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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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

But the price difference is only $38…

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