boxes are great, but I also think they're a little high in the hype cycle right now. Once supply and demand evens out I think they should be cheaper, though.

> The Apple refurbished store has the same model (...)

You have to admit this reads as grade A cope.

Is it that hard to acknowledge that Apple price gouges all their product line?

No, the very cheapest (new) one is competetive, everything else is price gouged

The point is that before the AMD Ryzen Al Max+ 395 chip there was only Apple that offered something comparable for the desktop / laptop that could do these AI relate tasks. Were else could you find a GPU with 64-128 memory?

Not as good but there's loads of devices with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with 64-128GB of RAM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com