The dollar is insanely strong right now and global Mac prices raised in accordance with that. In places that don’t use USD, prices shot up by tens of percent overnight while the US prices are the same as ever. Japan, for example, got a price increase of about 40% on all items.
This is a bigger story that isn’t being told properly often. The recent BRICS currency move is about them panicking over increasing dollar global dominance.
Checking recently I can’t find any major currency that is up against the dollar over last 10 years. US productivity is running away from the rest of the planet is another variable and with rapid on shoring of numerous industries, especially semiconductors, there is a possibility that US economic dominance is about to go into hyperdrive.
That version is something the media never mentions.
Outside of Peter Zeihan, I'm also utterly surprised that no one even brings up the demographics debate. Everyone has been so indoctrinated on the "we have too many people" propaganda that they haven't even realized how fast birth rates have dropped across the globe (and they're dropping even faster now).
The demographics of Europe, China, Japan and S. Korea are all terminal at this point. Outside of UK, France, and to some extent, Germany, most of these countries don't even have an immigrant culture to make up for the shortfall.
America, meanwhile, has decent native birth rate AND a culture that's always willing to accommodate new people.
> America, meanwhile, has decent native birth rate
No, it doesn't. It's about 1.8 and dropping, and most of the higher values in that group are from recent immigrants, which are also having fewer kids. Educated folks also have lower fertility rates.
The US is basically a mirror of Western Europe in this regard:
> AND a culture that's always willing to accommodate new people.
I'd argue that the biggest factors by far these days are:
1. English (very accessible due to music, movies, TV shows, etc).
2. Lots and lots of natural resources facilitating lots of businesses which aren't really feasible in say, Germany, France, Japan.
3. Large population bringing economies of scaling facilitating advanced businesses paying high salaries.
Otherwise someone who travels around the US and Western Europe, for example, will be quite surprised at the cultural convergence and immigration levels.
Most of your comment is a perception from 2-3 decades back, at least.
That's literally the point he made above... America has always been a nation of immigrants. This is a good thing, not something to be singled out and act like it's a negative.
> Even at 1.8, it's higher than the rest of the developed world.
Not true. If you look at OECD data – https://data.oecd.org/pop/fertility-rates.htm – the latest year for which the OECD has complete data is 2021, in which it records a US TFR of 1.6. The following countries all recorded higher TFRs than the US – Israel (2.9); Mexico (2.1); France, Colombia and Turkey (tied at 1.8); Costa Rica, Czechia, Denmark, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden (all tied at 1.7). The US, at 1.6, was at the OECD Average (1.6), tied with Australia, Belgium, Chile, Estonia, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Slovenia and the UK.
I suppose you might argue 2020 was a rather abnormal year due to COVID. Well, 2019 was pre-COVID, in which the US was still only 1.7 – just a a bit above the OECD average (which was 1.6 in 2019 too). In 2019, US fertility was tied with Australia, Costa Rica, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden; it was beaten by France, Colombia and Iceland (all 1.8), Turkey (1.9), Mexico (2.1), and Israel (3.0).
US fertility is not an outlier at all by developed world standards. It is somewhere between average and slightly above average. And I realise some OECD members might not be considered "developed" by everyone's standards – such as Costa Rica, Colombia, Mexico or Turkey – but the US is regularly equalled or bettered by countries which generally are accepted as such, e.g. Australia, Denmark, France, Ireland, Israel, New Zealand, Sweden.
Racism and xenaphobia of the native population has very little effect on migration if the reward for the migrants is enough.
If a "developed" country wanted to stop migration they would work to raise the living standards at the source. There is less chance of that happening than removing xenaphobic behaviour from the natives however.
Or the "developed" society becomes more brutal than the place the migrant are fleeing from, so they stay away out of fear.
If you look at Haiti, Venezuela, etc, it seems the limiting factor here is an unwillingness of the U.S. to leverage any political muscle, either domestically or internationally. I presume that's partly a consequence of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also probably because for some large factions, especially on the left but increasingly on the right, in American politics any form of involvement is unacceptable. It's almost like a radical ecological argument: the rest of the world is in a state of nature, and any intervention by an external agency is per se morally evil; the moral imperative is non-intervention, outcomes are irrelevant. Even those who don't hold this belief (explicitly or implicitly) at least understand the consequences: any perceived failure in intervention will be blamed on them, and nobody wants to face the ire of the religionists.
> It's almost like a leftist ecological argument: the rest of the world is in a state of nature, and any intervention by an external agency is per se morally evil.
The USA will get flack if it meddles and if it doesn't meddle, they really shouldn't worry about world opinion at that point. More to the point, it is impossible for America to fix the rest of the world, even if that were the moral thing to do. Welcoming some immigrants from countries having problems is probably the best we can do.
There's a huge gap between isolationism and trying to "fix the rest of the world". But in the current political epoch nuance, pragmatism, and mercy seem to be alien concepts.
The USA already has a foreign aid budget, and gets involved in bits and pieces, but it’s always too much and not enough at the same time, so how can they win at that?
Canada explicitly legalized racism so long as it’s done for equity purposes. In America the same laws would be unconstitutional and immigrants of all types coming to the country on a regular basis. This is a country where the median income of several immigrant groups outstrips that of the local population despite factors such as nepotism.
Define racism I suppose. Is racism inequality or inequity?
Probably by the ethnic distribution of the immigrants. Most of US immigrant are not white so I don’t understand your argument. Maybe only Canada has more diverse immigrants than the US.
What is the relationship between xenophobia and the diversity of immigrants?
Counter-example: Certain Arab gulf states, extremely large and diverse immigrant populations from all of Eurasia. Yet still super xenophobic to anyone who isn’t an Arab.
> Lots and lots of natural resources facilitating lots of businesses which aren't really feasible in say, Germany, France, Japan.
This doesn't seem to be a big factor in the boom industries in the US: tech, finance, pharma. It does matter for construction, the biggest employer.
The US still seems like a more welcoming place than western Europe. Or at least you can take comfort in a suburban home and drive to people/institutions that are from your immigrant group.
We have an immigrant ethos that exceeds that of the UK, France, and Germany. Plus, our large number of decent universities means the masters/F1->OPT->H1B pipeline works well for many educated workers.
> We have an immigrant ethos that exceeds that of the UK, France, and Germany.
Again with the outdated mindset. Those countries have as many immigrants or more, per capita, as the US.
> Plus, our large number of decent universities means the masters/F1->OPT->H1B pipeline works well for many educated workers.
Those work well for drawing people in, but how well do they serve second generation immigrants or minorities? Universities in Europe are cheap or free, that's a whole lot more egalitarian.
The US speaks English, is big and has a TON of money. The US basically brute forces everything, which I guess works.
> The US still seems like a more welcoming place than western Europe.
I personally know peolle that left US for UK because they found your immigration system unacceptable.
If you are from india, you might have to wait 10 years to get citizenship after fulfilling all requirements.
Uk immigration system itself is worse than that of France and many other countries.
It costs $10,000 to apply for visas for a family of 4. Thats just the money you pay to the government, assuming you never need a solicitor to help with the paperwork.
No European country (UK excepted) has an “immigrant culture.” In recent decades, some European countries have accepted large numbers of immigrants. But as far as I can tell, they’ve even relegated to an economically disadvantaged underclass in every one of those countries. They’re not buying Apple products. For example, average income for Turks in Germany (a group that started immigrating in the 1970s) is estimated to be 2,000 euros per month: https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/193000-turks-come-back-fro.... Average income for Germans as a whole is almost 4,000 euros per month.
Meanwhile in America, median household income for Vietnamese Americans—who also started immigrating in the 1970s, as refugees—matched the national average sometime in the 1990s.
Taking Vietnamese as an example, may not be the best example. Vietnamese immigrants in France are also doing well (Vietnamese diaspora in France is the second in size behind the US).
