In my case, I feel that Apple has priced itself out of the EU market with the latest Macs and iDevices. The new base M2 Air begins at €1500 after taxes which is genuinely an absurd amount of money to ask for a device that comes with 8 GB and 256 GB of non-replaceable ram and ssd respectively. The cheapest iPhone 14 starts at a bit over €1000. My plan is to keep my entry-level M1 Air for a few more years and then I'm replacing it with a Framework laptop.
My wife needed a laptop for class a year ago, so I gave her my old macbook pro 13 i bought in 2014. I also had a macbook air m1 for personal use, which I replaced recently with a macbook pro 14 m1, and planned to give my wife the air. She refuses the air bc she likes the old 13 so much, and she abuses the shit out of it.
How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years? Even the battery life is still ok. I am going to have to force her to consider the air bc the old 13 is a security risk without OS updates.
The only reason why I replaced the old 13 with the air was bc the 13 could not render 4k 60fps on an external display. Otherwise, I would have kept using it.
The old 13 cost me about $1600 USD new (256GB HD, 8 GB ram). Amortize that cost over 9 years and that doesn't seem so bad. Even my iphone 8 is still going strong.
Another anecdote - my current employer gave me a new macbook pro 15 when I started here back in 2017. It took my abuse well and the only reason I am not still using it is bc my employer forced me to upgrade when the m1 pros came out.
You probably won't need to replace your air for like 7 years, or when apple stops updates for your machine.
EDIT - I am surprised I am getting downvoted. You would think more folks on HN would be happy about long lasting products but the anti-apple bias is strong enough to override the concern of having a more sustainable product.
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
and subsequently for this flamey statement:
> You would think more folks on HN would be happy about long lasting products but the anti-apple bias is strong enough to override the concern of having a more sustainable product.
FWIW, it seems like you got incredibly lucky. In recent years, I've been through the following MacBooks:
- 2013 MB (Glorious, ran forever, needed more RAM and speed)
- 2016 MBP (bad keyboard, then rapid battery expansion)
- 2018 MBP (battery expansion, then logic board failure)
- 2019/2020 MBP (logic board failure)
- M1 MBP 13" (nothing, it's running beautifully.)
IIRC, all of the above failures happened just outside of the warranty period. For personal MacBooks, I will no longer go without AppleCare+. The risk of failure and accidental damage is too great.
We have an org with thousands of MBPs with similar experiences. It got bad enough that discussions were had about switching staff to Chromebooks or Windows laptops. (Chromebooks didn't meet requirements and Windows laptops are even worse for hardware and software reasons)
All of these devices basically sat on a desk in a ~68F office most of the time.
>FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
They are, though.
I'm on my 4th MacBook and all have lasted me at least 5 years. The reason I upgrade them is to get more speed/specs, not because they stopped working, I even sold them and made back some small $$.
PS The touchbar thing was nonsense, I didn't jump on that, as well as other gimmicks. Still the MBP is a solid option.
I use my MBP 6-8 hours every. single. day. I plug two monitors to it and leave everything on 24/7 (I only dim the screen but never close it). I'm sure I put way more use into them than the average user. I once went close to two years without a restart.
No other laptop I've owned has been as reliable as the MBPs.
Is 5 years any kind of achievement? I’m currently running a generic hp laptop from 2012(?). Not a single issue. Just had to insert one more 8gb ram, to keep chrome happy, and change the ssd once. Everything else still works fine.
I guess I got lucky too. Because I bought a 2012 MBP (the first generation that had the HiDPI Retina displays) and it lasted me over 6 years of daily, hard use. It was still in decent condition but my job at the time got me one of the newer ones. Of course, that one had the bad keyboard and had to be swapped.
2016-2020 the dark ages but outside of that 4 year period (that Apple has firmly reversed course on), Apple's reputation for excellent laptops is well deserved.
The #1 thing preventing Apple from getting into S-tier is user-serviceable storage.
Baking on the memory? It's frustrating and gimps the device lifespan, but arguably unavoidable with the bandwidth Apple is targeting. Without replaceable storage though, every Apple Silicon device is effectively a ticking time-bomb. These devices will all hit their TBW limit long before they're unusable, and Apple refused to anticipate this because... it side-steps their pricing scheme?
The current Macbook lineup is a step in the right direction, but far from perfect. Even ignoring my hundred gripes with MacOS, I think there are clear hardware improvements they can make with future iterations. None of these improvements seem particularly profitable though, so I'm not counting on Apple adding them.
High speed internet has largely rendered local storage obsolete for most users.
However, Apple’s base model is frankly silly. A solid 2TB NVME drive is only 150$, slapping the equivalent of 20$ worth of storage on a 1,500$ laptop is crazy.
Constant backups are essential when using a computer without user-serviceable storage. That or mounting another [network] drive and doing all your work from that instead of internal storage. Otherwise you'll be without your data for hours if not days/weeks whenever something inevitably goes wrong (not even with the storage itself) and you can't simply pull the drive to continue working on another computer.
The point of the parent comment was not about saving data from the drive, but that the devices are landfill material once they hit tbw limits on their drives, even if they were otherwise in good condition.
> The M1 boot process requires a working SSD to boot macOS. The SSD contains a Signed System Volume that is cryptographically sealed by Apple. No seal, no bootable System.
> So if the internal drive on your M1 Mac fails completely, even an external bootable drive won't boot. Yep, your Mac is bricked.
> Constant backups are essential when using a computer without user-serviceable storage.
Constant backups are a necessity even if your computer has RAID-6 storage built on enterprise-grade storage.
Your office can catch fire. You can be hit by ransomware. Multiple devices in the array can fail in rapid sequence (happened to me once). Your computer can get stolen (happened to me, twice).
Maybe you were lucky, maybe I was unlucky... Even before 2016-2020, I had 3 MacBooks that just straight up crapped out on me. Two were the nvidia graphics chips that would come desoldered or something. Another one just died one day for no reason. I am not trying to say that they are bad laptop, but on average, I think they are just as prone to dying as any other laptop. I don't think they are particularly "excellent." I've worked on hundreds of laptops, and I can't really say one brand does any better than the rest. Some make expensive laptops that are total garbage, some make cheap laptops that are really good. Assuming the laptop is spec'd how you need it, the quality is going to come down to your luck, and that's about all.
I also had a 2016 with a bad keyboard, they replaced it for free because it was a well known terrible keyboard and it probably didn't hurt that it was still under applecare. I continued to use that laptop into 2019, it did need a battery replacement (it got puffy, it happens) that I paid for out of pocket. Then I gave that laptop to a friend and she used it until she finally thought it was too slow/big (it was a 15") and bought a used air.
A failure != a brand new laptop, especially with applecare.
IMO chromebooks are worse but cheaper so you feel better just tossing them out. Windows laptops are worse .. so your position is Apple sux bucause the laptops fai sometimes. But window laptops fail more ... so ...
so what? Hardware fails sometimes, Apple has great support and actually own up to defective products. Sure I'm a little miffed that I can't generally fix them myself (and especially miffed that they solder storage onto a mainboard and don't use something like m.2). But every last apple laptop i've owned that I have replaced for speed reasons has gone to someone else who's used it for years after i've been done with it. (Well save one that took an unfortunate tumble into a lake.. no saving that one, RIP last macbook I ever owned with an optical drive)
Apple does not have support good enough for professionals, my colleagues are suffering with defective MacBooks until they can justify a full replacement, because Apple repairs cost a lot of time, while Lenovo sends a repairperson with tools and replacement parts to my office.
My Dell XPS shit itself, unbootable while blinking memory error diagnostic codes, a day before I had to make a flight. Dell scheduled service for me the next day when I was meant to be on my flight, so I called them to explain and they sent a tech to my home 3 hours later that afternoon.
On the other hand, an Apple store once took over 3 weeks to order a replacement battery for my macbook air. I never even received an explanation for this incredible incompetence. And when I finally got the battery, the apple store employee made sure to add insult to injury by criticizing my android phone...
It's night and day. My take is that Dell has something to prove while Apple rests on their laurels.
My biggest issue with the early Airs is that they were so aggressive with how thin the display is, that the LCD is often damaged by the bag you keep it in from the outside.
A replacement display is basically 70+% the cost of the entire machine.
AppleCare had to replace two of them on my Sandy Bridge MacBook Air. They blamed the bag I kept it in(when replacing it the second time), but they also sold me the bag.
edit: for the record I think this limit is stupid and the biggest flaw of the Air. You're right that other than that, it's a damn near perfect daily driver.
I couldn't agree more - I was shocked when I discovered the Air can't natively drive two displays, even with many docks. The only real solution are things like that kensington dock's display-over-USB hack which is not as reliable as a native monitor connection in my experience, and requires additional driver software on your OS :(
I just took it for-granted that every laptop in this price range on sale today will by and large be able to drive two external displays, but nope!
I ended up using a "double wide"/32:9 style monitor - the Samsung CRG9 - these 32:9 panels can be had in 5120 x 1440 resolution, which is exactly the size and res of two 27 inch 1440p panels side by side but in a single display. Works great on the Air, although its not a super cheap option.
Which comes with drawbacks. Video is sent out compressed over USB protocol which requires CPU cycles, more resolution + moving images = more CPU grunt required. Plus there is the risk some update will break the driver making your dock useless.
I think you're right, but the irony is the segmentation isn't working - in my experience no customer notices this drawback on the Air until after they've bought it. Everyone (quite rightly) assumes a 1000 dollar+ laptop will probably drive two displays in a pinch.
I don't know anyone who went "Ah! only one monitor support!? I better move up the range to get that 2nd display support..." etc. You would really need to get into the weeds on the spec sheets to notice ahead of purchase.
I actually find many more people doing the opposite - choosing to move "down range" to the Air for the form factor, given it still has a great CPU. These power users who choose based on the great form factor get hurt the worst on this.
The M2 MBP also can only drive 1 external display. The M2 Pro and M2 Max variants can drive more. Apple only put two display controllers in the M1/M2 chips which is why they support so few monitors.
It's still for market segmentation but there is a hardware reason.
Check out the DisplayLink stuff. I think it works pretty well. I even devote one DisplayLink screen to security cameras (4-6 640x480 cameras at 15fps). I also use that screen to play YouTube videos, if I'm following along with something
It handles it just fine at 8-10% CPU usage on an M1.
Seems far more likely that you've been incredibly unlucky. I've had many Macs and have never had battery expansion or logic board failures. I know many people that still use their 2013-era machines and they're still chugging along.
My wife has been using Macs for a long time now while I use both Macs and Dells with Linux and, occasionally, a Lenovo or an HP. We have gone through at least 10 Macs in total and none of them failed in less than 8 years. One got a puffy battery (replaced in warranty), one got chipped when it fell from the desk (a white MacBook, Apple replaced the bottom, keyboard, and palm rest for free, even though the machine was out of warranty, but was listed in a recall for the palm rest). Some HDs died and some flash got upgraded. While it's not a daily driver, even the white MacBook is still going strong (as is the Bondi Blue iMac, the eMac, and the dual G5, none of which get much uptime these days, but boot up just fine every month or so). Both our current Macs (a 13" Pro and an i5 Mini) are from 2014 and will be replaced by M2 ones because they can't get the newest OS (while I can get away with it, my wife won't for long due to professional compliance rules).
No consumer-grade PC laptop or desktop of mine lasted that long in active use (some x86 servers did, as all the Sun and IBM PPC/POWER stuff) without extensive overhauling. Even my Thinkpads got cracks after five years.
The thing that worries me the most with the newer Macs is the flash storage - when it dies, I don't expect them to be repairable. I hope Apple includes M.2 slots in the future, even if the laptops need to be bulkier because of that.
> All of these devices basically sat on a desk in a ~68F office most of the time.
That's the problem. You need to discharge the battery once in a while or it builds up gas and expands. I had a 2015 that was perfect until I stopped going anywhere in March 2020. So I basically didn't unplug it for a year, and then the battery got explodey.
So now that I still work at home, I make sure to unplug my laptop once in a while just to drain it down a bit.
Edit: Not sure why I'm getting downvoted here. You still need to unplug your older Macs that don't have the software and firmware updates that do this automatically now.
I'm simply pointing out why OP had battery problems.
