Right. Because my desire is to spend a fortune, only to have to spend another fortune to make it all just work.
Yes, for some people it is a serious investment.
You might win 500k or more a year, good for you, you are successful. But for people who have kids who will have to go to University ,even at 100k a year , $1300 isn't a small amount of money.
If you think people buy laptops like they buy candies well you're a privileged man, and again I wish you the best,but that's not the reality for most of us.
what this does mean for me, is that older models will come down in price and become much more affordable. might even be able to pick up last years for $2-400 on ebay.
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I live in the Midwest and have what in the US would be a sanely priced house that bears some resemblance to its cost-of-construction. I have done business trips to Silicon Valley to developers who are making only modestly more than me, if not the same as me, who are living in houses worth 5 times as much on paper (and in their mortgage payments), and they'll be in there putting in top-of-the-line granite countertops or something that I wouldn't dream of putting in. My theory is that their house is just so gosh darned expensive that the idea of dropping $2K on a new laptop or getting The Very Best Countertops (TM) seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the debt they're already carrying anyhow. While I could certainly afford a $2K laptop, it's certainly enough to make me think twice, thrice, and a fourth time before I bought it (and I tend to come in more in the $1K price range when I do, since I run Linux and not Mac. There's some nice stuff at that price point).
So yes, for most people, this sounds like a fortune for a laptop.
I think it's actually addressed half of shortcomings of the old Pixel: 4GB of memory has been upped to a reasonable 8GB or a generous 16GB. The CPU bump is also a welcome change. Only the limited disk space is an issue.
I just wished they doubled the storage (at least) and sold them with plain old Linux as developer machines. Would be a great way to get into the hearts and minds of many programmers.
I do agree that making it more Linux-friendly or selling a pre-installed Linux version would be great.
(I suppose there is some sort of tax or import cost...?)
Personally I wouldn't pay more than $300 a machine and consider $1299 to be pretty extortionate amounts of cash considering the rate of depreciation.
Hey everyone I just worked 2x the time to pay for something shiny with no productivity gain!
(I use a shitty old X201 with 4Gb RAM and an SSD from eBay connected to a monitor I skip dived because it was 5:4 ratio)
This thing was in almost perfect condition, no scratches, drops, nothing.
The people who wine about the costs of going high end (MacBook , Watch, whatever) aren't part of Apple's target demographic. Apple wants to (and always has) sell well made devices to people who don't want cheap, and aren't afraid to pay for it.
I'm typing this on Thinkpad T430s with i7, two SSDs (one of them in ultrabay), 3G modem... when it was bought, it was as expensive, as Macbook Pro can be. Yet, I consider the Thinkpad worth the asking price and Macbook Pro not.
It is entirely about what you value in the product you buy. You may be totally utilitarian, or you may want fashion item. In the end, it is just stuff anyways ;)