By what metric is Vietnamese the largest immigrant group? The largest is easily Mexico, and I don't see that Vietnam cracks the top 5, and maybe not the top 10.
The largest minority group in the US is Hispanics. White Americans have a median household income 36% higher than the median household income of Hispanics. The median income of Germans is almost double the median income of Turkish Germans.
> Per capita income for Poles, Italians, Russian, and Germans is higher than median US per capita income.
US per capita income is higher than US median personal income (that’s what happens with concentrated-at-the-top instead of normal distributions.) But you probably mean “mean” rather than “median” since that’s what your source actually provides.
I am not sure you looked at my sources. Direct quotes: "The following median per capita income data..."/"The following median household income data..."
Household income is higher than per capita for all groups.
I picked large, visible minority immigrant groups that have been in their destination country for more than a generation.
> What are the statistics for Poles, Italians, Russian Germans?
There’s far fewer of those than Turks, and many are ethnic Germans to begin with.
> The US has plenty of minority and immigrant groups for which convergence is... far from happening
There’s only two: black people and indigenous people, neither of which are immigrant groups. Economic migrants go the US, such as Germans, Italians, and Irish, all economically assimilated decades ago. Hispanics are on the same track: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353.
I don't have the numbers but what I can share is that Vietnamese are considered a model minority in several European countries, including some not famous for their integration policies, such as Czechia. So the fact that Vietnamese Americans are doing well is not some weird thing.
Turks in Germany is not "cherry picking" - they are one of the largest immigrant groups and have been immigrating to Germany for much longer than other big groups.
> AND a culture that's always willing to accommodate new people.
Try getting a green card even as a trained European. Good luck :)
Not that I'd ever be interested in living in the US. I prefer a country with a decent social security safety net and socialized healthcare. And where people can't just run around carrying guns.
Spain is not perfect but I have way fewer things to worry about here. So I can relax and enjoy life more.
You are buying into a distorted image of the typical US population experience. Access to healthcare is pretty much instant and high quality for all but the very bottom of the society. 85%+ of the population can get an appointment within a day or two and if it’s urgent can access numerous urgent care clinics with almost no wait.
Best I can tell for many European countries the situation is significantly worse in terms of access.
There is a lot of strange misconceptions about US quality of life from people in other countries.
Be sure to check that urgent care clinic is in network first! Having a well paid job in a big US metro gives you access to excellent healthcare but the bureaucracy here is a huge pain compared to countries with universal systems.
Coming from the UK I would have picked the NHS as it was when I left 10 years ago over what I have access to here, but the Tories have really run that service into the ground in the interim.
It's not the access really. More the worry about paying for it. In the US it can cost a lot, and while your employer covers it usually, this means you're really tied to your job. Here in Spain I never have to worry about paying for it.
I'm sure the healthcare in the US is world-class considering how much it costs. But that cost is the biggest problem for me.
But really, I'm a socialist and considering that this is a swearword in the US for many people, I just don't want to ever live there. My world view is just too different. I've never even visited.
> 85%+ of the population can get an appointment within a day or two
I'd love to see where you got that statistic. IME, I have to wait months for any kind of specialist. And when I finally get to see one, my insurance underpays and then I spend endless hours fighting with both the provider and the insurer. This crap happens every single time I need to see a doctor. I can't wait to retire and move to a second world country that has US trained doctors who give you their personal cell number.
> The average has dropped to 10 days! The US wait for equivalent of GP is like next 1-2 days, or even same day if you get triaged by the group.
Unfortunately NHS is in terrible shape at the moment after many cuts. It is performing at the level of a 2nd world country.
Czechia has canver survival 30% higher than UK does.
I lived in Czechia, we had a proton therapy center for Twenty Years. England got one just recently.
There is a story where larents in Britain had to steal their child from a hospital, to take her to czechia for Proton beam therapy.
The UK doctors have declared her terminally ill, refused to let parents take her for other treatment and after parents kidnapped tbeir own child, theyl parents were declared wanted in Interpol, launching internstional manhunt.
They foung in court to get thei4 chance to treat a child, took child to czechia, went through therapy and now child is in scholl and free of cancer
If theu had trusted the NHS their child would be dead.
I also know a bloke who was struggling with backpain for 4 years and could not get it sorted in UK, he through he would become handicapped and retuned to Romania to live it out in peace. Turns out it wss really bad Vitamin D deficciency, which makes your bones soft and allows nerved to be pinched. He is living a full life now.
Bear in mind that a bunch of Americans have been sold on public single-payer healthcare as the solution to the problems with their healthcare system based on the amount the UK spends on the NHS after all those cuts (which are more like spending not increasing at the same rate as demand). Also, one of the big cost savings is that medical staff are paid an awful lot less in the UK than the US.
I live in the Bay Area with good insurance. Next appointment with Stanford for a regular check up with a GP as a new patient is 2-3 months, unless I want to drive an hour away.
>The US wait for equivalent of GP is like next 1-2 days
Again, I'd like to see the stats on that. I wanted to see my Dr for an annual checkup and was told it was a 2+ month wait and if I didn't want to wait I could see some random nurse practitioner.
There are 2nd world countries where it is incredibly cheap to call your doctor's cell phone and have them come to you in a day or two.
I can confirm that in multiple European countries you just walk to your GP's office and wait an hour or two (worst case) if you do not have an appointment.
I waited 20 min last time I went without appointment.
Specialists is a different story, the worst being psychologists/therapists (wait time counted in years where I live).
The equivalent is urgent care clinics in the US. They are everywhere and you can be seen in 15-20 mins, covered by employer medical plan. Testing, imaging, common medicines and treatments on site.
Wait for specialists and surgeries are significantly less in the US than all other G20 countries.
People are mixing up numbers because of different naming and conventions.
Here is an example item, wait time for knee replacement surgery, or any standard surgery. I’m fairly confident the US is lowest among all G20, by significant amounts.
Your annual checkup wait isn’t an appropriate measure, they do that as they are prioritizing care much better than in bureaucratic socialized medical care. That doctor you are calling on cell likely has much less resources than the nurse practitioner you can be seen in 15-20 mins wait almost 24/7 in every major population center in the US at urgent cares, rapid cares, and worst case ERs. Instant testing, imaging, medications on site.
I don’t think you are comparing apples to apples when people claim they would prefer medical care elsewhere, they have some incorrect assumptions about greener grass, or we are discussing the experience of very lowest income segment of the population.
I do agree that bottom 10% might be slightly better off medically in other countries than the US. That is definitely possible. But for 90% I don’t think it is even remotely competitive.
that doesnt reflect my experience in US at all. I come from India.
Despite our hospitals being flooded with patients, healthcare is not inaccessible. As it is over here, its a insane system with the priorities a* backwards. Focus on patient, not on your profits.
> Access to healthcare is pretty much instant and high quality for all but the very bottom of the society.
The US simultaneously under-treats poor people while over-treating rich people. This is why health outcomes in the US are so bad across a range of indicators.
We should define what healthcare means. For example: if you have a cavity, do they simply pull the tooth or do you get a filling? It's just an example, but health care ranges from "preventing you from dying only" up to cosmetic stuff.
Having moved from a dense hcol area of the US to a dense hcol area of France, my experience has been that 1) I have access to specialists with less than a week wait in both places, but 2) costs in France are much lower than US.
It seems to be a common belief with Europeans that the US has no safety net or public healthcare at all, but of course this isn't true. It's just mainly targeted at poor or old people.
Suicide is often included as a cause of death to intentionally distort this statistic:
> From 2019 to 2020, the relative increase in the rate of firearm-related deaths of all types (_suicide_, homicide, unintentional, and undetermined) among children and adolescents was 29.5%
If you control for this, and include rates of homicide using other means of destruction (i.e., explosives or knives), it starts to look a lot more even compared to other OECD countries (albeit still above average).