> So now that I still work at home, I make sure to unplug my laptop once in a while just to drain it down a bit.
That's still a defect; the laptop battery management should do that for you. As an example, the Dell laptops I'm used to automatically drain the battery to ~95% when plugged in all the time (it appears to be at 100% while on AC, but when you unplug it you can see the true charge).
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
Except when they’re not and Apple tries very hard to bury the problem while the machine is still relevant, so your choices are either to pay for (expensive) repairs out of pocket or dump it and buy a different model. Then years later once the machine is obsolete for most, will they finally give in and offer a free repair to the lucky ones who have been left holding these hot potatoes of a defective model. Not every time though, sometimes they just won’t accept responsibility at all, ever.
See the GPU issues, the battery issues, the butterfly keyboards, the yellow tinted panels…
You forgot the stage light effect. Mysteriously Apple give a free fix/service program for the 13" models but not the 15" models. Kind of sucks if you had a 15" model that started to go bad.
This has been my experience since I first went from windows to mac. People always talk about the "Apple Tax" and it's real but it's not as obscene as people make it out to be when you factor in longevity. I had friends in college who were replacing ~$400-500 machines almost yearly while my ~$1,200 machine (2009) lasted all 4 years and then some. I only upgraded since I was using it professionally and wanted some more power. I have friends who are using their old MacBooks from college up until a few years ago (over 10 years). Now if you are using the machine professionally you might want to upgrade more often but I still get 4 years easily out of my MBPs. I upgraded early (~2 years in) for the M1 Max because it was such a nice jump but I could still be using my 2019 right now if I wanted to.
did you ever stop to think that maybe if they bought a $1200 windows machine it would have lasted 4 years.
also macs were very early to hop on the ssd train and that was an insane advantage over most windows machines. I think that gap has closed substantially at this point.
> maybe if they bought a $1200 windows machine it would have lasted 4 years
Maybe it's different now (I haven't used Windows in decades, so I don't know) but I will say that it never felt that way to me. Perhaps because Apple controls the OS and the hardware, and has the ability to either spend extra time optimizing for older known hardware that falls within a support window or to delay a feature that would be problematic for older-but-supported hardware, but my lived experience with Apple hardware is that I get a lot more practical longevity out of it without having to work to squeeze every last drop of performance out of it.
Yes, I can always take a $1200 Windows machine and put XFCE or Xubuntu or Mate on it and it'll extend its life considerably, but as someone who has always tried to extend the life of my components as long as possible (the server at my feet is an Athlon FX) -- it's always just felt easier on Apple hardware.
It's even easier still with non-Windows PC operating systems, but ... has Windows gotten better on this regard or is that longevity still bolstered by migrating away from Windows?
From a software support perspective macOS is the worst. They don't tell you how long an OS/machine will be supported for they just cut off support whenever they feel like it. So some machines will get 5 years, some 8, it's a roll of the dice. They sort of update N-2 versions but they also don't bring back every bug fix so...
I don't think they spend any real time optimizing for old hardware, for example APFS is just a turd on HDD systems and yet they forced everyone on it and worse yet kept selling HDD iMacs on the low end (which really wasn't that low).
Meanwhile MS announces in advance what the support window will be. With Windows 10 there was barely any difference in requirements from Windows 8 so pretty much everything that wasn't a bottom tier netbook or tablet from 2010 still works fine and is supported until 2025. Meanwhile the 2013 Mac Pro which was an expensive beast and sold until late 2019 won't even get some security updates in 2025.
Linux and the BSDs also announce ahead of time the support period and there's a plethora of options for aging hardware.
It seems dishonest to leave out Windows 11 when talking about how MS is for announcing in advance what support will be. They did not give anywhere near proper notice about the TPM/UEFI/Secureboot requirement ahead of time.
> They did not give anywhere near proper notice about the TPM/UEFI/Secureboot requirement ahead of time.
Nearly all machines, DIY included, would have met these requirements. Intel PTT has been built into their processors since 2013. AMD for at least a few years.
From a software compatibility perspective, nothing beats Windows. Your windows laptop will continue to run flawlessly until the hardware stops working (although you may have to do a clean reinstall from time to time). Microsoft takes software compatibility very seriously.
Hardware as high quality as Apple is harder to come by though, and generally commands the same price premium.
Windows 11 is very good, so good in fact I couldn't even state one fault with it. No issues in heavy daily usage whatsoever.
I'm no windows fanboy, but it's a decent work/play OS. I've tried a few times to get used to Mac's, but found a lot of things very confusing - how to really close apps to save up some memory, the window close/minimize buttons are in the wrong corner, icons are (were?) a weird flat/3D combination.
Oh, and that all-aluminium body on macs. I don't know if it's just me having dry skin but I sort of always felt a slight buzz when it's charging.
The problem is finding the $1200 windows machine that feels valuable and worth it after four years; it's hard to find one that has the "build quality" if you will. Maybe people with the Surface are pleased with it still, that looked pretty nice.
I mean, any "pro" grade Dell or Lenovo laptop will last 10 years if it's not dropped or otherwise abused too badly. I've had several. I don't run Windows on them, so don't know how that experience would be. But hardware-wise they hold up. They aren't quite as light and elegant as a Mac but that doesn't matter to me.
Even commodity Dells like the Inspiron and XPS models tend to be extremely repairable (and fairly upgradable, which is where Apple really falls flat). Granted that there will always be lemons (and there have been lemon Macs, in which case you are SOL), but by and large people replacing PCs after a year or two just don't care to take the time.
I'm currently using a Dell XPS laptop that will turn 12 years old in a few months. Since I bought it, I've been able to
1. Replace the AC adapter and battery multiple times (the most common failure point for this model).
2. Upgrade the screen (yes, really!) to a wide color gamut model that can do photo editing in the AdobeRGB space. (New Macs have good screens, but not so long ago even the MBP only had an sRGB screen).
3. Add an SSD.
4. Upgrade the memory (supports up to 32 GB).
5. Upgrade the WiFi adapter card to a new model that supports WiFi 5 (née AC), getting me much faster wireless without having to buy a new laptop.
And ... a bunch of other stuff. All this has cost me less money, in total, than a brand new bottom-of-the-line Dell model would have cost me at any point in the last 12 years. The point being, if you're going to replace your device after 4 years anyway, may as well get a Macbook Air at this point (especially with the M1/M2 chip). But I've been delighted by the longevity of my old Dell.
I still have my Asus ROG g73S from 2010 and boot it up from time to time when I need a windows machine or CD/DVD/blu ray player. It runs windows 10 these days and doesn't have any issues with drivers, I definitely think its closer to apple in terms of both price and longevity. I use a macbook pro as my daily driver now and love the smaller form factor though.
They usually keep working just fine, but the Macs get beat up and bent a bit and keep "sticking together", the Dells and friends end up with broken covers, cracks, etc. Doesn't matter for the working part, but makes it much harder when someone wants "a newish one".
Out of 6 ThinkPads from the "pro" tiers that I've had, none of them failed at all and all of them worked fine for much longer than that, except from one whose screen failed after 3 years or so (ThinkPads had a bad quality period around the Vista era, then recovered much of the lost quality, although if they fall from a height they probably no longer end up fine while denting the ground like my 2005 ThinkPad did. By the way, in fact that ThinkPad, from 2005, still works, except that obviously it has almost no battery, doesn't support the latest Windows and is slow with current bloated software and websites).
It might have lasted 4 years, but you'll note I said I knew people using them up to 10 years. In fact my 2014 MBP is still in service, a friend of mine uses it. I had a $1k+ Windows laptop that was a few years old in 2007-2009 and I was thoroughly unimpressed in it's build quality and how crappy/slow it was after 2 years. This was all pre-ssd even on macs (or at least the macs I was buying).
I have no doubt that Windows laptop build quality has improved in the last decade, in no small part to chasing after Apple, but at this point I can't imagine going back to Windows so I'll never really know.
There are also laptops that went the opposite direction from Apple, yet they keep on trucking. Old Thinkpads, Panasonic Toughbooks and HP Elitebooks are perfectly usable today, arguably moreso than older Macs. Toss Linux on it, and you'll have longer first-party support than any Macbook shipped in the last decade.
If anything, the repairability and upgradability that prevented old Macs from being e-waste is gone now. It's hard to imagine Apple pushing the envelope on reusability or device longevity in their current era.
> I had friends in college who were replacing ~$400-500 machines almost yearly while my ~$1,200 machine (2009) lasted all 4 years and then some.
Other people have noted that shelling out the same for Windows hardware might get you better quality, but there's also the possibility that people who spend that much don't want to shell that out again so they take better care of their stuff.
My anecdote is the complete opposite experience. I bought a new 2012 MBA in June and the hard drive started failing on me in August of 2013. It was just out of the warranty so Apple did me a "favour" and let me buy a 3-year Apple care so the repair would be free. They made the Apple care start on the day I bought the MBA back in June, which was something that I got screwed on later on.
Then they recalled the 2012 MBAs because of failing SSDs in October 2013 and refused to refund my Apple care because they did me a "favour" and I got a good "deal" with getting Apple care because I shouldn't have been able to buy it post-warranty. It didn't matter that they recalled the SSD literally 2 months later free of charge, they wouldn't let me get rid of the Apple care and have it refunded.
In April 2016 the battery died on me and it was out of Apple care warranty because the Apple care was June 2012 - June 2015 instead of the August 2013 I purchased it on and being valid until August 2016. So that cost me another $250 to replace. Another repair I had to pay for that should have been free.
Finally in 2019 I updated to Catalina and it hosed the entire laptop which was working flawlessly before the update. It started randomly beach balling after about an hour of use and would stutter every couple of minutes until it eventually would lock up and turn off completely. Then it would randomly show the flashing question mark when booting up and it stopped working completely. The laptop couldn't even factory restore itself or stay on long enough to be restored over the internet. I brought it to Apple a few times, they didn't detect anything wrong with the laptop, and I eventually gave up on it. I still have no clue what that update did to kill my entire laptop but I was done putting money into it at that point.
Yeah, but only because I built a desktop in 2010, spent $1100 and didn't have to put a penny more into it until last year. And that was because I wanted to upgrade, not because I had to. I had a Dell laptop survive 8 years without paying for anything.
It really annoys me that the laptop died for no reason overnight after an OS upgrade and Apple couldn't even come up with an explanation or attempt to fix it. I've done some Googling recently because this was in my mind again and apparently Catalina bricked a lot of laptops but I can't seem to find any acknowledgment from Apple on that.
Yes, that's annoying. Generally Apple offers refunds for prior repairs (within some window) on service programs?
I'd guess that the compounding exceptions of your situtation (paying for AppleCare in liu of paying for a repair, then that repair being being of a service program) were sufficiently illegible to Apple that you didn't (couldn't?) get a refund.
I didn't downvote you, but I'd imagine you're being downvoted for arguing in favor of that laptop being economical.
At the risk of sounding like a dead meme, "a laptop going strong for over 9 years" is already the default for the kinds of folks who would opt for Linux and who would replace their laptops HDD with an SSD.
My $800 laptop from 2015 has been 16GiB RAM and 512TB SSD and it still works perfectly (save for an Ethernet port which I regrettably damaged). It's running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, which is supported for three more years as of this comment.
This is kind of a standard experience for people in Linux land. So by comparison, a $1600 laptop with 8GiB RAM and a 256GB HDD which is no longer receiving security updates does not sound like a good deal.
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
My own experience (4 MacBooks Pros) and that of providing MacBook Air and Pros to a dozen or so staff (with 50 or so on non-Mac kit) leads me to conclude this statement is not true.
They are great as long as they work but no better in terms of longevity to equivalent kit from other manufacturers, at least in my limited, non-scientific, IMHO experience.
Last year I asked the numbers to our IT department for a similar discussion.
On about 2000 macbooks, 2000 thinkbooks and 6000 hp elitebooks, all of various generations, the macbooks scored best on reliability and best on 'how many tickets do these users create for our service desk'.
The cost savings are there. But obviously there was still a significant amount of issues with these laptops. They are not perfect, but they performed better than the other two families.
The big issue with macbooks is usually that if they fail after 3 years, they are an immediate write off. The others get repaired. Oh and those butterfly keyboard years were horrible and nearly stopped us from allowing macbooks apparently.
>FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
That was also true for older macs, which were cheaper.
I believe that the Apple Silicon macs are the highest-margin macs Apple has ever made, since they no longer have to pay Intel for the CPUs or AMD for the GPUs.
I can see no technical or logistical reason why Apple had to increase prices, and believe it is entirely driven by the idea that the market can bear it.
The money they save from buying components from Intel is sunk into development of the processors. They also have to pay for manufacturing and logistics. TSMC have also increased the cost of manufacturing by 9%. Add rampant inflation and a strong dollar into the mix, there’s your technical/logical reason.
>The money they save from buying components from Intel is sunk into development of the processors. They also have to pay for manufacturing and logistics.
I am not convinced. Most of the development cost for Apple Silicon is already covered by the iphone and ipad. They always had to pay for manufacturing and logistics so that's not a new thing, and I bet they paid AMD and Intel way more than they pay TSMC even now.
> The money they save from buying components from Intel is sunk into development of the processors
That doesn't sound right. The m series chips are literally copy pasted from their a series and they operate at a scale where they probably get nice economies of scale. I bet they increased their margins a substancial amount.
I bought a $900 Asus Zenbook 9 years ago and it's still going strong as good as it was the day I bought it.
The problem with these kinds of anecdotes is they lack a control. If you compared an identically priced PC laptop you might find that there's almost no difference. You're just making an assumption without any actual contrasting data to back it up.
FWIW I still have a system76 laptop from 2015 that's going strong. My wife's thinkpad is 13 years old by now - I've been able to keep it chugging by replacing the hard drive and memory.
That's a big advantage of the older Macs and Thinkpads and Elitebooks and XPS and so on: you can trivially restore an aged 10-year-old T440P into a highly functional machine by bumping it up to 16GB of RAM, adding a new battery, and a couple of 1 or 2TB SSDs. I did the same a couple of times with my 2008 MBP, that was indeed a great machine. All of the above can easily be updated to modern Linux or Windows 10 installs to your liking.
But new Macs with soldered RAM and soldered storage and glued batteries may feel nicer on the Apple Store shelf, but a few years down the road when the base model specs are no longer adequate and the latest OSX releases drop them from support, you won't be able to repeat that process.
This is why I'm looking forward to the framework 16". My system76 still works great, but I would love an upgraded graphics card. The framework 16" could be the last laptop I ever buy.
I really wish they had other keyboard options. The macbook clone keyboard and trackpad is a dealbreaker for me. Something with a little less "design" and a little more function would be great.
Or alternatively there were 3rd party providers of them
Thinkpad T440 - 7 years of daily use (could probably use some cleaning inside). I expect it to last quite a bit longer, still. It did cost $500 + some upgrades. Windows 10 is still supported. :)
17 or so year old IBM T41 stopped working about 2 years ago.
Yeah, give laptops a good cleanout every couple of years even if you're a non-smoking obsessive clean freak. My T42 started acting weird a while back and opened it up...numerous odd places clogged with lint, dust and what I assume is cat hair. Worked fine after degunking.
So I checked the T41, and it was just a dead power adapter. After making a new one from a spare DC-DC converter, the laptop itself still seems to work. Cleaning it up might be a next step. :)
I think this is standard for most laptops that cost over $600
Or at least my experience with my Asus and Acer brand 'gaming' laptops.
My computer from 2014 is still my daily driver and I use it for modern gaming. This 2014 computer even does CAD with no slowdowns, its really hard to justify buying something new. I can afford a new computer, I just havent had a reason to. Maybe with AI, I might spend like 35k on a tower so I can run my own LLMs.
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
No. The spare parts are available 5 years since the end of sale of the product; may be longer, if they are available, but max for 7 years. Batteries for 10.
I also have 2015 13" MBP. It is perfectly fine hardware-wise, but it is not supported by the current OS already. (It is supported by Monterey, which still receives security updates). I also have 2012 Thinkpad (T430s). It is also perfectly fine hardware-wise, and it is supported by current OS (both Windows and Linux), and neither of them even plans to obsolete them. (Heck, Linux distributions are just starting carefully considering x86-64 microarchitectures).
> the anti-apple bias is strong enough
You should consider whether you are not having apple-bias. The Job's RDF joke existed not without a reason.
I have had two MacBook Air m1 failures in my family that has started to change how I recommend purchasing a mac. They have 1 year warranties and one had logic board failure around the 18 month mark. It’s possible they last 7 years (I have a 2015 mbp that is going strong) but also it’s possible any high end brand lasts that long (I have an Hp envy that is running strong as well). The repairability of a MacBook m1 is basically zero. I’m too afraid to buy a new logic board because of the T2 chip). Anyway, a 1 year warranty is absurd on a product that expensive that you shouldn’t be having problems with. The tiny warranty is a scam to get you into AppleCare plus for hundreds more, so factor that into the price you pay as well. I feel like I’m responsible for recommending the m1 to my cousin that got fried this last week
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
There is no Apple-bias. Apple hardware is not really any better than other brands, but they are chic and you pay for it. That's almost always been the case, speaking as a Mac guy before it became cool (pre-iPod). Stories of longevity for any brand are generally from people who take care of their stuff, but you can find exceptions even here.
I bought a refurbished Lenovo laptop 10 years ago for $300, it's still going strong after updating to an SSD a couple of years ago. The comparable Apple hardware would have cost 3x that. I also don't have to worry about losing security updates because my hardware doesn't go EOL like you just described.
>How often does a laptop go strong for 9 years? Even the battery life is still ok. I am going to have to force her to consider the air bc the old 13 is a security risk without OS updates.
My ASUS G73 is 12 years old. I stuffed it with 32GB RAM and it works just fine. I use it to create 3D models and assemblies. I do clone the SSD once in a while but still there was no need to replace.
Since I use it mostly as a portable desktop (external keyboard, mouse and 4K monitor) the relevant parts are pristine.
I have an Asus G75 and I will never buy any hardware from Asus again. I rarely used that thing, basically once or twice per month yet the battery died after just a few years, then the keyboard, then the screen, and it weighs a ton too.
I'm still rocking a maxed out MacBook Pro from 2013. The battery IS shot but plugged in and connected to a monitor it still gets the job done as a home machine.
Maxed out Macbook Air 2013 here. Replacing the battery was surprisingly easy and cost about $30. I should replace the SSD at some point too.
It's still getting new MacOS releases/updates using OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. Once MacOS is ARM only will put Linux or OpenBSD on it and see how long it goes.
I dont know how comfortable you are with with opening laptops but please make sure there is no spicy pillow issue (expanded lithium ion battery) in your machine because they represent a real fire hazard.
Replacing old batteries is sometimes extremely affordable if you're willing to open the machine yourself.
My dad bought an 11" MacBook Air in 2011 - I think it was the cheapest possible Mac you could get at the time (maybe $900-$1000?) But I really wanted him to be on MacOS.
He basically never used it as a laptop, and it's been plugged in to an external monitor and keyboard for many years. He used to stack paper on top of it until I told him to stop it so it could vent better. I would update the software, but I think it's been a while since there's been a new security update. I picked it up recently while visiting and noticed it wouldn't close all the way - uh oh.
So I told him his battery was going bad and could explode. He took it to an independent repair shop the next day. They replaced it with a new battery and cleaned out over a decade of dust in the chassis for $120.
I tried to impress upon him that having the same computer for over 10 years without ever having to take it in (or really do any kind of maintenance besides software updates) is extraordinary - he understands now that computers are a little more like cars. They need to be serviced sometimes. Not nearly as frequently as cars. And those laptops were not known for having good thermals.
I'm on the verge of buying him a new MacBook just so he will be on the latest software - but for what he does (email, web browsing) the Air works just as well as it did in 2011.
I think I might end up getting him a gently used M1 Mac Mini though since it never moves from his desk and it would be under $500.
Anyways, I'm on an M1 MacBook Pro and it's hard to see myself buying a new Macbook Pro in the next 5 years minimum. I just don't need to. They fixed pretty much all of the problems their laptops had.
Be sure to enable the "optimized charging", when it decides that you're mostly running plugged in then it'll hold the battery at 80% to avoid holding it at 100% forever.
There is an application called "AlDente" that lets you control this more precisely - not only can you essentially force it to hold at a specific charge level at any time, but you can also configure battery temperature limits (battery won't charge above, eg, 35C) and also "sailing mode" which gives it some hysteresis so it won't immediately charge up to 80% (or whatever you set) but rather stay at (eg) 76% if you run unplugged for a few minutes.
This isn't to defend Apple's stingy memory and storage specs, I just don't end up needing more than that really for the kind of work I do.
The base SSD was 500GB too. Which I'm using like... half of? It's the same thing with iPhones. The base storage amount for Pro models is 128GB and I never run up against that limit. Maybe if I took way more pictures and videos.
I store all my important data in different versions of the cloud (code I write in remote Github repos, files in Google Drive) so on device stuff is more ephemeral.
If I was a professional photographer or video editor, I'd care a lot more. Again, I think they should offer more a base but I don't ever run into actually needing it so it's not a pain point for me.
Can't answer for the quoted poster, but I'm on a 16GB M1 MacBook Air, and haven't felt a strong need for more RAM yet… I'm doing a heavy amount of SwiftUI, and even messing around with some local LLMs.
I could imagine upgrading to the M3 or even M4 MBA, but at that point it will have been 4–5 years on the M1.
I dump my old macbooks on friends and family when I do an upgrade for speed reasons. I usually rotate every 2-4 years. My parents are still using a 2014 air that I got out of a box my previous employer was going to send to recycling. It's probably about time to upgrade them. They generally have the same usecase. They use iPads for most things, but sometimes they want a physical keyboard. They have rejected generally the ipad keyboards as 'weird'.
To be fair the build quality of a $200 Chromebook is pretty rubbish. The pixel is probably on par with Macbooks in terms of build quality but again that's so expensive you may as well get a macbook air.
And the problem with apple hardware is you barely can fix anything yourself and without Apple care it costs a lot of money because they can't replace single parts but only complete modules.
My Thinkpad X220 from 2011 works just fine, although I don't use it as my primary laptop anymore. Was also able to upgrade the memory from 4GB to 16GB and updated the HDD to a 1TB SSD :)
Ditto.
Macs are surprisingly long lasting. I have
- a 2011 MacBook Pro that is used for midi and piano classes. One battery change in 2018 and that’s it. It’s used every other day by kids for 2 hours.
- a 2013 MacBook air. Workhorse for the kids homeschooling. Used every day for 8 hours or so. One battery change and a MagSafe adapter change.
- a 16” 2016 MacBook Pro. My daily work device for the past 5 years. One battery change and 2 MagSafe adapters.
- a 13” 2019 MacBook air for the wife. It’s been puked on till the screen is a bit messed but it still works. No hardware updates.
So we are talking about ~ 30 years cumulative ownership with 3 battery changes and 3 MagSafes. Not bad in my book. If you want to nuke e waste, buy a Mac and hope it’s not a lemon. They rarely are
I was an Apple service technician up to 2016, then I gave up on it because 'repairing' (basically logic board replacements) the new machines (that involved cutting and gluing and other silliness) became too onerous and, quite frankly, depressing.
Personally I have a mid-2012 13" MBP, 16GB, 1TB SSD, 2K external display and a third displayLink display running Ventura and it's still going strong. I have several more for giving coding lessons / as backups for me ;) I dream of the day Apple goes back to making something as serviceable as them, but I won't lose sleep waiting.
Dells are also high quality and last a long time. My Dell laptops from college, law school, and my first job have all lasted over a decade, requiring only a battery replacement or two over the years. My dad's (IBM) Thinkpad from the 90s still works.
OTOH, literally every Mac owner I know has had to replace their Mac laptop multiple times due to various hardware issues. (And yes, that includes Macbook Pros, Airs, etc.)
It's great that Apple has such good support. I couldn't tell you what Dell or IBM's support is like; I've never had to use it.
> FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
I agree with you, but that doesn’t change the fact outside the US, many Apple products are 15+% more expensive than they were a few years ago. In the UK we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis—my bills have shot up and I simply don’t have the extra disposable income.
