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Comment by apetrovic | Hacker News Reader

That's overly dramatic. I don't think a new Macbook Air today is a worse value proposition than some Mac from 35 years ago. I just checked Apple prices from 1991:

    - Mac Classic II, the slowest of the bunch, $1.900, or about $4.661 today
    - Quadra 900, the fastest model in 1991, was $7.200 ($17.663 today)
    - PowerBook 170 was $4600 ($11.285)

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"Value" and "price" aren't the same thing. A new computer in 1991 cost more, but it also covered a vastly increased set of use cases versus a machine from 5 years prior (assuming the hypothetical 1991 computer buyer had even owned a computer before). Today, you can buy a used MBP with an M1 and it will do everything a new MBP can do, and the differences compared to a new machine will be imperceptible to most users.

Plenty of people would even be perfectly happy on an x86 Mac, too. Sure, there would be a perceptible difference compared to a new machine, but not enough to justify the price. That's what obsoleting Rosetta is about, it's about artifically making x86 Macs so unbearable that would-be happy users have no choice but to buy something else.

All his comments are overly dramatic.

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