I wouldn't consider that distortion. Its a significant problem that firearms are highly successful suicide on the first impulse. Children who try another means are much more likely to have a chance to contemplate if they really want to kill themselves.
I'm calling it a distortion, because it's often used as a dishonest portrayal of how prevalent gun violence is in the US. Usually by the media, who wants attention grabbing headlines, and don't really care how the numbers are manipulated to peddle to their readers' selection bias.
It's US government agencies that call death by suicide a form of violence, and that's the reason that death by suicide involving a gun is a form of gun violence.
This is despite all the weird laws in the US against collecting, analysing, and reporting statistics.
Shouldn't that number be concerning 30% of children deaths are from guns?
Suicide or not, doesn't that seem concerning? Hmm... Some people say it's the top way children die now by gun.
I remember growing up and having active shooter drills in elementary school but it's nothing like they are now. I think we are one of the few countries where children dieing by firearm has increased 46% in the last twenty years or so.
Where I grew up it wasn't rare to hear about stabbings or shooting but it does put me on edge hearing about a mall I used to go to having an active shooter etc.
It is concerning. But not for the reasons the media makes it out to be.
Only 0.18% of all gun homicides were committed during a mass shooting. https://www.maciverinstitute.com/2022/05/debunking-every-maj.... The chances of you being killed in a shooting are less than being struck by lightning. If you don't plan on joining a gang, frequenting a bad part of Baltimore or St. Louis, or committing suicide, it becomes orders of magnitude less likely, to the point where you're no less safe in the USA than any other country.
"Gun violence is the leading cause of death between 1 and 19 years of age" So why did the study chose such a specific age range?
Cut it off at 18 and it wouldn't work, since it would exclude gang violence. Start it at birth and it also wouldn't work, since the statistic would include infant mortality. Unfortunately, that would debunk the fact that gun violence is a widespread problem in the US, rather than something that's happening exclusively in a few poorly run municipalities with excessive levels of poverty, violence, and organized crime.
> You’re much more likely to die in a car accident.
Maybe so, but I believe you are also more likely to die of a car accident in the US. There's no getting around the fact that amongst western nations, the US has certain aspects to its culture that make it a more dangerous place to live in many ways.
You're also much more likely there to die in a car accident than here :) I don't even own a car where I live and I don't need one. In fact I wouldn't even know where to leave it in this city.
Here in Barcelona a flat rate of 20 euros a month takes care of all my travel needs on metro, bus, tram and train <3
And your reply neatly encapsulates why, for better or worse, the American economy is more efficient/dynamic. Those immigrating into the country know they'll have to hustle and work to survive and thrive.
No, threatening people with death isn't a good way to get dynamism. The American middle class healthcare system, employer plans, is specifically designed to reduce dynamism by making it harder to quit your job. There's other advantages but not that one.
> The American middle class healthcare system, employer plans, is specifically designed to reduce dynamism by making it harder to quit your job.
I’m confused, my understanding was that changing jobs is much much more frequent within the US middle class than elsewhere. How does that make sense if as you say quitting is so risky.
What specifically is risky about the US setup? Of course it encourages not being unemployed as healthcare when unemployed is a problem but most people just line up a new job before quitting.
By "dynamism" I meant it makes it harder to be unemployed, as you might be if you want to start a new business/become a contractor etc. Switching jobs is OK if you already have one lined up.
Also, being married makes it safer (but you might be relying on two incomes) and Obamacare is good in some states.
There is COBRA for 24 months and co-ops for contractors/sole-proprietors. It takes much more capital to start a business than people realize and a good part of that is cost of healthcare. the paystubs and W2s from employers hide how significant a part of employee compensation the benefits are.
Yes, there's some countries that have even lower levels (eg Italy and Greece), but that's a large chunk of Europe with a pretty similar fertility rate to the United States. I wouldn't give America a pass on any future sort of demographic discussion regarding this. Heck, China (which you list at "terminal") has a fertility rate of 1.7.
That is such an odd term. As if it the birthrates could no longer change for the positive or as if it would doom countries with birthrates below 2.1 to die.
It’s easy to envision things that would induce people to have fewer kids, it’s harder to come up with things that would make them want to have more. These birth rates are completely new experiences for the world and we’re not quite certain what the outcome will be (as it is, there are likely subcultures that are still above replacement on average, even in the most declining societies).
I bet these five could easily get birth rates above 2.0.
- Reasonable maternity leave allowances.
- Good affordable (or free) healthcare.
- Good affordable (or free) child care until school age.
- Free education to university graduate level.
- Affordable housing.
The super-rich have no interest in allowing this to happen, so countries where having a child is a significant cost will continue to have low fertility rates.
All of those may help (and arguably, European birthrates would be much worse if they didn't have them) but I don't think they're alone enough to turn around the zeitgeist of the country as a whole.
The two main hurdles to increasing birthrate are:
1. Convince couples with no kids to have one.
2. Convince couples with two/three kids to have one more.
The list might help but the question is how much for each.
> Outside of UK, France, and to some extent, Germany, most of these countries don't even have an immigrant culture to make up for the shortfall.
Not really true, for example: Sweden has been doing above EU average on both immigration and higher birth rates (for its development level) to account for the shortfall, it's not that clear cut in Europe as a whole.
ChatGPT can't do math right. It did both the multiply and the divide wrong, which makes it even worse than usual to have that many digits on your final answer.
But that's moving the goalposts, Europe has a bunch of countries with small populations, Sweden is 16th in population from 40+ countries. Aside from Germany, Italy, the UK, France, Spain and Poland all the other countries will hover +- ~10 million people compared to Sweden. It's smack in the median of population size in Europe.
In all fairness, Sweden isn't exactly doing remarkably well either. It's fertility rate is still well below replacement level. It's still in terminal decline. Just a tad slower than its peers.
Talk about a weirdly polarizing figure. He's like a clock that's right once per day. Every time his name comes up here on HN, it's a flame war. To reinforce what you state though - at least he raises some interesting topics for us to all discuss.
Peter Zeihan is basically always right in terms of first principles. Where there is time & opportunity for others to course-correct is where I've seen most of his predictions go awry.
A great example is the price cap -- enacted via insurers -- on Russian oil, which was a remarkably creative measure. PZ was spot-on about the precursive factors, specifically a) that insurance concerns dominate global shipping, and b) that the world was in for some serious pain if Russian oil stops abruptly.
Peter Zeihans insistance on birth rate is a bit silly. Most developed countries, including the USA are in the 1.5-1.7 range. There are outliers like France that are higher. There isn't this huge demographic difference between Europe and the US. He is selling his message to American conservatives, so I guess the one who pays the piper calls the tune. I don't think he cares about immigration much.
Can't disagree but the biggest target of his demographics argument is always East Asia, and the numbers there are truly dismal. S. Korea's latest numbers were 0.78. I really don't know how a population can ever recover from that
They easily could by actually putting in family friendly policies into place and abandoning the educational policies which turned childhood in Korea into a constant drill 24/7.
> A culture that’s always willing to accommodate new people
What America are you talking about?
Immigration to the USA has always been hard and a very contentious topic.
The previous president was largely voted in on his anti immigrant policy (both for legal and illegal immigration). We’re still undoing his damage to the immigration system today.
Prior to that, America has had a very fraught history with immigrants and abuse.
It’s not a culture that’s willing to accommodate new people. It’s a capitalist machine that sees new people as valuable buyers and workers.
Immigrants have always been treated as a form of cheap labor to import. Whether that was the boom of Italians or Chinese or Mexicans in the past. Then they’re immediately vilified after the work is done.
I think what the culture has in difference to others is valuing the results of capitalism more than anything else.
The way to stop illegal imigration is to legalize the status of much more hard working imigrants who deserve a good life and kick out people who are not hard working / law abiding immigrants.