I mean shit, I’m a decently paid developer (for the north of the UK, so not London) and until my most recent rise a base 16” MacBook Pro cost almost an entire month’s take-home salary.
On a different note, shouldn't Apple support viable hardware till its live? Lack of security/OS updates is basically bricking a perfectly functional device and creating more waste on Earth. They could even charge users for an upgrade after a while if it means overall less waste on the planet. Ofcourse, it means that there's less sales at Apple but hopefully they're big enough to not bother with this.
This is anecdotal, but my daily driver Dell E6540 is closing in on 10 years old now. One nice thing about this Dell is that it is very easy to replace the battery, unlike all modern Apple laptops. My wife had a Macbook of around the same vintage, but when the battery went it was too difficult to replace and we had to buy a new laptop instead.
Apple themselves offer a battery replacement service for a fee, and it seems to be a reasonable fixed price (where I live). You might still be able to get them to upgrade that Macbook's battery.
Don't use an Apple Reseller for this without checking Apple's battery replacement price first. The reseller I went to quoted 2.5x the price, and said they were unaware of Apple's price (seems unlikely), which they could not match.
my previous air went for 3 years before something got screwed up in the thermals and the fan needed to run constantly, and selling it to somebody who wanted to fix it was the easiest way to deal with it. The apple store wouldn't do anything for me. now the M1 Air that i got in january 2021 has a failing keyboard.
this isn't "anti-apple bias", i like macs and will keep buying them. but the claim that they're more durable or longer-lasting than equivalent windows laptops is just nonsense. you can't expect 9 years out of one, but if you're very very lucky it might last that long.
my Acer chromebook that i bought in 2013 is "still going strong". so is the pair of the absolute cheapest possible dell inspiron i bought in 2012 for rental customers to use at outdoor events. but i'm not going around telling people they should expect acer or dell laptops to last a decade.
lenovo makes better workhorses than apple. you seem to be attributing the plateau of necessary machine performance to apple's quality. the reality is that for general computation no one really needs more machine than was produced in ~2010.
you simply don't need to upgrade computers like you did in the 90s and early 2000s.
>FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
I suspect many of us agree, and full disclaimer I am an Apple customer since about 1990. That said - that so many base units across their product line come with paltry specs is really upsetting. Frankly, it feels like environmental waste for them to still be selling machines with only 8gb ram / less than 1TB min storage. Sure, I've heard their song-and-dance about storage in the cloud and how because of their memory management 8gb isn't really just 8gb - and I find those arguments to be horse pucky.
Also - if your battery is still kicking after 9 years consider yourself very, very, weirdly lucky. I bet if you put our a survey you would find a number of us who didn't come close to that, whether due to keyboard issues, battery, etc.
Old Thinkpads are at least equally durable, though not sure about the newest generation. Been using a T520 from 2011 for a few years with Linux, no problems.
Macbooks are great if you get a model without some serious design fault - like screen protection peeling off, or butterly keyboard breaking.
My cheapo Samsung laptop from 2013 lasted until 2020 and it went through some heavy abuse. Still turns on and all, it's just that the battery gave up and the power socket is loose, so it might randomly lose power.
My mother still uses my even more cheapo laptop from 2010 - my brother in law replaced the HDD with an SSD, but that's the extent of maintenance done. The battery sort of works, but barely.
Meanwhile my work MBP in 2019 started developing keyboard issues after a few months of use - just like the units my two coworkers from the same room had. To be fair that was a particularly bad model year.
A laptop generally should last seven years, but most people here don't see their devices reach that age because they pass them on after less than three.
My personal experience is that they do not. Had one Macbook pro that would crash and then fail to boot after about 5 minutes of use around the 1.5 year mark. (It appeared that once it was warm it would not work). Then, my current Macbook pro needed a full logic board replacement at 11 months (so close to being out of warranty). It is still going strong but I am concerned the issue will happen again.
I very much enjoy using my Macbook over any windows laptop (the trackpad and keyboard are just so much better), but I am concerned about spending $3k on another laptop in a year or so when this one runs into an issue again.
Since we're trading anecdotes. I have a 2013 Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro which refuses to die. I've always used it when I travel so I definitely haven't coddled it. I've kind of been hoping it would die so I could justify replacing it because it's been good enough to get the job done. And the best part is that since it's running Windows I've been able to upgrade the OS and still get security updates.
As other posters have demonstrated, having a laptop last this long is part good design and part good luck.
>FWIW, macs are high quality and last a long time.
My own personal anecdote is that I spilled a trivial amount of booze on my MacBook 9 years ago and was left with the option of whether I wanted to replace the entire lower case. While it was my fault for drinking and computing, I just see it as being an expensive device to maintain when you accidentally damage it. I'd rather play a lower stakes game with a cheaper product that I'd buy more frequently as my needs change over the years.
I've killed several Apple laptops by spilling a single drink on the keyboard.
I've spilled more drinks onto a single Thinkpad than I've killed Apples with. Thinkpads (used to?) have a pan under the keys with a drainage hole that goes out below the laptop. No damage whatsoever from several spills.
Apple has a lot of fanboys that are not entirely rational about their fanboyism.
Yup. Stepdaughter spilt a small amount of water on hers. It worked fine, plugged in, but the spill had damaged the charging circuitry. Laptop even showed the battery as healthy. Just couldn't be charged.
Take it in, thinking okay, maybe $300 for parts and labor.
Hah, no. "So we're looking at $950..."
followed by the Apple guy then saying "How about we look at getting you into a new MacBook instead?"
Nah. It worked fine, and was mostly attached to her desk and digital piano, and continued to work just fine on AC power.
Am I missing something? You're saying that you bought a device 9 years ago with the exact same specs(8gb ram, 256 disk) that are currently being sold for about the exact same price. And you are saying that macs last a long time? How is that possible if the specs are 9 years old?
I have a 2011 Air and 2011 W series thinkpad. Air lasted until last year. W520 is still going strong.
yeah, Apple computers do last long. But it is ridiculous that you can’t upgrade RAM or hard disk or pretty much anything, after spending THAT much money.
I just bought a Mac Pro M2 in January after using a 2013 Macbook air for ~10 years. It lasted me through college and more, still runs smoothly to this day. Apple's build quality cannot be understated.
i'm writing this on an 11 year old thinkpad i got used 8 years ago for like $300. There's actually plenty of high quality hardware out there, it just takes a bit of unbiasing in your assessments.
Just chiming in to confirm this anecdote - the only difference is that the machine I gave my partner was a macbook air, not pro. Still works fine for almost all normal person use cases.
Yeah my 2010 MacBook Pro 15 is also still working ok including the battery. Running Linux on it now though because Apple has given up supporting it many years ago :(
If you want MacOS on it opencore supports even the current version of MacOS on this machine. I have MacOS 11 running great on a 17” 2010 MacBook Pro for a friend. I will likely upgrade it to MacOS 12.
>EDIT - I am surprised I am getting downvoted. You would think more folks on HN would be happy about long lasting products but the anti-apple bias is strong enough to override the concern of having a more sustainable product.
A small part of the reasons I downvoted you is this flamey statement here, because you seem more worried about the downvotes you were getting than with the content of your message and seem to base your opinion an what you think other people will like to hear, and when that doesn't work and people downvote you, you then resort to generalize and perhaps falsely calling people who disagree with you that they must have an anti Apple bias when that's not true.
You should always speak your mind free regardless of other people's upvotes or downvotes, and not start to attack those who don't agree with you as if only your opinion is the right one and everyone else who disagrees must certainly be biased.
Back on topic, no, I don't have an Apple bias, and the main reason I downvoted you is that I don't agree with your assessment of Apple making sustainable products when they've demonstrated time and time again being at the forefront of the anti right-to-repair movement and did everything they could to make sure to restrict, disable and discourage third party repairs as much as possible. See Luis Rossman's and Linus Tech Tips's videos. That's not what a sustainable company does.
I'm glad you've never had any issue with your Macbooks, but one, that's survivorship bias of sample size one, and two, that's just shows reliability, and in no way proves anything about sustainability.
Sustainability would be if you would have had issues and Apple would have provided you with assistance to reapir your old devices on the cheap. But your anecdotal experience of something never going wrong is no proof of sustainability as nothing ever went wrong with my Acer, HP, and Lenovo machines either, but that doesn't mean they're models of sustainability.
Framework is an example of sustainability, not Apple, because sell you with the parts to keep your machines going, in case something goes wrong. Apple does not do that, in fact the opposite:
"Oh, the display cable of your out of warranty Macbook is toast? Bummer. How about buying a new laptop then?"
That's not what a sustainable company does. Ever.
Based on these facts, I would encourage you to reevaluate your stance on what sustainability actually means and how it's defined on a consumer company and products. Peace.
You got my upvote because I have a similar experience - still using my 2014 MacBook Pro.
However, I also agree with the other take I’m seeing in these comments: the current prices do seem disproportionately high (at least in the EU).
I feel I have to go back about 25 years to see the same level of expense for high-end electronics. I genuinely thought we were past that era of rarefied ‘professional’ hardware.
And as others have also pointed out, adding RAM or disk capacity is ridiculously expensive.
Electronics prices in the EU are simply crazy. Recently i wanted to get a small mini-PC that would be energy efficient and I could run some AI experiments on. Reading online forums, everyone's like "just get a mac mini, couple hundred bucks and you're golden". I check the apple website and turns out they actually cost almost a thousand euro for the 16GB/256GB model.
But its the same with a lot of other electronics too - people online will tell you something like "just get a raspberry for $40" but then you look at the European ebay and you're in for at least a 100 euro and that's for a used one.
Rasbpis are expensive because people started using them for products (why make a board to flash these lights when I can put a cheap Pi in there with a program to do it?) and during the chip shortage they started prioritizing businesses -- which is against their self-described mission, but whatever.
They still haven't caught up production enough to stifle the price increases.
Yeah they really caused some bad blood with this business prioritisation.. Not just with us in the community but also with Broadcom who now view them as competitors as opposed to a friendly outreach project.
I'm not very deep in the raspberry PI world, mostly because it's been hard getting a hold of one. Are there alternatives that the community has gravitated towards?
The Rock64 fits in a Pi3 case and is roughly equiv. and runs DietPi (makes a good Pihole).
The RockPro64 is a great media machine.
The A64 doesn't really do it for me but I am sure it has applications.
My one big complaint about the Rock64 design is that the tiny barrel power plug (the same size and voltage used for USB powered hubs) is right next to the 3.5mm audio jack and fits inside and if you mistakenly put it in it will fry the board (ask me how I know). I have taken to popping the connector off shitty headphones and putting it in the audio jack so that can't happen.
For the original hobby niche of small electronic projects where a microcrontroller with wifi will suffice, the ESP8266 / ESP32 have been quickly overtaking the pi zero. Of course it's not really comparable and there is the Rpi Pico as a competitor but I find the ESP32 much easier to work with. It's also much cheaper (not to mention the 8266)
For heavier usecases that really there isn't as much of an alternative. Many other boards like the pine64, beagle and orangepi, but their ecosystem lacks sophistication.
I did these calculations a while back on various Mac models and the price difference was actually not that large. The US prices are without VAT. Add the 19 or 21% of VAT that is typical for EU countries and it's almost the same. The difference grew a bit, because the Euro became a bit stronger relative to the USD since Apple made their last announcements.
mini-PC that would be energy efficient and I could run some AI experiments on
Don't do that, an M2 has very limited compute. A cheap RTX2060 Super from some years back will be many many times faster when you use Tensor Cores.
Seems completely fair to me? A good computer lasts many years, the cost (outside Macs) has gone down a lot and you can get a second hand computer at very low prices. Also a lot of other tech-related costs are much lower here than compared to e.g. the US, like much more affordable broadband internet.
In the early 90's, I had a particular Sony Walkman that I was very fond of. I paid about US$100 for it.
A couple of months later, I accidentally left it on the plane as I was transferring in Paris. When I got to Vienna, I was delighted to discover that it was also available there, so I bought a replacement. I was not delighted to find out that it cost nearly double what I paid for it in the U.S.
There's something about Europe and electronics that always seems to equal higher prices. It's been going on for at least a half a century.
