Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Buying what you need today and no more

Upgrade unfriendly hardware

Faster obsolescence cycle.

Apple isn't doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They're doing it because it will make you buy their products more often. It's a smart way to do business.

View on HN

Buyers remorse is also bad for business. If you feel the extra $700 you spent on top of the, relatively, high sticker price of your laptop* wasn't worth it, you're not as likely to be a return customer. That's my experience from the days I spent selling swords ($300-$5000 range for reference) in a martial arts supply shop.

*I feel like Ultrabooks have helped Apple's image by making the Air seem about the right price for a nice laptop.

I'd expect cognitive dissonance to have the higher effect - "I paid so much for this, it must be good".

Reassuringly expensive.

For some people yes. My best friend is that way. Charge a lot for it and he'll love it forever. I point this out to him but he remains unfazed. I'm not so easily convinced that price = quality ;).

Yes, but unlike with PC laptops there is a real resale market. I upgrade my macbook every other year or so, and it usually just costs me a few hundred dollars after selling my old machine. Upgrading just the RAM or HDD would be cheaper, but wouldn't also be much of an upgrade compared to getting a new machine.

Some PCs have a good resale market too. Thinkpads hold their value well enough to use the same technique.

Isn't the resale market a strong reason to upgrade the RAM and HDD as the upgraded machines have higher resale value?

Only if increaseInOriginalCost - increaseInResaleValue <= valueDerivedFromBetterSpecs.

I'm not sure that's true.

I suspect the MacBook Air is as successful as it is because most people want portability a lot more than they need raw power. I wouldn't build a render farm out of 11" MacBook Airs, but I bet they're a lot easier to pull out on a crowded flight than my 15" MacBook Pro.

This does raise an interesting question: how often do normal users grow past their hardware's limits?

I'm not a typical laptop user. My machine serves as a portable desktop replacement, and I spawn virtual machines to work on software for Linux and Windows. Even so, my 4-year-old machine is serving me pretty well. It wasn't the base model, but its specs are pretty pathetic by modern standards.

It doesn't take a mini supercomputer to maintain a photo collection and edit documents. Some people will be satisfied with a base model MacBook Air for a good while.

Though I admit, buying a machine with 4GB RAM today is a bit sketchy. Maybe the SSD cures it, but OS X does not take heavy swapping well at all.

Sure, in theory. However the upgrades the OP listed are in fact unnecessary on an MBA (i7 vs. i5, 512 SSD vs. 128 SSD).

not memory though

Er, what? How can you say "more storage is unnecessary" as a blanket statement of fact?

I wouldn't think of buying a 512 GB SSD for a workstation, let alone a Macbook Air. That's not future proofing, it's a waste of money.

It's also not about "storage". It's quite simple to get "storage" with external HDDs, as noted in the OP. What we're talking about here is paying for premium onboard flash storage, which is unnecessary, particularly on an MBA.

Have to disagree. Different people have different use cases and different budgets.

In particular, some people might like the mobility of the MBA, but have a lot of photos, music, or movies they want to take with them (i.e., different use cases). And many people have the means to shell out for large internal storage because they don't want to manage the external drives. Some people like Kias, some like Lexus.

Actually, I would argue that external USB disks are more annoying to use with a MacBook Air than with a workstation. I couldn't even have my MBA on my lap right now if I had to connect an external disk for music or apps.

I've been using an Air as my sole computer since 2010. I just upgraded to a new one, and spent the $300 extra for a 512G SSD. My old 256G machine has been hovering close to full for the past few months, which has been pretty annoying when I tried to do things like "prepare a 120p graphic novel for printing" or "edit a video for that GN's Kickstarter campaign". I dug out an old external HD for those purposes, and really hated that I was using one - I had to do these things at home now.

I want to have all my data available when I go on a trip, or out to a cafe. And I don't want to hassle with carrying external drives or finding power for them; that completely negates the "lightweight" and "has a long battery life" features of the Air. Which were the major reasons I switched to one.

Obviously you don't have any need for that kind of space - but trust me, there are people out there who do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com