Currently most of immigration works by enslaving the hardest working people for years by not giving them a chance for proper health insurance, bank accounts and a way to live peacefully just because they were born on the wrong side of an imaginary line, it’s disgusting.
> The previous president was largely voted in on his anti immigrant policy (both for legal and illegal immigration). We’re still undoing his damage to the immigration system today.
The Trump administration's H1B reform was focused on paying immigrants more money [0]. This did not have the effect of reducing high-skilled immigration, nor was it its intention.
> It’s not a culture that’s willing to accommodate new people. It’s a capitalist machine that sees new people as valuable buyers and workers.
The US is one of the few countries that accepts immigrants not based on education/skills merit[1] (except for H1B, which is largely gamed by Silicon Valley to acquire foreign talent). This is in contrast to Canada or Australia, where the only hope you have to immigrate to those countries as a national from a country with a very high volume of immigration (e.g., India or China) is to get an advanced degree.
Not absolute number, but age distribution. One needs to have confidence that the country won't be facing major economic problems due to not enough young people to support an aging population - e.g. Japan.
GDP will tend to grow faster if your population is growing faster (in capitalist, developed economies). On a second-order (or maybe 3rd-order) basis, GDP per capita will tend to be faster if your demographics are skewed younger vs. older. Regardless, faster growth rates tend to result in higher real interest rates. Higher real interest rates attract foreign capital, which tends to cause currencies to appreciate.
> America, meanwhile, has decent native birth rate AND a culture that's always willing to accommodate new people.
And a society that burdens people with debt causing them to work every waking moment while avoiding costly things like health care, because they might miss a day of work or become even more indebted through the cost of said health care. People just pick up opioids so they can handle the pain and keep working two jobs.
I know hardly anyone in my country that works more than 40 hours a week. In fact, most people I know work 36 or 32. Two jobs is pretty much unheard of over here. I hear plenty of stories in the US though, about teachers working a second job somewhere else.
> America on the internet is different from America in real life.
Implying I don't know America in real life, never lived there, never visited and don't know actual people there. All not being true. I have zero friends in my home country who work multiple jobs. I have multiple in the US.
> The Americans work 34.5 hours a week.
In my country it's 32. So almost 8% less. Which I'd call significant if working hours is directly correlated to productivity as a country.
> And a society that burdens people with debt causing them to work every waking moment while avoiding costly things like health care, because they might miss a day of work or become even more indebted through the cost of said health care. People just pick up opioids so they can handle the pain and keep working two jobs.
In the bottom 10-15% of the society there is some truth to what you wrote. However are you sure you are comparing that with the same segment in your country?
> However are you sure you are comparing that with the same segment in your country?
Yes, I come from the bottom of society in my country. I grew up surrounded by people without jobs, blue collar workers and parents that worked in factory and hospitality jobs. Luckily, my country takes care of people in these situations, provides them affordable homes and health care and income and helps them to go to school without ending up with crippling debt.
Not actually that common for teachers to work two jobs. Also most americans have healthcare and the ones who dont are often young and dont consume much of it. Not saying its good. But some europeans think we live in some kind of mad max hellscape.
> Not actually that common for teachers to work two jobs.
Yeah, the smart ones find a better school district to work in or leave the profession entirely. None of my friends in teaching are working 2 jobs. They can find a better paying non-teaching job, easily. Our son has 8 classes and 6 teachers. The school proudly announced at the beginning of the school year they were fully staffed. Currently they are at 85% with a revolving door of educators. We're in a HCOL city and school board is going forward with plans to build housing for teachers because they simply can't recruit them any other way.
> We're in a HCOL city and school board is going forward with plans to build housing for teachers because they simply can't recruit them any other way.
This is a good policy also found in safety-net-having countries like Finland.
Too many people are just replaying inflation discourse from the 1930s and 1970s over and over again in their head, talking up the imminent collapse of the dollar, without actually taking a look around.
The "shills" are not wrong. Every single currency that ever existed went to zero. The USD will be no exception. Honestly, BTC will be no exception either.
I can pay my non-imaginary taxes with dollars. All my other bills also helpfully accept dollars. This gives dollars a useful non-imaginary quality crypto does not have.
There's a handful of objectively valuable things like air, water, and food which I literally cannot live without. The value of pretty much anything else is imaginary because it's subjective.
The value of cryptocurrency is just far more imaginary than dollars, euros, or even gold.
You can believe that phone bills are a purely imaginary human construct that has no physical meaning and your phone will still stop working when you stop paying them.
At some point these things we conjure up out of our collective imagination are every bit as real as the ground hitting you if you jump off a building.
That counts for crypto as well though. If your phone bill is in crypto, and society believes (!) in crypto, then you might have society enforcing it's beliefs with the full force of the law.
I.e. imaginary.
Your phone bill is just another level of abstraction on top of the USD imagination.
In the middle ages witches were believed to be real by enough people to burn them on the stake. The full power of the state was behind this. Unless there's scientific evidence of sorcery now I think witches are imaginary.
Well, the USD is backed by the "full faith and credit of the United States government" which, however you may feel about it, isn't imaginary. Each dollar is a claim to a piece of output of the world's largest economy with the strongest military.
You seem to be conflating some issues here: On one hand the strong dollar has held back the US economy because it made it less competitive with lets say German exports (which are sold in euro). On the other hand the strong dollar has been great for the US consumer (cheaper to import stuff) and for the government: Easier to refinance their debt and buy stuff (raw materials, etc.) abroad.
From an economic perspective BRICS (which on a net basis are exporting nations) should really be worried about more dollar weakness. However I think the recent moves away from the dollar are not due to macro economic reasons but due to political ones instead. The confrontation between Russia and the West made these states realize that having dollars (or euros) can quickly turn into a liability: If they do something the US or EU doesn't like then their funds will just be frozen.
> On one hand the strong dollar has held back the US economy because it made it less competitive with lets say German exports (which are sold in euro)
Due to higher US productivity even with the strong currency the cost of production for goods is significantly lower for same quality. US companies are generally gaining market shares in all high value goods.
> On the other hand the strong dollar has been great for the US consumer (cheaper to import stuff)
This allows higher quality of life at lower price. I’d like to point out that EU member gdp per capita are worse than the poorest US states. This is surprising to me as well, but true.
> From an economic perspective BRICS (which on a net basis are exporting nations) should really be worried about more dollar weakness.
How is that true? I’m not following. They need dollars to buy imports and with strong dollar it’s harder to buy imports for same exports. Take Turkey as prime example currently.
> If they do something the US or EU doesn't like then their funds will just be frozen.
I agree that is a big concern for them. However I don’t think a currency pact using Yuan will help much. They really want to give that same power to the Chinese? who have even less due process. This is actually a big reason I’m bullish on Bitcoin it’s probably a better reserve in long run.
> How is that true? I’m not following. They need dollars to buy imports and with strong dollar it’s harder to buy imports for same exports. Take Turkey as prime example currently.
On a net basis they are exporters. Meaning (again on a net basis) dollars flow into these countries and goods flow out. If the dollar is strong then companies exporting from the US are more expensive then comparable exports from other countries (which can sell for a lower dollar amount and still pay their staff, raw materials). If the dollar is weak then companies exporting from the US are comparably cheaper. The US is usually a net importer because due to a strong dollar (and high wages) it's just cheaper to import stuff from abroad.
> there is a possibility that US economic dominance is about to go into hyperdrive.
The USA is an impressive beast in this regard. It just never fails to lead and now with AI it's simply light years ahead of the nearest competitor. There's literally thousands of AI startups here - it's just amazing.
Lots of people like to opine on the downfall of American hegemony and global financial and cultural dominance but I'm a believer in the lesser traveled idea that the American Empire hasn't even begun yet.