Everything in Canada is usually 10-25% more expensive than the US, besides stuff covered under NAFTA. Consumer things like clothes/electronics are usually the biggest victims.
But I just compared the Apple stores and the base Macbook = $999USD vs $1299CAD, doing pure currency conversion $1299CAD = $965.96USD, so it's technically ~$32USD cheaper in Canada? Probably just out-of-step with currency markets/inflation.
It’s mostly the Euro having weakened vis-à-vis the USD, plus some very minor components like private-copying levy. European prices are usually listed including sales tax, which can make them appear higher compared to the US list prices which don’t include tax.
Yup, at most. They're still selling my 2019 Mac Pro configured the way I have it (12 core, 192GB, 8TB, W5700X 16GB) for $13,000, just as it was in 2019...
... and if I go to trade it in, they'll give me $850 for it ...
> ... and if I go to trade it in, they'll give me $850 for it ...
Lol, that's a joke :D
I'm really surprised how they let the Pro range suffer though. Every 5-6 years there is a major release bringing it up to spec but in between nothing happens at all, not even a minor redesign for the latest CPUs.
This is what I don't get - the Pro is specifically aimed at those needing the maximum performance out of their machine. But after the first year this has been overtaken by the rest of the market and the remaining years until the next redesign it's a pityful excuse for a high-end workstation. Not to mention they won't even drop the price (ok for the trash can model they actually did that once.)
So, to whom is this still an appealing offer? Who invests top dollar into apple workstations when it's almost guaranteed they're going to be left in an awkward spot with nowhere to upgrade every few years? What's the point of this whole product line this way?
I've noticed this as well, but having lived through 2011-2013 when the CAD = USD, Apple has 3-6 month lead times on pricing changes, almost always tied to product releases/store updates.
Maybe it'll get more expensive the next time they release a product, maybe it won't because the difference is currently negligible.
The EU also has strong consumer protection regulations, such as a minimum 2 year warranty, that are factored into the price. Also, prices from Apple resellers can be lower than what you get from Apple themselves, usually similar to Apple with an education discount.
They should have said: "Just get a used Mac Mini". You can literally get them from macsales.com for less than $100. The intel machines have not gotten much faster, but their prices have dropped dramatically.
When I was commisioning El Camino Hospital in Mtn View, CA - we had a bunch of digital art that we paid ~$1,000,000 for for the campus... but the digital signage solution was still behind in delivery...
So I went an bout a bunch of mac minis with remote desktop and just looped the digital signage videos via VLC.
I had to do this in some of the salesforce offices I built - like 50 Fremont, Chicago, NYC...
Mac minis were great for the 'bandaid' -- but even then were over priced and a pain to manage...
But I personally do not think Ill be buying another mac object due to appl fking me when my machine was under recall for catching fire, and my machine..... caught fire....
And appl held the machine for two month while 'investigating' and refused to honor the recall because it took them two months to find a moisture sensor that had been set off at some point.
The machine caught fire in my bed while I was watching netflix.
Appls solution was "well you can buy a new machine to replace it at full price" (this was LITERALLY what they said to me in the Union Sq, SF flagship store.
In the past i've done the hackintosh thing with NUCs over mac minis. They are generally cheaper, faster and you can actually replace the ram/storage. With the advent of M1/2 though that will no longer be an option.
Looking there, what do you do with a 10yo Intel Mac Mini when Apple drops support for them (serious question)? If the answer is "load linux", then there are probably better intel based options.
There is only 1 Mac Mini available with M1 CPU and it only has 8GB RAM - that's for $499 and if you add shipping to Europe and tax, probably it will work out closer to $1000 than $499.
So once upon a time my parents in the states sent me, a newly minted ex-pat living in the EU, a package for my birthday. It was mostly cheap plastic kitchen things, a couple of oven mitts and stuff like that. It went to customs. Not only did I have to haul my ass out to the airport, I was charged 120Euro for a box who's entire cost couldn't have been more than 30USD (and I'm being generous). I was informed that if i refused the package, my parents would be charged the full amount.
So yes, it's easy to imagine that by the time you get the package in your hands, it costs more than 100% the products price.
That seems an expensive lesson in filling in the customs declaration. Gifts are exempt from customs duties and VAT if they're worth €45 or less, and exempt from duties but not VAT up to €150.
If you ignore a parcel or reject it, it should be returned to the sender.
I have, countless times. I've shipped everything from small boxes to containers. If you're paying $500 on taxes on top of your $500 product, you're doing something wrong
Two years ago, I paid around €300 for a pair of original Haori from Japan. The shipping costs where around €60, which was expected, but the taxes and import fees added another €170 to the total expenditure. That's not 100% of the product's price, but it's damn close.
I recently ordered a keyboard from Taiwan. I got charged the 21% VAT plus a few euro administration costs by the shipper. Mind you, I would have paid the same 21% VAT if I had purchased a similarly priced product in The Netherlands. So, you are down to shipping cost, many companies have different options. Sure, if you want something on your doorstep in 2-3 days, they are going to charge 80-90 USD/Euro shipping, that's simply what it costs.
Even better - some countries have 0% import tax on computers (just VAT). I am not sure if this is an EU-wide regulation (I would expect so, because it is a single market), but in The Netherlands it's 0%.
$800 + tax (don't forget thats included in EU prices already) isn't exactly just "a couple hundred dollars" either. Stuff is more expensive, yes, sales tax is usually higher, but the example doesn't seem that extreme? Also depends a bit on how the exchange rate has wobbled right now.
And the RPi prices are through the roof everywhere. "Just get a Pi, they are cheap" is basically a pre-2020 sentiment.
I remember being upset that the same laptop cost more in Australia than it did in the US, then I realized that it had a lot more to do with Australia's corporate tax rates. Turns out... companies do pass on taxes to the end purchasers.
It feels, and I don't mean offense here, that if the EU wants to tell companies which power plugs they can use, and stay heavy-handed with corporate tax rates, that people in the EU will need to just accept higher prices as the outcome of their leaders' actions.
Currency fluctuations, and corporate taxes explain all the price differences. Someone said "Oh it costs 7% more now than it did 2 years ago!" Gosh, compared to the rest of everything a price hike of only 7% seems like a really good deal over the last 3 years. =P (But I get we aren't used to tech prices ever going up over time.)
No company is in the business of giving things away, y'know? Anyway Apple just wants a profit of $X per unit. If your country adds a bunch of rules and costs, that's fine it's your right to self-govern and set whatever laws you want, but Apple is still going to get a profit of $X per unit.
Edit: Later today I'm picking up a laptop for a colleague who is coming in to town next week from an EU country. He wanted to buy it in the US since it was so much cheaper. Good timing on this post. (=
> He wanted to buy it in the US since it was so much cheaper.
He needs to declare it when he returns to the EU, and pay the same taxes. (Assuming it costs more than €430, which is the limit for bringing personal goods into the EU by plane.)
I understand that receipts are required by law, but in my experience, no one checks for them unless you leave your laptop in the box (or declare it). If you put it in a laptop bag or simply say that it's a work laptop, you will likely not be questioned. I have traveled to over 25 countries with a laptop and have never had any issues.
It seems that everyone buys laptops in the US and brings them home this way; whether they are in Australia, Costa Rica -- or even the EU -- on a personal level, nobody wants to pay more, especially not more taxes.
The only time I have paid import taxes was when I sent a used phone and laptop to a person on Reddit who needed them in Canada. Even though the devices were over five years old, the Canadian tax authorities wanted me to pay new retail prices for them. I paid the taxes so that the kid could receive the devices. I'm pretty sure I could have just declared them as having a value of $100, but by the time I got involved the kid had already said it was an "Apple Laptop" and the Postal Mounties just assumed a new sticker price. Frustrating.
Exactly right. This assumption that physical goods can cost about same all across the world is hilarious. Tax policies, interest rates, inflation, exchange rates, local laws etc..etc cause so many things make items priced differently across geographies.
As the other posted mentioned, but also the US works damn hard to make sure we get our fill of cheap shit to keep us content and happy. There are tons of things that we literally tarrif at 0% that other countries hit much higher.
Add into that things like shipping costs in various areas, and it can all add up.
Their monthly salary is usually on top of other benefits such as subsidized/free accomodation in their capital, food and travel expenses coverage, and so on. They definitely can allow themselves a new Macbook if they wanted to buy it on their monthly salary. Most of the time they get that for free from extra allowances too.
You are right but completely missing the point. The case is not that the PM couldn't have access to a Macbook if they so wanted but that it'd take the head of government of a country a whole month of their take-home salary to afford one. It's quite absurd, not the accessibility for the PM but to give a hint to how the average person of said country would definitely be priced out.
But a mac air is a luxury item, and its pricing reflects that.
I don't think it's absurd at all. A similarly capable laptop could be had for a much lower price, so people that complain they cannot get this luxury item for an "affordable" price just sounds entitled to me.
This doesn't read like a complaint about the pricing per se. It's more like pointing out Apple's low sales might have something to do with their high pricing and then providing that the pricing is unattainable for laypeople by way of stating the single figurehead of a country will still be out a month's income if they want one.
A 30hp Ferrari for 100k would still be a luxury item, very much so, assuming there'd be people that want them (which there clearly are for macbooks). Luxury doesn't mean "the best" or even "good".
Calm down. Apple products are luxury for a lot of people in the world. One doesn't become arbiter of what is luxury or not all across just by looking some local things and coming up with quick-n-dirty definition of it.
I would love to hear more macOS users admit that their equipment was a status indicator, overpriced for what it is.
I’m sure apple is excited about cultivating this brand identity. If there is one way I can think that they could get away from the “Sony” or Nike model, it’s being seen as a luxury item, a tool of the select few, instead of just a high quality brand, that yes, might be a little more expensive.
-- Just adding a bit that I'd prefer to be less sarcastic than I was in this comment: My point is that I like the Mac brand better as an bit more costly, but upscale, quality tool than a "luxury". Luxury implies that it is impractically expensive (which I think is what is being argued) Maybe it was just the choice of that word.
I'm not sure they even really view themselves as prosumer, but it is a fine line.
I'd also love to hear how could people price in the value of the experience they get from using their device every single day.
I say that as a former Mac/Apple hater, I used to think all the usual tropes: how overpriced it was for the configuration, how all Mac users were part of a cult, brainwashed for status, so on and so forth. Until I got a Mac for work, planning to just install Linux on it but after seeing some coworkers having headaches doing that I stuck with MacOS for a while and... I never left.
I never had anything close to the issues I had when using Linux as a daily driver, I do believe Linux has got much better for desktop these days but I simply don't want to care about fixing my machine/OS when something inevitably goes awry as it's done multiple times in the past for me.
Apple might not fix their issues as timely as I'd like sometimes but I've been on this boat for 10+ years and the amount of accumulated pain from using a Mac vs what I suffered on Linux/Windows-land machines before is not really comparable, at all, it's been orders of magnitude less painful to me.
My experience is absolutely personal and anecdotal so I just want to disclaim that I'm not saying people who don't use/like Macs and Apple are wrong, or advocating for anyone to switch, etc. I don't buy into the Apple cult, if some other company creates a product that works better than what I have I will switch in an instant. I just don't think it's very clear when comparisons are made simply on tech specs rather than the experience as a whole.
The thing is that right now my Macs have done everything I ever wanted from a desktop machine, very high reliability compared to any other option I've used in almost 3 decades on computers, so I stick with them.
On my Mac I can do my job as a SWE, do my photography stuff, as well as my music production. And I never had more than a hiccup here and there from a major OS upgrade in 10+ years.
Similar story here. Thought Macs were just overpriced crap, spent about 10 years as a DOS/Windows user than another 10 on Windows and Linux, before being issued a Macbook Pro at a new job.
By a few months in I was a convert. Having to use another OS for anything serious and involving a GUI makes me grumpy now. Everything before that looked like half-broken garbage, in hindsight. I had no idea how much time I'd been losing to glitchy software and bad hardware until about 90% of that was taken away. Felt like an idiot for not giving Macs a real chance much sooner.
I was also an Android user at the time, and that was a dual-platform mobile dev job—using both those operating systems extensively on a range of hardware converted me to iOS, too, in a hurry. Much smoother, better UI, and better battery life. Sold.
