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Comment by datakan | Hacker News Reader

The price hikes drove me back to windows. If I'm paying those prices I may as well be able to play games with my kid again. I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.

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Unfortunately the price hikes are affecting the entire industry, and it's not just high-end rigs for gaming and local LLMs. Game consoles and even the Raspberry Pi have gone up in price. In fact, Apple was one of the last holdouts; it didn't start raising prices until June.

I paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.

Once you price out similar specs for a Windows gaming build, I don't know how much better you'll be doing, and it won't have unified memory so you'll be "paying twice": once for RAM and again for VRAM.

$250 just for 2x8gb DDR5 RAM. I'm not even sure you'd save much money on a DDR4 build, all parts considered.

> it won't have unified memory

Why wouldn't you choose unified memory if it matters to you ? A central point of Windows/linux is to get the hardware you want.

Those options are more exotic in the custom PC world. Probably wouldn't be saving money.

"exotic" only means you won't find it at Wallmart. Buying a PC with a Strix Halo chip or Core Ultra is not some obscure quest or back alley deal.

On money, being about the same price as a mac is good enough, given the machine will have vastly more versatility and expandability.

It won't resonate as much if you're straight into the "one size fits all" target of Apple machines. I used to have a macbook and an iPad, the iPad being the primary device, and it was an utter pain. Moving to a windows tablet cuts my costs in half while being able to do more things in total.

Strix Halo machine is at least $2500 it looks like, cause that's more for local AI, not a cost-saving measure. Can't upgrade the RAM or GPU on a unified chip.

I don't wish an iPad on anyone, it's worse than basically any laptop.

> $2500

That's par for the course yes. The AI bubble didn't help it was never priced at entry level either.

I got mine the first year it got out, and the laptop (a Z13 with 64gb RAM) was price aligned with the top of the line MBP pro with the same ram.

You can game just fine with a modern iGPU these days, depending on what you play. You don't always need VRAM.

Exactly. The Mac will have a better iGPU, but if your goal is to run arbitrary games, Mac isn't an option.

Mac certainly doesn't always have a better iGPU. The base model Macs don't have particularly impressive iGPUs and they are going to be more common.

I'm pretty darn happy with video games on my Mac. It can play the only two video games that I play: World of Warcraft and Baldur's Gate.

> I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.

For me, the advantage is not being on Windows or Linux. If my PopOS/Manjaro setups hadn't introduced so many random issues with WoW on raid nights that it became a meme for my raid team, I might still be on Linux.

did you consider the depreciation of your windows machine? A mac is easy to re-sell.

The used-market value of the ECC DDR5, >16GB GPU, and >1TB SSD PC components used in my side Windows machine have outpaced the depreciation costs given how little (non-cryptocoin, non-AI) wear has been applied; so while I hope that is no longer the PC case someday, I would hesitate to broad-brush all or even most PCs built to pre-AI modern specs as having lost value at this time.

In the future we will all have screens only and a internet connection.

We'll stream everything, so "computers" will exist in the cloud and users won't have to worry about upgrading their machines.

They'll just pay a monthly fee like for mobile data or whatever, and you just connect via screen.

All these data centers and shit around it (internet, etc.) will be actually useful to every day consumers.

Why should I have to upgrade my GPU every 2-3 years? I should just be able to pay to get 4k streaming top of the line graphics.

And <25ms ping latency will become a human right. Only back water countries will see their people having to suffer loading screens and 150ms+ ping

/s btw (in case you're oblivious or something)

Best of luck getting a good deal for new hardware right now from anyone right now. All hardware pricing negotiations these days start with give us your company credit card, drop your pants and bend over the table.

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