All of Western and Central Europe, Israel, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, parts of South America, and a few other places are already vassal states of America as it is. I expect more to become over the coming decades.
I have yet to see quantitative numbers that suggest a downfall for the American empire. The discussion always turns to hyper political issues and problems, like race or guns, or healthcare systems.
Yet if we look at more practical questions like productivity, innovation, efficiency, energy, food, … etc. What downfall? It looks like it is growing and I agree there is a possibility that the American Empire is only just starting, not ending.
There is no alternative. Good that media doesn't report it because there's nothing to report. The dollar is not going away anytime soon.
A good comparison I got from twitter is Amazon credit. If you get $50, yeah it's fine, you'll spend it. If you get $5000 of it, you'll look very, very closely into all options to get your dollars back.
I think the 2009 recession for the US, and our anemic response to it, created a huge swath of perma-bears across the political spectrum who have predicted the US economy will collapse every year since 2011.
Like a broken clock I’m sure they’ll eventually be correct.
> the 2009 recession for the US, and our anemic response to it
From dictionary.com:
anemic: a lack of power, vigor, vitality, or colorfulness
Interesting that you'd characterize the response to 2008 financial crisis as 'lack(ing) power'. The response was unprecedented in scale and scope, at least in terms of intervention from the Federal Reserve. The bail-out of the automakers was also controversial due to its size and lack of precendent.
Or, are you referring to a lack of regulatory response?
> The response was unprecedented in scale and scope, at least in terms of intervention from the Federal Reserve. The bail-out of the automakers was also controversial due to its size and lack of precendent.
And all of that was anemic compared to what was needed. From January 2009:
> I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”
The Fed's actions help on the 'back end' of things in the financial sector, but not on the 'front end' of things with regards to the real economy and jobs. Obama had a long slog to get unemployment down because of the lack of stimulus.
Large in the quantity of money printed, but anaemic in the sense of it being a band-aid, maintainging ther status quo. It did nothing to address stuructural problems or course correct. It just set us up for the next crisis.
BRICS currency? What a laugh... Brazilian president actually wanted to create a common south american coin, replacing the real with currency common to Venezuela and Argentina. These are the idiots "moving" against increased USD dominance.
I run into people that are thinking the opposite. Maybe they're too contrarian but they think this is the start of a rebalance toward china / brics / non western countries.
Thinking "BRICS" exists is a red flag for contrarianism. China and India are literally in a shooting war at their border. The term was invented by Goldman Sachs. It's not an alliance.
Not quite shooting. They are actually not given guns so they have to fist it out. Just a little bit of theater for those provinces. To think that would stop them from commercing with each other is wishful thinking
> This is a bigger story that isn’t being told properly often.
It really isn't! I actually thought that the dollar was doing very badly because it has been going down in price in comparison to my local currency for the last 9 months or so (around 15%) (back to 2016-2018 levels).
And such a decrease hadn't happened in more than a decade.
Doom and gloom stories generate clicks. So they'd rather focus on the inflation we are experiencing rather than point out how much better we are doing right now than literally everyone else.
The dollar's strength has much to do with the US leading the world in interest rate rises. Its not "dominance about to go into hyperdrive", it should slow the economy by hurting domestic spending and exports.
Thank you for pointing out the Mexican peso strength, they have definitely been able to turn it around. Isn’t that actually a bit due to their strong US ties?
Swissie and BTC make sense as safe havens for the sanctions and seizure risks of USD. I do expect those to continue to strengthen.
Strong US ties, high interest rates, currency of choice until recently for the carry trade, and a large oil exporter. Large moves in the peso are largely tied to the price of oil.
The past year it's gone from almost 21 to the dollar to nearly 18. Certainly sucks for me losing 15% on the conversation rate along with the general inflation that has happened. My food bill in Mexico is up like 40% over the past six months in dollar terms.
This is in a thread about how people cannot afford MacBooks, which count as a "US export" because they are priced in dollars that go back to the US eventually.
I must be then because all I ever read is that China will beat the US eventually and the dollar is being challenged. The raw numbers say the opposite best I can tell.
If you're one of the upper-tier non-US nationalities concerned about a strengthening dollar, that sets up some behavioral and policy incentives that could have destabilizing effects.
Like, Russia's purported election interference and general political destabilizing activity starts to sound like a (ethically awful but) economically sensible move. In the extreme, the US falling into a civil war would ease that pressure on BRICS etc.
>This is a bigger story that isn’t being told properly often. The recent BRICS currency move is about them panicking over increasing dollar global dominance.
I figured out a while ago that anyone who mentions the "petrodollar" in a geopolitical context knows knothing about geopolitics.
Bonus idiocy points if "BRICS" is mentioned in a way that implies any kind of formal collectivity, as opposed to a catchy nickname Goldman Sachs created 20 years ago for certain large emerging economies.
> anyone who mentions the "petrodollar" in a geopolitical context knows knothing about geopolitics
I'm curious about this. The petrodollar is clearly a real phenomenon and policy decision. You might say that it's the replacement for when the dollar was backed by gold; instead of being convertible into gold, it's now the currency that's de facto required to purchase oil (which is basically liquid gold), as well as being the currency of the world's foremost military that protects the trade of oil.
What "petrodollar" refers to is the fact that oil producing countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia) have a vast surplus of oil revenue far in excess of their cost of production or ability to do anything internally useful with it. This means they have an extra stash of dollars that they need to do something with--and that stash of dollars is the petrodollar. It is a real phenomenon.
The problem is... it just doesn't have much relevance to geopolitics. The people who try to link it to such imagine that the US has a major foreign policy plank in upholding the use of dollars to price oil, to the point of starting wars purely to do so, despite such proponents not being able to offer a shred of evidence that any US official cared about this, or even being able to articulate what the supposed benefits the US receives from such pricing is.
Beyond what jcranmer wrote, if OPEC tomorrow priced oil in renminbi or rubles, China or Russia would be pleased because it would simplify transactions for them. But that decision isn't up to China or Russia; it's up to the various OPEC member states, who all want dollars and not Chinese or Russian funny money. And why should they do otherwise, when the Chinese and Russians themselves don't want their own currency, much preferring to hold dollars?
Yep, and that’s always been an issue with Apple products: they set their prices in USD, then set the foreign price using conversions from around release date (plus taxes obviously).
That means if the dollar was very strong at release, the machines get very expensive in foreign currency.
Which is weird, because barely any part of it is produced in the US. So it's not that their costs are going up.
They are just not realizing they are self sabotaging in terms of opportunity costs.
If they adjust prices to purchasing power, with at least 30% profit marge, windows laptops and chromebooks would be having crisis talks right about now.
People would prefer the Apple stuff, but not at that price. Even if you can easily afford it, if you are from a protestant nation, you couldn't live with yourself spending your money so irresponsibly. The value deal isn't there, unless you are using it professionally. But for leisure? No way.
Which is the part most people here on HN still somehow dont understand, the world, tech and especially SemiCon are running on USD. Patents are in USD, All your TSMC Wafers are in USDs, and they goes along with most of the stuff produced by TSMC from the likes of Qualcomm. Majority of Design and Software are in USD.
This isn't the first time Apple sales have taken a hit in a downturn. The issue is if they significantly cut margins now, when the economy swings back up again the risk is they'll face an uphill battle growing margins again.
People delaying purchases, or buying lower spec models or alternatives now may well want to upgrade sooner when their financial situation improves. If Apple sacrifices margins they risk losing out on those high margin sales return in a few years time. In the long term it may be better to take the temporary hit to revenue now in order to preserve their margin structure long term.
What they might do is introduce down market models, or more likely keep older models around in the lineup longer than they otherwise would at a slightly reduced price. That would still mean taking a hit on sales at the top end, as here with M2.
> If Apple sacrifices margins they risk losing out on those high margin sales return in a few years time.