I was an Apple hater long ago, then a buddy gave me his G4 PB when he bought his first Intel MBP. I begrudgingly started using it, then bought my own Intel MBP, giving the G4 PB to another friend (who was also converted). OSX/macOS gave me most of the utility of a unix in a nice GUI environment that I rarely have to mess with.
Yes, it is just a status symbol. It couldn’t have anything to do with its speed, 16 hour battery life, or it not sounding like a 747 the minute you open too many Chrome tabs.
“I would love to hear more macOS users admit that their equipment was a status indicator, overprices for what it is.”
In other words you would love to hear people confirm your opinion of Apple and and why they use them. Must suck to find out that many, if not most people use macOS machines because they like the performance, the design, and support.
I will never understand people that a) care about why other people buy computers and b) assume that the only reason people choose differently than they do is due to vanity/ignorance/status. Apple is the only company whose success people take personally. Wishing that people would finally admit to being as shallow and status chasing as you know they are is an excellent view into your mindset.
> Apple is the only company whose success people take personally.
Nah, NVIDIA has the same thing.
> I will never understand people that a) care about why other people buy computers and b) assume that the only reason people choose differently than they do is due to vanity/ignorance/status.
Yeah these things almost always come down to values differences. You value different things than the other person, leading you to a different conclusion. There is a side helping of sometimes different observations too... like all the people insisting that macs are super slow or whatever, even into the era of apple silicon (there are many many people who continued to dive onto that grenade on the basis of cinebench tests or whatever too).
But nobody is generally making irrational decisions here. The question is "what alternative machines can I get at a similar price and how does the overall big-picture compare". And they're ending up with the other machines at that price not comparing well.
It's a tough lump to swallow for a lot of people but the M1s were very compellingly priced, with the usual apple caveats. The MBPs are within the range of reason overall, the MBAs are actually probably better than you will find at an equivalent price in the wintel market. Even for engineers - it's *nix on the desktop, that's part of why a decent number of companies are switching.
> Wishing that people would finally admit to being as shallow and status chasing as you know they are is an excellent view into your mindset.
Yeah. All you have to do to redeem yourself in the eyes of this random internet commentator is announce you're a big dumb idiot baby! Why isn't anybody willing to do that!? Really says a lot about society imo. /s
> I would love to hear more macOS users admit that their equipment was a status indicator, overpriced for what it is.
I would love something like my M1 Max MBP running macOS for less money. Since my first G4 PB, I have never thought of it as a status thing. I like the mac GUI with unix underpinnings. It's also popular enough that most common software runs w/o issue, and it has a lot great indie programs (though that market is sadly shrinking).
EDIT
At least in nerd circles while growing up, the high status thing to do was run linux on the desktop. /shrug
Not so much people asking to be given goods they cannot afford as it is pointing out the business implications of designing / selling devices that people cannot afford.
> implications of designing / selling devices that people cannot afford.
luxury items tend to be the first to suffer drops in sales in the face of a recession. I dont think it's there's any implication other than that apple's sales are going to drop.
The point of the GP comment was to imply that the price is too high, and that it shouldn't have been, and the drop in sales was the fault of said high price. I'm countering it with the idea that as a luxury good, the drop in sales is totally expected in a recession.
Some people use Macs for work. I guess you can think of it as a long-ish investment and get it on finance, but considering how quickly hardware becomes outdated in some industries where Macs are are either a technical or social must-have, the prices do seem absurd...
I bought it for my wife because she was constantly breaking the Linux laptop I put together for her. She’d have a billion tabs open and eventually the RAM would fill up and it’d crash and she was annoyed about this. I haven’t had to troubleshoot my wife’s MacBook Air in the two years she’s had it. She wants to write and watch movies, and the Mac just works for her.
I use a 16GB M1 Air with 1TB hard drive myself and it does everything I want and I don’t have to worry with tinkering on it. I used to be really into tweaking performance on my desktop but it’s just not worth it anymore.
Almost exactly 2 years ago, I bought an M1 Air for €1050. That same M1 Air is still being sold by that same store, but now costs €1126. That's a 7% rise in price for a laptop that's now 2,5 years old. This is just ridiculous.
> It isn’t clear that increasing interest rates will have any impact on lowering prices. The nascent resurgence in inflation being experienced across the world is primarily still due to supply chain disruptions. The mechanism by which rising interest rates are supposed to impact inflation is essentially by increasing unemployment, which weakens workers’ bargaining power and thus slows wage growth. But lowering wage growth won’t do anything to address supply side constraints or energy shortages, which are a driver of ‘cost-push’ rather than ‘demand-pull’ inflation.
> ...
> The trade-off for policy makers between creating jobs and wage growth, while simultaneously controlling inflation, goes back to a 1958 paper by economist William Phillips on the relationship between ‘Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957’, which became a cornerstone of macroeconomics. The paper identified the correlation between lower unemployment with higher inflation and vice-versa (see Figure 2).
The explanation for this relationship was that as unemployment decreased the ability of workers to bid for higher wages increased due to less competition in the labour market. Higher wages mean more income to spend on goods and services, which leads to prices going up. This is bad for net creditors and net savers, because the inflation cancels out the interest on savings. By contrast, workers and net borrowers benefit from rising wages and prices, as it allows them to pay off their debt more quickly, which is depreciating in real terms relative to their income.
Inflation is multifactorial, different types of disruption to the economic web cause different effects on it, the article then goes on to mention the overall lower wages on US and UK post Reagan Thatcher as case study for how labor and wage growth changes inflation rates
Salary growth leads inflation in virtually all cases, and in this one too.
(Realized I can still edit: reply after reply is trying to interpret this as a statement about causality, which it emphatically is not. I'm just saying that ordering is complicated in feedback systems, and that the needed salary growth to compensate for existing inflation largely already happened. This is doubly or triply true for the tech salaries people here are making.)
The particular current case of inflation really took off with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Talking about salary growth as a cause is way off the mark.
Salaries are only redistribution of current money supply. Inflation means an increased money supply and only banks can increase it, wether it's government banks, private banks, or both.
Probably because my mother was an economist, I've pretty much ignored the subject my entire life. However, your post piqued my curiosity. Some reading later, and I'm scratching my head: are economists really that dumb? The price of some goods must go down if the price of other goods goes up? Only in some simulation of an economy that doesn't include real humans, right?
No, the are really smart. You have to be very intelligent to be able to contrive a way to support an idea that is completely wrong. Intelligent people almost always support the most idiotic political, economical or cultural ideas, because that is a mental challenge that is satisfying. Using the sheer force of their intellect to "beat" normally gifted people in arguments about these issues, they delude themselves to believe they are right, even though they picked an absurd angle just for the challenge.
It's a feedback cycle, arguments about which node in the graph is the "real" one are pointless. My point was just empirical: almost always, the proximate cause of "inflation" is increased consumer spending, and the proximate cause of that is usually salary growth. And it was this time too.
So an argument of the form "salaries don't keep up with inflation" is backwards (usually). They already did!
It's not a feedback cycle. Inflation is the increase in money existing. Paying higher salaries do not increase the amount of money existing, as that money is taken from somewhere. Raising prices do not increase the amount of money existing. Only the money creators can increase the amount of money existing. Money is created by banks and governments in symbiosis.
Increased prices of labour or products is always a consequence of inflation and never the cause of inflation.
This is conflating "money", which you seem to take colloquially to be a finite quantity of "stuff", with "money supply". Inflation is the result of an increase in the latter, but emphatically not the former. In fact money supply grows and shrinks for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with things being created or destroyed.
And to my point upthread: the factors that result in changes in the money supply are themselves subject to influence by lots of things, including stuff like the rate of inflation. It is absolutely, 100%, a feedback network.
It is not so simple as to say salaries went up so inflation went up. Inflation from decreased supply at the same time as increased Treasury spending through stimuluses, coupled with the workforce shrinking, is what caused salaries to rise.
Once more, I'm not making an argument about causality. I'm saying that the "compensation" of salaries for inflation already happened.
Arguments about "why" just aren't helpful here. Everyone thinks they're smarter than everyone else and knows policies that will be perfect, and everyone is wrong for the same reasons. It's a cyclic feedback market and it just does this stuff, for the most part.
But you absolutely can't look at things with a microscope and say "salaries don't keep up with inflation", because that's (almost by definition) never true.
All non-US countries experience this. Apple strictly ties pricing to some USD value, which at the baseline is not always 1:1 (meaning it may be more expensive taking into account conversion).
If your country's dollar falls in value, Apple punishes your country. It's not fair to you as an individual, but it's how Apple have operated for at least the last 15 years.
We ought to consider ourselves lucky in the UK. We have Apple Stores that we can walk into a buy Macs. In the 1990s Mac were sold by authorised dealers who closed their stores at the end of the working day. The first Macs you could buy from major electronics retailers were the Performa models. I am not defending Apple, but Macs are more affordable and accessible than they were before while being priced at levels that are way above similar PC hardware. Just like they were before.
What's the point of that? My mom who walks into a store doesn't adjust for inflation. Her income hasn't been adjusted for inflation, let alone exchange rate.
Many people on HN can probably explain why the price is what it is now. That doesn't mean that people are willing (or capable) to pay that much.
And Mom decides not to buy an M2, which makes perfect sense (to me) - most people's income eventually somewhat maybe adjusts for inflation at some time, but prices on milk and stuff adjust much faster.
One of the best ways to look at the effects of inflation is how long between "upgrades" of various things like cars, computers, phones, TVs, etc.
Also, everyone and their mother wanted to buy the M1 when it came out, because it was just so much better than what came before; but there's no real pressing reason to upgrade to the M2 from the M1, so most of the new purchases will be the last few Intel hold-outs upgrading, or new customers.
At $999 and a major performance increase, a new laptop might be a no-brainer (especially compared to replacing batteries, etc).
This thread was about pricing in the EU. Even if it was inflation adjusted, it wasn't adjusted for exchange rate differences, which are a significant part of the price increase on Apple products in the EU.
This isn't a contradiction of my example. My example is pretty clear: Mom makes X before/after prices have gone up, and years after so.
> Inflation usually means wages going up.
Inflation is a rise in prices, that's what it means. Maybe I am being pedantic about your use of "means".
> But low wage workers in the US have gotten significant pay raises since 2019.
Mom in my example hasn't, so irrelevant. Why do you insist on using generalizations to try to contradict an example? My example is very real, the generalization does not apply.
4 years ago I bought a maxed out (except storage) MBP 15" for ~3.5k EUR. A similarly specced machine now is 4.7k EUR, and a maxed out (except storage) one is 5.2k EUR. I'd really want to upgrade to a machine with M chip but with current prices I can't reasonably justify that. Instead, I got a PC with 8c/16t Ryzen with similar performance in my workload for fraction of the price, and simply use the MBP only when needed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Agree with this sentiment. Many years ago I bought a maxed out MacBook Pro for about ~ $3000 CAD and now the prices go up to ~ $6000. Technology is supposed to get better and cheaper over time. They really are trying to squeeze every cent out of consumers they can. There’s also another side to it. I think a big “buyer” of apple hardware were startups and tech companies that were providing these machines to their employees. With the tech layoff and freezes in hiring this should impact the number of Macs purchased, I suspect.
Not just startups and tech companies, lots of boring non-tech enterprises offer Macs too for technical roles because you lose out on good candidates if you can't offer Macs. This side of the pond (Europe) those are also way more likely to allow employees to upgrade after a few years.
You speak in general terms but you’re in a bubble. Here in my bubble, a tech valley in the South of France, developers have to be convinced to switch to Mac. “Sounds awesome but will I be able to get used to the new shortcuts?” is the general question.
Where are you from? I’d rather hire from your pool than mine (and I pay 20-30% above market range).
Not your parent poster but I'm from Eastern Europe and I'm using Macs for 3 years now and can't be convinced to go back to Linux.
Mac is just much less troublesome. As I'm aging and (hopefully) becoming a senior dev, I'm getting more and more focused and want to immediately attack the problems I'm paid to solve, and not endlessly fighting and fine-tuning my machines.
I might be wanting to get back to work soon. Hit me up if you need a seasoned dev.
For 3600€ you could get the M2 Pro 16" with 32 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD which is a much faster machine than the on you bought 4 years ago, even if the specs might not have changed that much.