Changing the official price is not the only way to go. Apple is one of very few places which doesn't regularly run sales and promotions to adjust the sales of their products. They could easily run an Easter sale that takes a month, then something else again. This wouldn't change their margins long term.
Apple is the only major consumer electronics manufacturer with high enough margins to cut them "significantly". IIRC, their gross margins are still multiple times higher than the industry average. They would have to cut prices by a lot more to fall in line with industry averages, which honestly, doesn't seem likely to me.
If some countries were selling Apple products at a cheaper USD conversion than what it costs in the US, you know there would be massive reselling from those countries if you could undercut Apple's own prices on brand new products.
Apple states its quarterly results in USD, which is all their investors/media care about, so of course Apple cares enormously about profit/revenue in USD. in addition, much of their design/engineering/management/etc costs are in or coupled to USD.
Like so many before you, you are making the mistake of thinking Apple cares about marketshare.
They quite demonstrably don't. They care about profit-share, and about making what they see as the best computers they can.
As others note, Apple already takes either a plurality or a majority of the profit in computer sales. What incentive is there for them to reduce their average margins, take on a lot more support responsibility, and have to ramp up production significantly, just to capture a notoriously fickle and unrewarding segment of the market?
I actually thinks Steve would actually lower the price of iPhone and Mac given how profitable they are now and how much cash they have. Instead of Doing Shares Buy Backs.
>What ruined Apple was not growth … They got very greedy … Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible … they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years. What this cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share.”
Just look at the BOM cost of MacBook Air and an iPad Pro. There is not reason why MacBook Air cant be $799.
What competition? Just like with phones, Apple is already getting most of the profit from computers. The commodity PC market is not exactly one worth going after.
They probably don't want the grey market to flourish, where Indian MacBooks sell for $700 locally and get shipped to the US in an eBay transaction. Geo-locking a laptop in the modern world is impractical if not impossible and would have its own PR issues.
There can't be a grey market if you charge the same price globally.
I think geo-locking is definitely a workable solution. Add a cheap GPS receiver and the machine can tell where it's located. Then if it's moved between countries, it can refuse to work until the user pays up. Since Apple controls the OS, they can bake this in: bring up a web browser page pointed to a payment form, linked to their Apple account.
I don't see why this wouldn't work. It's not like Apple users are going to rebel and refuse to buy Apple products because of something like this.
Produced, no, but designed, programmed, and marketed, yes. And Apple's profits compete with other US companies, so it's products need to be profitable at the current very strong US dollar valuation.
Here in Mexico Apple products are around 20-25% more expensive than in the US which is way higher than simply adding the 16% VAT.
Not only that, in the US it's common to have Apple sales in multiple retailers like BH etc. These are almost non existent here in Mexico. The best we get is some meager discount at Costco for the models nobody wants.
With a company as large as Apple, and a product with such high volumes, wouldn't this simply present arbitrage opportunities which would smooth out the costs again anyway?
The euro has actually recovered about 10% from its low last year.
The problem is Apple’s pricing strategy. Very static and never sacrificing not even a little bit of margin.
Even in the US, the prices are just too high. A well apointed M2 pro is over $5,000. I used to buy ThinkPad workstations and high end intel macbook pros for about the same price -- the thinkpads have come down considerably in the past 10 years. Macs have gotten more expensive over the same time.
Not to mention, in the past year the price of almost everything else has gone up too. So, it's easy to see why people have less money to spend on macs.
Also, inflation is increasing quickly almost everywhere, buying the latest and greatest MacBook has always been a luxury purchase for most of the people, so obviously less people do it when the economy doesn't do very well.
Why would they put their consumers (who are buying premium goods) over their investors (who are mostly regular folk with 401ks and private pension funds)?
This article we're discussing says they halted M2 chip production. Running factories empty is a huge opportunity cost. So who's to say this approach of maintaining high profit margins is the correct medium-term outcome for their shareholders?
Not even used: when I was shopping for a laptop for my wife Apple was still happily selling M1 MacBook Airs and I was happy to buy one. The premium for the M2 just didn’t feel worth it.
I bought an M1 MacBook Pro when they came out and I like it a lot. What concerns me about future revisions of the CPU is it will get hotter and the fan will get noisier. One of the best features of the M1 is the fan hardly comes on, and when it does, it's very quiet / low RPM.
I bought an M2 a couple of months ago, coming from an i9 16". Oh boy, I know what it is like to have a hot machine :sigh:. The Intel version was stuck at 70C in idle, which is nuts. I think that that was probably the main reason of the switch.
The difference is just insane from a thermal standpoint (plus then you mix in how this thing runs laps around my 16" while staying cooler).
And it isn't just the MacBook Pro line, I have a gaming laptop is horrible to use actually on my lap.
I tried pushing the new m2 MBP with some video rendering and it did not break a sweat (literally).
It does kinda feel like the bar was a bit low for the improvements going from Intel to their chips. But I do wonder what their long term plan is, I can't see needing to upgrade this machine for at least 3 years with the performance I am getting out of it. Even 3 years feels pretty soon.
Clearly they were making them horrible on purpose. Intel had a long streak of really bad products that somehow got even worse when put in Macs. They took away features an replaced them with crap. Then, magically, all the good stuff returned for the M1 launch. It's a mistery!
Definitely! I mostly use it connected to my 4K display and on a typical day it does not heat over 50C and that happens when you're compiling stuff for minutes. My Intel Mac's fans activated simply because it was connected to a 4K external display.
All external displays are powered by the dedicated GPU on the intel MacBook pros. This allowed MacBook pros to output 40k60 through any of the 4 USB-C ports (unlike windows PC’s of the time). The downside was it meant the dedicated GPU was consuming an extra ~20watts whenever you were connected to an external monitor.
>1650EUR for a laptop that won't have enough ram to run the browser in two years.
That did not have enough ram 3 years ago... the fact they are still trying to sell 8GB as an useful amount outside of extremely budget laptops is insane.
Speaking as someone who has and uses an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB RAM, I agree it's not a lot but it's more than sufficient for any use case a Macbook Air would generally see.
This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.
I will say the Macbook Pro really should start from 16GB RAM and at least 1TB SSD; it's for professionals, isn't it?
> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.
4GB of RAM.[0]
It's the stupid websites that require GB of RAM to display a couple pieces of written text and the hundreds of MB of JS that tally up to the additional 28GB you may be thinking of. Oh and all the electron apps which add additional browser requirements where there shouldn't be any. I guess Mac OS is somehow exempt from this particular fault though, I would be curious to know how they accomplished it.
> I guess Mac OS is somehow exempt from this particular fault though
MacOS isn’t, but Apple Silicon laptops sort of are. Seems the onboard flash and flash controller integrated into M1 and M2 chips are fast enough that disk paging doesn’t impact performance for most day-to-day task. I’ve personally been very surprised at how much performance Apple have squeezed out of 8GB of RAM, it’s certainly far more than I was accustomed to in the Intel era.
It's still stupid. It costs Apple a minimal amount extra to vastly improve the utility of their devices with 16GB RAM and 512/1TB drives by default. But they're cutting corners here in search of product segmentation and profit, so much so customers will genuinely be suffering because of their choices.
Yes, the way consumers perceive your pricing matters. If you lose a key, you need to call a locksmith; it's rare that someone needs to buy a new apple laptop.
I bought a Linux machine a year or so ago, with 64G ram and 2T SSD (for less than Apple wants, obviously). I will say it is pretty much over spec-ced. I have a browser, use it for taxes and like city permit approvals and the odd pdf download/print. For a while I ran a bitcoin node. I use it for development of my open source go libraries, with eMacs and the associated ten stack overflow or GitHub tabs, but the only time I get make it use even a faction of its power is when like i test a “find all dup files on the dive” or rebuild gcc.