Could not argue about the price of a Ryzen, can't beat that. :)
Why would you compare the price of an ordinary laptop with that of an extraordinary one? People buy Mercedes and not Lada Niva for a reason my friend, even though both of them can drive. ;)
Same feeling to me, I bought a M1 Air 16GB RAM + 512GB storage in 2020 which serves me really well to this day, when I saw the new M2 MBA I thought on getting one for myself and passing down the current M1 to my girlfriend but when I saw the prices for a 512GB storage + 16GB RAM I just gave up. There's no reason for me to get rid of my M1 right now, it'd be a luxury in itself, the absurd price just made it very easy to talk myself out of it.
I run a small self-funded SaaS and work+develop (Clojure) on an Apple machine. Functionality-wise I find it difficult to even consider an alternative (yes, I have used Linux as my main machine, I know the disadvantages very well). Now, as for pricing, lets look at some real data:
* my previous MBP 16" lasted me 29 months, salvage value was around 50%, and the amortized cost was around 42€/month
* for my current 16" MBP (M1) I'm assuming 24 months with similar salvage value, which puts me at around 60€/month
The M1 MBP is a spectacular machine. It's faster than nearly anything else I can get. It's also portable, which means I only need one machine for home, office or travel work. At 60€/month I find it to be a fantastic value proposition and I don't think it's overpriced at all.
I'm not saying you're wrong, just showing that a totally different point of view is possible, especially if you use the machine for work.
Some where someone wrote: It's not that Apples hardware isn't cost competitive, they just don't have en entry level option (or even a low mid-level option).
The cheapest MacBook Air, which is fine for most of my needs is €1260/$1370 and while it's a wonderful laptop, it's just a bit much for running Safari, VSCode and a terminal. It really is a €950 laptop, but if they could hit that price then what else would you really want to buy?
A major issue for me is that I wouldn't know what else to get. Given the current state of Windows, I'm not running out to get a Windows machine. Honestly, if the layout of my house was different, so I could get my desk closer to the living room and family, I'd go for a desktop running Linux next time around.
Other than that, I think Apple have the market cornered. You want a great laptop, with an OS that just works (for most people), then what else are you going to buy?
I feel like Apple is shooting themselves in the foot with app developers. First you make your system a complete walled garden, you need Apple hardware to develop MacOS/iOS apps and there is no alternative. It would be one thing if you had a walled garden + affordable hardware but that's not the case, you have a walled garden and you have prohibitively expensive hardware to develop apps for that walled garden.
Hell even when it comes to development, you can't just build your iOS/MacOS app on a regular Linux CI machine, no you must have MacOS machines for building, so you need that special hardware on top of all the other expenses.
I almost feel like Apple setup the developer program with the idea that it's just going to be 15 year old prodogies making apps on their parents computer, their whole stack just seems incompatible and PIA to work with when it comes to actual software development. It should be a sign when you have popular products like CodePush that were designed specifically to address the shortcomings of developing iOS apps.
Yes because app developers aren’t going to develop for the phone being bought by people with the highest incomes and willingness to spend money.
It’s been over a decade since indy developers really made a dent in the App Store.
Android is not exactly a piece of cake to develop for, the tool chain is slow, the emulator is slow, the device market os fragmented and people are still mostly running old versions of Android you have to support.
Not to mention most Android devices on the market are slow.
I can agree with the market all you want but on the tech side, Android is miles ahead of Apple for any developer stuff, there's not even a debate.
xcode itself is 12GB and doesn't support partial updates, the projet file is some hot garbage and plays badly with git, the whole ide is lagging pretty hard on clicka, app upload is so broken Apple themselves had ro release a third party tool to bypass it, the developer portal looks like it hasn't changed since 2010 and has a number of shameful bugs...
How many test devices do you need to make sure your app works well from a high end Samsung to a shitty low end $150 unsubsidized phone?
How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?
I never had that on Android but I experienced that with Apple actually! I had to get a second phone because the first one glitched and broke the developer mode, resetting it did not solve the issue. Apple support had no idea what caused the bug of course since there's no debug logs, this bug still exists right now if you are unlucky and is common on stackoverflow.
> How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?
I prefer to use my real device since it's not taking any screen space but the Android emulator is much much faster than the one from Apple, every click takes 3s on the Apple one, I don't know what they have done exactly to make it perform so badly. Or maybe it's the mac I used, but again, there's no way to know anyways.
I gave up on Apple because of the overall poor dev experience, I now consider the devices legacy and tell users who ask that I will only support Android to guarantee a better experience, the app used to be available on iOS but I won't upload the app back due to the poor dev ecosystem.
Why do I have a feeling that you aren’t that experienced with iOS or mobile? You are running into problems that most iOS developers don’t run into and you’re not having to experience supporting a fragmented Android ecosystem that most developers have to go through with complicated apps
I've also used iOS for about a year and it was hands down the worst mobile experience I ever had. I don't criticize here though, it's a matter of personal taste unlike the dev experience.
> You are running into problems that most iOS developers don’t run into
Those problems are real and you have tons of threads online. The thing is, the iOS dev stack looks brittle, you're likely to have the different problems as somebody else and there's no way to debug it anyways.
I got a surprise when going to System76’s buy page. Upgrades to 1To or 32GB are only two-digit numbers, not three digits! Coming from Apple, it’s refreshing.
(But the second adapter is 110$ and requires a separate 120$ shipment).
By the way Framework also has no cheap options like $400-$500: the prices start with 750 Euro for tiny 13-inch version. I guess you can't profit much from selling reasonably priced laptops.
I suspect that the hardware margins might be there, and the sticking point is the additional overhead to cover support. When they sell ten million units and have six-sigma'd any manufacturing and support wrinkles to near-irrelevance, I wouldn't be surprised if they move down-market.
For the time being, there's apparently a customer base willing to pay those prices. They're not spec-competitive, but once you assign value to the brand, and the moral stance of supporting the idea, and the secondary value of intentionally-not-obsolete components, they have a lot going for them.
And notably, the customers who consider those factors to be important, are generally aiming mid-high in the market anyway.
I suspect that's excluding VAT, which would add 25% where I am, making it a $1000 laptop. I understand Apple isn't responsible for VAT, but I still need to pay it. Still it's hitting the price point I think it should be at, it's just not really an offer that's available to me.
The prices are bad enough, but what really seals the deal is the forced obsolescence. I have an older macbook that I was trying to upgrade to the newer OS and they make it basically impossible. I struggled for a few days on it, then I just installed ubuntu and it works perfectly.
Apple's value proposition seems to be "pay an arm and a leg for something we will break anytime we think you should give us more money."
New macOS historically runs on devices between 5 and 10 years old. Longest in recent memory was El Cap which supported 8-10 year old devices. Shortest was Snow Leopard, which supported 3 year old devices.
Ventura is lower, 4-5 years, but that happens periodically when aligned with major architectural changes.
[edit] Honestly, their support cycle is pretty impressive. And just because they don't release a newer version of macOS doesn't mean software stops working.
Why should 4-5 years be lauded? I daily-drive an AthlonXP machine from 2008. Nothing about the hardware requires dropping support. (Linux has, sadly but understandably, dropped support for the older 386/486/ppro architectures in the name of kernel sanity, but I wouldn't run a desktop with any of those anyway.)
Dropping support for hardware that still runs perfectly fine, and isn't a heinous mess of architectural workarounds, is nothing more than a crass money-grab. Which is completely understandable for a company whose job is to make money, but I still don't see why that's praiseworthy.
It's one thing for the Linux kernel to still support 15+ year-old hardware (the Athlon XP was already pretty old by 2008). It's a very different thing for a full desktop OS to still support it in a feature-complete way.
Historically, Apple seems to prefer to drop support for old hardware rather than maintain a long list of caveats about which features cannot run on older machines. Throughout the Intel Mac era, Apple was clearly trying to raise the bar for baseline GPU performance to ensure the graphical effects really would run "perfectly fine" as you put it, though they were stymied by some of Intel's anti-competitive behavior. Their decision to drop support for the 32-bit kernel and firmware was quite reasonable, though the later decision to drop support for 32-bit applications was more of a problem for users.
I've run into this a few times with Apple. It's not that the upgrade is explicitly not allowed by policy. It's just that things are broken in ways which prevent you upgrading/using the device properly. I don't know if it's just lack of care on Apple's part, incompetence, honest mistakes or a stealth method of forcing an upgrade. In any case, hardware that seemed slow and outdated with Apple's software ecosystem now runs perfectly with Ubuntu. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I suspect it's more that maintaining a 10+ year testing matrix across three architectures and like 15 product families is pretty un-manageable.
The cross product matrix is already staggering, but imagine testing 10 years of iPhones, 10 years of iPods, however many years of Watch, AirPods, chargers, etc against every Mac released for 10 years - in every configuration? Every time you ship an OS update? Wild.
I've had a similar experience, where supported OS updates rendered a macbook effectively unusable due to performance hits and bugs.
It's one of several reasons that I stopped buying macs for my personal dev machine and switched to ubuntu. Linux certainly isn't perfect but updates have been more pleasant than on mac or windows.
Right, and they also do security releases for some older macOS and iOS releases, so even if your machine doesn't support the lates version, you can still have a secure machine. E.g., a few days ago they also put out security fixes for macOS 11 and 12, in January for iOS 12 (supporting iPhones 5s from 2013).
>The cheapest iPhone 14 starts at a bit over €1000.
The cheapest iPhone they sell you is the SE, a phone with a low-res, dim display, that's worse than what Android phones had 10 years ago (have the SE from work and my dusty old 2012 Samsung Note 2's OLED display just blows it out of the water), all starting at a whopping 549 Euros, more than my rent.
Apple's pricing is just nuts in Europe. For up to 399 I might give it a pass, but at 549 they're just taking the mickey.
The iPad 9 was also a pretty good deal at ~380 Euros until they replaced it with the iPad 10 at ~540 Euros. Absolutely mental. It fells they're pulling "an Nvidia" on us and just jacking up the prices for no reason.
I 100% agree about the hardware but I have to say the selling point of apple is the OS. I have an iPhone SE 2020 and the screen broke. This caused me to use my QA device (Samsung S21+) while I returned to the city from the mountains.
It was a horrendous experience. The camera is unquestionably better in the Samsung but that is about all the positives I could take from my week of using it.
Android was just an abysmal experience from my perspective. Nothing on it seems intuitive and everything feels like a ploy to get you to use a product which will siphon your data off to Google.
Obviously this is just my own personal anecdotal experience so take it with a pinch of salt. But there will no doubt be others feeling the same.
I miss my old 3310 if I am honest. I’ve been looking at dumb phones recently. I just need one with WhatApp so I can talk to my family around the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Security is not remotely comparable. Google couldn't even be bother to fix the glaring Wifi attack that their _own_ team found. I would be scared to own an Android phone, even a Pixel.
The M2 air for me is working more as a means for me to talk myself into getting an M1 Pro 14" than anything else.
Creating a mental process like this:
- "I'd like an M1 Pro 14, but it's too expensive"
- "A 16GB M1 Air would more than suffice and they're now at okayish prices refurbished"
- "Oh! there's a new M2 Air and it's like a pretty nice middle point between the M1 Air and the M1 Pro"
- "Oh wait, 16GB is only a few hundred less than an M1 Pro"
- "...I guess I should just splash out and get the M1 Pro??"
I'm probably still just gonna get an M1 Air when I need to instead but the amount of time I've entertained getting an M2 Air versus using it to compare against alternatives on either side has been absolutely minimal.
My work M1 Pro has drastically improved my quality of life so I'm not entertaining anything other than Apple, but the M2 is decidedly underwhelming comparing to the seismic shift that was the M1.
Yeah, I did exactly this. My colleague was raving about the M2 Air, and I looked into it, compared it with M1 Pro, and told myself: this one's worth it (things like the fantastic screen and available ports). I did buy my M1 Pro on sale, but I only saved a couple hundred EUR compared to release price. As a pro relatively late adopter I didn't have much transition difficulty because everything was ported, as a con I missed out on a few months of support (for resale value / EOL etc). Compared to the MBP 2015 (which didn't get the update to macOS 13) I was using: it never gets hot, the fans barely ever spin, it probably uses a lot less W so saves me energy, yet its a lot more powerful.