Hopefully it will work for a long time, but I think development could be good on a quarter of the mem/storage hardware. More cores would be nice, as always, but even there, go compile will light them all up but for far less than a second.
I think he was being intentionally hyperbolic, alluding to the fact that Windows' published minimum specs are way to low (like Vista) and the actual specs needed to run are much higher because the bloat.
“Way too low” isn’t really true. I have RDP and Firefox and Word and Excel open, and Windows still uses just around 4 GB of RAM according to Task Manager.
> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.
Speaking as someone who has and uses a Windows laptop with 8GB of RAM, that's an absurd statement. The "new minimum" in terms of what you usually see for sale, is (still) more like 16GB.
You beat me to it. I'm still using 8GB on my Win10 desktop. I play games (of course not the newest ones with all bells and whistles on, especially as I have only 1060 GTX card), I develop stuff in VS or VS Code, I browse the net on multiple browsers, I edit graphics etc. etc.
I wish I had 16GB but 8GB is _still perfectly fine_.
I use an M1 Mini with 8GB at home, M1 MBP with 32GB at work. I experience pinwheels all the time at home, hardly ever at work.
Maybe I'm an extreme case, typically running all the time: phpStorm, Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Excel, Terminal, TextMate, WhatsApp, Messages, Calendar, MS RDP Client, Mail, Notes, Reminders.
Also kind of a trip, I installed Stats at home to troubleshoot bottlenecks. Just noticed I didn't install it at work.
If you need 128GB of RAM, you need 128GB of RAM. Nothing unfair about that.
Personally, my newest main machine has 64GB of RAM (for now) simply because I never want to run out of RAM ever; RAM is cheap (when it ain't coming from Apple) and I hate dealing with swap thrashing.
Speaking more generally, I sincerely wouldn't suggest any lower than 32GB to any person asking for advice on a Windows setup today. Far too many programs demand far too much RAM now, with Chrome being just the leading example.
I wouldn't take this at face value. Modern OSes are great at managing RAM, which means RAM only gets cleared as needed. A lot of that 27 GB can likely be cleared, but the OS finds that there isn't any reason to.
You can look at any number of videos demonstrating that a base model MacBook Air is more than capable of running Chrome with a few tabs open. Modern browsers (and operating systems) opportunistically use free RAM for caching.
SW dev stuff tends to take a lot more RAM than consumer/productivity apps though. I would want at least 16 and ideally 32 for software dev. But for general usage I think that would drop to at least 8 ideally 16.
> This literally isn't Windows where 32GB of RAM is the new minimum.
I use both MacOS and Windows, both in a VM using Linux as the host OS, on a laptop with 64GB of RAM, and honestly Windows 11, not considering the fact that it tries to run ads on the start menu, feels lighter and snappier than MacOS.
Of course if you give it a lot of of RAM it will try to use as much as it can to aggressively cache stuff, but not differently from what MacOS does.
8GB of RAM is unusable for even basic 1080p video editing. I would think a Macbook air's use case included that, because there are a wide range of $700 Windows laptops that will provide the 16GB minus the extortionate markup.
A little while ago I asked on HN if an M1 with 8GB of ram is enough for major 4k editing in FCPX and multiple people chimed in to say they're using that exact setup and it's smooth as butter...
The 8G on my wife's last Intel MacPro was definitely not enough for her light browsing and email reading, it just ground to a halt swapping browser memory. Admittedly she visited web sites with a lot of crap on them, but still.
My vibe from people my age is that for personal and mixed personal/business devices that aren’t particularly “tech-minded” is that they feel they don’t need a full laptop anymore and are going for more portable devices. Meaning iPad.
Generally 8 works for me but I do sometimes end up needing more. At which point I curse my financial situation when I had to purchase my computer which I am otherwise happy with.
I just wish the Baseline for Computer in 2023 could be 10GB, or even 12GB. It doesn't need to double to 16GB, but there are lots of situation where 8GB would cause paging. And macOS doesn't really optimise for paging speed.
Also remember, the GPU also uses memory. 8GB isn't even the same as 8GB when iGPU wasn't a thing.
A lot of developers and video editors use Macbook Air and 24GB is what is considered sufficient for them. They buy into Macbook Air for portability reasons.
Windows laptops on the other hands hold incredibly well at 16GB of RAM. There are also windows laptops with the same weight as Macbook Air at half the cost and double the specs.
I actually like Windows, despite all its faults, and blame the wider Windows ecosystem (and especially Chrome) for demanding and wasting so much RAM.
With that said, I can easily break past 16GB just running Windows and Chrome. 32GB is the new minimum if you want an enjoyable time; swapping into the page file even with PCIE4 and PCIE5 SSDs is still miserable.
Unless you plan to run Bloomberg and a full trading setup 16gb of ram in windows is heavy user spec.
Opening task manager and checking if windows is using more than 16gb is not a method to tell how much you should spec, my PC has 128gb ram with page file disabled and regularly sits at 40gb ram, because windows will allocate ram if there is ram to allocate.
I run 1000s of users on vdi 4/16 is more than enough for 99% of users.
I was using a 16GB RAM Windows machine as a daily until last year, I upgraded that to 32GB because I was routinely capping out and thrashing the page file.
I've since upgraded from that machine to a new build with 64GB of RAM simply because so many programs demand too much RAM now, and I hate even the mere thought of hitting swap.
>With that said, I can easily break past 16GB just running Windows and Chrome
I find that hard to believe since Chrome now sleeps tabs. I have Chrome with 60+ tabs open right now (yes, I'm one of those hoarders) and only eats 2,7GB RAM with a total system usage of ~9GB including all my other apps I have minimized right now (Signal, Torrent, Weather, PotPlayer, etc).
So I seriously doubt you're blowing past the 16GB just with Chrome alone.
Chrome eats a stupid amount of RAM even if it tries to not; just earlier I closed Chrome on one of my machines which immediately released 10GB of RAM. Combine that with however much Windows generally consumes and that's close to or even past the 16GB mark.
It would be ok if the upgrades would not be so freakishly expensive. RAM is on an all-time low, still Apple wants 460€ !!! for 16 GB RAM more here in Europe.
The worst thing about that upgrade pricing is that you know it’s basically pure profit for Apple. Sure, there’s an Apple tax that gets you build quality, aesthetics, better iOS integration, no OS licensing etc, but that’s already been priced into base model. RAM and SSD upgrades are just priced like Diet Coke in a fancy restaurant.
I have friends who run small businesses and use Mac Air’s with 8gb and they don’t bat an eye. They run stuff like quick books and Microsoft office products.
One friend uses the Air for business only and an iPad Pro for personal/family use.
I understand the frustration with low RAM Macs. I really do. I primarily work on a 32gb M1 Max.
But I bought a M2 Mini with base everything (8gb/256gb) and it is still absolutely killer for 99% of things. I do a lot of dev, gaming, and casual stuff. It plays WoW at 100fps, Dota, streams all my GFN games, and the swap is fine when doing web dev.
My current personal home laptop is a Chromebook with 4Gb Ram and a Core m3-8100Y. For daily browser usage I barely notice any performance difference with the work issued 16GB i7 laptop. So how about let people decide for themselves what they need instead of speaking for them?
My family is basically all-in on Apple gear, but to be honest, the little Lenovo Chromebook that I bought for $300, with keyboard case and pen, is amazingly versatile. The Linux container support is OK for running Emacs and some dev tools. I do a lot of dev using mosh/ssh on external servers, BTW.
There are only two things that prevent me from going cheap: poor video performance when I plug it into my large USB-C external monitor; and, my addiction to the Apple Watch that is a device that makes me rethink how I expect technology to fit into my lifestyle.
I used an 8GB M1 Air as primary device (Safari, Xcode, Simulator, VSCode etc) in 2021 and it mostly worked out. I preferred it over my beefy i9 MBP due to various reasons. Sometimes I had to kill apps if a memory challenging app ran in the simulator.