The only thing I miss on my M1 Pro, is USB-A (which I'm invested in, e.g. my YubiKeys and something like a HackRF or Proxmark), but its got 3 (!!) USB-C and I got adapters. I would've gone to Framework, but while the Linux desktop has come from a long, long way (my reference point being I started using WMs in the 90s, with my first being FVWM on RedHat 5.2) I prefer macOS with a plethora of FOSS utilities, and I am not disappointed by macOS on the ARM-based M-series. With a Framework, I could open it up myself and it seems pretty idiot-proof. I love the modularity of the ports but in the end they're just internal USB-C adapters. So while aesthetically nice, with 3 USB-C (and a SD and HDMI) I'm good to go.
I have an M1 Max (work) and M1 Pro (private), but I seriously considered getting an Air M2. Why? It is much more compact and lighter than the MacBook Pro, which is really nice for travel. But yeah, the M1 Pro with discounts was to enticing, because I could get one with 32 GB RAM.
I recently picked up an m2 14". It's fucking delightful, it's true that it's a pound heavier (which is about 40% heavier). But in a bag that pound doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot to me.
The inclusion of the HDMI port, and generally how far along we are in the usb-c transition, means that I can probably get away without one of those mini dock dongles that generally are no more than a few usb-a ports, an HDMI port and maybe an ethernet port. I have a couple of tiny usb-c(male) to usb-a(female) in my bag for interfacing if I need to.
Previously I had a 13" M1 work machine and it was also great but skated a bit too close to the 'air' sun. It was almost perfect except I felt like I had to carry that stupid mini-dock dongle with me just about everywhere given that it only had 2 ports, one of which was probably going to be for power. (and no magsafe... boooooo)
Don't do it. I bought M1 Air instead of M1 14" Pro to save money and now I regret it. The Pro's display and speakers are much better I now watch movies on work M1 14" Pro.
M2 Air might be good too, I don't know. But if I could go back, I'd go to M1 Pro.
Yup - I was happily doing everything I always do (as above) on my 15" 2012 MBP w/ 16GB memory up until some power chip on the mobo died. It was only lagging a bit w/ certain websites in Chrome. I still have three other Macs from around 2012 working just fine, one being my music server.
So I was asking myself if I "need" the fancy laptop screen and excellent audio of a 14" MBP for $2K (no video production, no graphic design, no VR/AR, but hey, Electron apps all day long!).
Answer is no, clearly. But any Apple Silicon at this point is (hopefully) another ten year machine.
Except each macOS upgrade slows down the machine to a crawl. I still remember when I got my 2013 MBP 15”, you opened the screen and the login appeared smoothly. Now it struggles at each step of the fade in, and lags a few seconds before showing the password box.
Or you know, maybe they like that it has an improved camera, better battery life (eg. after switching from Intel to Apple Silicon), larger color space which allows them to edit photos better, or the laptop got better speakers, or the laptop became more thin, or added support for fast charging, or maybe many crappy Electron apps makes them update more regularly? People can have all kinds of good reasons to update their laptop.
That said, I know plenty of Mac users who upgrade maybe every 4 or 5 years.
This is what kills it for me. When the M1 macs came out I was quite enthusiastic to use them, but just wasn't ready to drop that kind of money on an unknown OS. So I brought a cheaper, refurbished MBA (8gb ram, 256gb ssd) and loved it. The trouble is, 256gb ssd would be too small for me as a daily driver, ideally I'd want at least 1tb, but my only option to get that is to buy a whole new mac. Its hard to justify spending ~£3000 on what is effectively for me just a bigger ssd.
* It just works. I detest Windows. I love Linux but lately I started spending too much time maintaining it, I have busy life and decided that taking care of my OS is a luxury and I would rather use something that is acceptable than spend a lot of time getting to perfect.
* It is viable powerful workstation. I just connect it to a good docking station and have a nice setup with two 60Hz 4k monitors. It is silent and usually cold while in this setup. And it is surprisingly (and I mean it) powerful.
* It has gorgeous display. For hugging together and watching movies with my kids and wife.
* It is a status symbol. All people at my company who mean anything have one and it is easier for me to just fit in and pick other, more meaningful battles.
* It is durable. It will last me a long time, hopefully. It is true that it is fragile, but it is mostly fragile in certain ways that I can manage around. I am generally gentle and caring about my gadgets. If I don't kill it in a stupid way there is good chance it will be perfectly good working laptop for many, many years to come. I can hand it down to one of my family while I get a newer machine.
This is a huge factor for me. I have linux on my desktop but my laptops are Mac - I do a lot of graphics and video editing and the color reproduction of Mac displays is reliably faithful at both the hardware and software level. And the M1 is a champ, its performance seems like a miracle for such a quiet cool machine
My $0.02: in my world nobody gives a #### about status, but while I agree with your list, I feel it misses the single biggest feature:
* the power efficiency of the M1 means you can _actually_ use it an entire day on a charge _without_ having to compromise on performance. That is a huge issue.
I'd amend your last point with: at least in North America, getting service for the Apple products is very streamlined and that has enabled me to keep even a 2008 MBP alive until today. For me that is a huge deal as I hate donating to the landfill.
> It is a status symbol. All people at my company who mean anything have one
Watching all this unfold as the DevOps guy was funny. "Don't go buy the new Macbooks, it breaks our build pipeline and you can no longer run production locall- wait, what's that? We ordered 20 last week before anyone even tested it? Sigh..."
It doesn't matter to them. They're content spending 5 hours tweaking their Mac setup for every 60 minutes they spend improving production. Do I envy that naivete? I'm not sure anymore.
Macs don't have that much to tweak. What are people spending 5 hours tweaking? If it's building the perfect CLI, welcome to programmers and any computer set in front of them regardless of OS.
It was mostly Lima/Docker/Rancher/Podman related, iirc. Our architecture was all over the place, and people were in disagreement on the best way to fill-in-the-gaps for MacOS. Not sure what it looks like now, but I spent a lot of time doing Mac stuff for software that was only ever used internally.
Damn straight. I just got a m1 air 8gb w/ 256gb for $975 CAD on FB marketplace in December.
It was in absolute mint condition with 7 cycles on the battery and 1 year left on applecare (which apparently means i can renew it even as the second owner.)
My take is that a lot of people got these wizzbang new laptops through some spending account for WFH during covid, they never left the house with them and now theyre selling them as they go back to the office.
I agree with this. I got the M1 Air as soon as it launched, it's insanely fast, there's no fan so there's no noise, and the battery goes for 15+ hours (granted I mostly just use the iTerm and a browser window).
Yeah, that's more than I paid for my Framework with the 11th Gen i7, 32 GB of memory, and 1 TB of storage. I've been saying for a while that Framework doesn't get enough credit for how competitive their prices are on the higher-end options. When I was buying mine, comparable machines from Apple, Microsoft, Lenovo, and Dell were like double the price. The ability to repair and upgrade was icing-on-the-cake for me.
> The new base M2 Air begins at €1500 after taxes which is genuinely an absurd amount of money to ask for a device that comes with 8 GB and 256 GB of non-replaceable ram and ssd respectively.
I wonder why the Apple executive leadership doens't come together and say:
1. let's lower prices
2. let's keep prices the same but offer 16GB + 512GB of storage
my hypothetical retort would be "they don't need to if people keep buying their product" but, if the article headline is true about sales being down, then they need to run some kind of sale or re-evaulate i guess
i wonder what their margins are on their M2 Mac line of hardware
> It is generally believed that Apple has a profit margin of around 40-45% on its products.
> Using the mid-point of that range (42.5%), we can approximate the hypothetical cost of manufacturing an Apple M2 laptop as follows:
I'm mostly Linux these days, but I also have a second hand M1. If you're in the UK, I got mine from: https://www.hoxtonmacs.co.uk/ It's not a massive markdown from a new machine, but it works as if new.
> My plan is to keep my entry-level M1 Air for a few more years and then I'm replacing it with a Framework laptop.
IMHO, the Mac and Framework are different products for different people: The Mac is for generalists who just need a computer that's easy to use and gets things done whereas the framework is for techies who need to get things done, but also care about open architecture, upgradability, and tinkering with esoteric Linux distros.
Many of these generalists on the Mac side don't need more than a web browser for most of their tasks and are willing to pay more because they don't want to care about the details: they just want a computer that works.
This isn't to say one or the other is better, but that they are solving for fundamentally different problems.
I am in the same boat as you. I have an M1 Air with 8GB of RAM. I am eyeing the M2 Mac Air or the Pro. But, as I assess my situation, I use the M1 Air for light coding tasks: to learn stuff outside of my working hours, and not to run something like LLMs with it. So, even with 8GB of RAM, I rarely feel I need to upgrade to 16GB. Though, I would probably upgrade to M2 with 16GB if the price is not that steep. For now, I am happy with the M1 Air and I still think it is easily the best laptop I have ever had in my life.
I consider the Mac base models quite affordable for the quality and performance. But for my use I need more RAM and would prefer more storage, and these prices are absolutely beyond ridiculous.
A first world problem sure, but it's really frustrating that all the deals are for 8 GB versions. With non-upgradable memory, I'd never buy 8 GB laptop I intend to keep 5+ years. Not even with macOS's famous memory frugality.
I feel the same. Macs are just way too expensive in EU market to recommend for normal people. You can get a real good internet+netflix machine for 800EUR. In my opinion Apple prices themselves out as the quality of the 800EUR market range increased dramatically over the past four years. Most people dont need a M1, so they can buy cheaper.
I used to justify Apple’s very high prices with “the hardware and software are premium”.
For me, the hardware is still without a doubt premium. Great build quality, fantastic processors etc.
iOS is still pretty good as well. But MacOS…damn what a mess. I’m starting to think I’m better of using a framework laptop with a user friendly Linux GUI running on it.
Agreed. I loved my Coporate MacBook pro. It was durable and battery lasted long. But it costed about $3k and I can't afford it. Instead, I bought a System 76 ($1200) + Desktop PC I built myself ($600). I am not a gamer. I only do programming and you don't need a fancy hardware to run vim.
Correct. It's a terrible deal relative to buying a mac ~5-6 years ago, when the price for a base spec model was more reasonable and you could upgrade it yourself.
this is exactly my issue. I was able to get an opened but unused macbook pro M1 2020 from Amazon for £799/€909 in 2021, with 8GB ram and 512GB SSD. It's been an excellent purchase, and I've been happy with it but faced with paying much more, I'd likely opt for something else.
> with 8 GB and 256 GB of non-replaceable ram and ssd respectively.
Technically it is replaceable - replacement of surface mount components isn't actually too difficult and tools that are needed are affordable.
Problem is that the Apple won't give an option to buy memory or SSD chips on an open market.
While the replacement wouldn't be feasible for a typical laptop user, plenty of mobile repair shops would have done the upgrade with pleasure provided they could get access to chips.
Something we really need legislators to step in. Unfortunately in the EU the coming right to repair law is completely useless.
It's not user-replaceable. It would not be _that_ difficult for Apple to keep a SODIMM slot free, or even come up with a new standard - as they are wont to do.
Apple sacrificed upgradability in the name of making more money - it's as simple as that.
Well trick is, decent iGPUs need better than 128 bit wide DDR5 @ 5200 Mhz. So apple's solution is a small CPU package with ram on board that lets them do 128, 256, 512, and 1024 bit wide memory interfaces. All but the 1024 bit wide are low power enough to be in thin laptops.
Considering even the Ryzen 7950x or Intel I9 for desktops are 128 bit wide that's a pretty huge difference. You have to move up to Epyc, Threadripper, Xeon, or a Workstation CPU to get more than 128 bits, and those aren't available on laptops.
So I'm going to have to disagree with the "Apple sacrificed upgradability in the name of making more money".
Well, it's not because Apple doesn't give access to parts, otherwise it would be.
Not sure how use of hot air station suddenly makes it something that a user can't do?
You can buy a hot air station for less than $100 and it will do the job. Only caveat is that the replacement part needs to be new (so it has pre-applied solder balls) - otherwise you'd need to reball which a bit more difficult, but not something that can't be done at home.