Maybe your argument applies when running Chrome (?), but I had no issues whatsoever running Safari, and not even using an ad blocker.
There is no justification for putting a computer with 8GB on the market. Not even the most extreme budget computer should be built with 8GB, this is just a scam.
What do you base that on? If you are an HN reader there is a good chance that you do some kind of technical work that may push a computer more than a basic user who just does browsing, email, social media, and text-based work. 8GB is enough for those kind of activities, particularly the way people do mostly single-task work. That kind of usage may not justify spending extra for more RAM.
If you are doing development, video work, lots of multitasking and if your productivity per hour is important, then you probably need more RAM.
I dunno, got a raspberry pi recently and realized that my daily work environment works just fine at it's peak with 2G of ram. Of course, bigger file cache is always better, but hardly mandatory.
Meanwhile a lenovo is 800 EUR for a 11th gen i5, 16GB RAM and a 3050ti.
As someone with a value investing mindset, I personally can't find the extra value for double the money in macs.
I think "commodity" laptop manufacturers have successfully tricked people into thinking a laptop is a collection of integers (16gb RAM, N core processor, etc) but I have NEVER used a laptop even close to as performant as the m1 and m1 ultra based macbook pros. You really have to experience it to believe it, it literally never lags no matter what or is ever unresponsive regardless of what i'm doing. Not to mention the full day battery life or anything else like that
The only difference is that the MacBook Pro has a higher refresh rate and a good SSD. Having used both I assure you a modern "N core" processor with 16gb of RAM, a fast NVMe SSD and a high refresh rate screen feels just as responsive as the latest MacBook Pro.
I think the key problem is anchoring from low-end prices.
If a laptop makes an employee 1% more efficient, that has returns of $2k/year to the employer for an employee whose cost is $200k/year. Note that cost >> salary, so this corresponds to perhaps a $100k salary.
Reliability is king. A failed device will typically cost thousands of dollars in lost productivity, IT costs, etc. A device which fails at a critical moment can have almost arbitrary costs.
From a business perspective, Apple, Latitude / Precision / XPS, and Thinkpads are usually the only devices which make sense.
From a home perspective, there are plenty of $200 machines which get the job done. That's one of Apple's problems.
Another one is that most businesses spent a lot on upgrades during COVID, and those machines are still within their lifecycle. As we're entering a predicted recession, delaying upgrades is the #1 thing to go. Layoffs also mean there's a glut of machines (there's a ton of nice off-lease stuff on refurbished web sites right now at bottom-barrel prices; I saw a Precision laptop with 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD, Xeon, and NVidia Tesla for under $500 a few weeks back).
That's fine but after experiencing the insane battery life of M1 I will not use another brand unless they somehow manage to beat apple silicon, which I hope they do but they have such an advantage.
Some people from the Apple M1 team left to start Nuvia, which was acquired by Qualcomm and will hopefully be bringing comparable performance-per-watt to PC OEM Arm Windows/Linux laptops in 2024.
Which is fine if you’re mostly stationary but for someone who travels a lightweight and performant laptop with all-day battery is a game changer. Only Apple has that at the moment.
Well no that particular laptop have been my mainstay for 7 years of mobility, and ran 7 years vertically on a stand, so Apple would have broken way before that Lenovo. Notwistanding the price.
That combined with the best speakers you will ever hear in a laptop, keyboard and touchpad you know will be at least decent (ye olde butterfly notwithstanding), the steep price tag kind of sort of starts to partially make a bit more sense.
The price is still stupid, but a potential customer not needing to give a crap about his new computer might just make the steep price worth it.
Why would I care about laptop speakers? 1600 EUR gives me plenty of room to get a normal laptop, Harman-kardon soundsticks plus top-end Sennheiser headphones. No matter how good laptop speakers are, they won't even be near the ones mentioned.
The point was that the combined value of all these features are rarely matched in any other laptop in this price range. Superior speakers were just one of the things.
> I personally can't find the extra value for double the money in macs
I'm sure the resale value is much, much higher. I purchased my very first iPhone, an iPhone 13 pro, largely due to the fact that it will still be worth a significant amount after 2 or 3 years.
If you take that into account, the difference probably isn't as noticeable.
I have a Lenovo Legion for games and Macs for work. Why don’t I use Lenovo for both? It’s heavy, has crappy battery life, and sometimes makes fan noise even when idle (because it’s running hot). If Mac could run my Steam library I wouldn’t even bother with Windows devices.
I mean, you can get a light and thin Surface laptop. But it’s in the same price range as Macs. But M2 definitely beats Intel on battery life.
I received an m1 Mac with 8gb of RAM for work and it’s practically unusable. About 2gb of the RAM is sucked by the GPU and system. I can keep one WebStorm window open but if I launch docker and run a service, the laptop goes into swap mode and the whole thing becomes extremely laggy.
€ 1.518,85 in here (nl). Thats a lot. IIRC i bought my 2013 MBA 8gb in Germany because it was almost 200 eur cheaper than in neighbouring countries. Too bad that gap seems to have closed. I love seeing people freak out over my German QWERTZ keyboard.
God a 16' 16GB M2 costs 3200 CAD which is almost 4000 CAD after tax and a few extra but necessary peripherals. Although I understand that M2 pro is usually reserved by professionals who need some extra punch but it's still outrageously expensive.
I'm not advocating evading customs tax or anything illegal but I know many people who bring a laptop or phone back home for a relative everytime they go to the US.
Our Hyderabad associates tend to do that every time they come visit our office. Or they did, when we still had an office. It also helps that we don't have sales tax in Oregon.
In Ireland, vat is 23% on electronics. Businesses basically don’t pay that but it still is there for the ordinary buyer.
My m2 air 24/1tb from work was 2300 or so, my personal m1 air 16/512 was 1850 a year earlier. Don’t see a huge difference between them, but the work one in particular is a giant leap ahead of the 5tr old mbp it replaced.
Came here to post the same. My 2013 MBA 8gb runs vscode + 100 firefox tabs ‘just fine’. Compiling takes ages though compared to a modern affordable non-apple laptop. But here in Europa the alternatives aren’t as affordable either anymore.
Given the state of the PC market it would be shocking if Mac sales were not also affected.
>The PC market has experienced its largest decline ever, according to analyst Gartner. Preliminary results by Gartner shows that worldwide PC shipments totalled 65.3 million units in the fourth quarter of 2022, a 28.5% decrease from the fourth quarter of 2021.
Apart from this, if you're an enthusiast who likes to build their own PC, component prices have gone insane. A flagship GPU is 2000 dollars, and motherboards are priced so high that Gamer's Nexus decided to do a 25 minute video rant about it.
The returns are diminishing, it's not worth to get a 4090 RTX with DDR5 and a compatible mobo, if for 1/3 of the price you can get 90% of the performance with a used 3090 and DDR4.
The GPUs are what kills it. I started looking into building a performant 4K@60FPS SFFPC as an upgrade to my five year old gaming PC and it easily reaches $2000+ with taxes after adding the GPU. The build I’m looking at now, without a crazy motherboard, is $2500.
Nah, the chipset doesn't have much to do with that anymore. AMD's current desktop CPUs provide 16 PCIe lanes for the GPU and 8 lanes for a pair of NVMe drives; the PCIe lanes provided by the chipset are in addition to those (routed through another 4 lanes from the CPU). Intel's current desktop platform provides 16+4 direct from the CPU, and routes 8 lanes to the chipset.
The high-end chipsets are for people who think they still need lots of SATA ports, or lots of high-speed USB ports. Or for people who want features that are artificially restricted to only be available on boards using the high-end chipsets.
Overclocking capabilities (if you're into that), better build quality overall (primarily to facilitate overclocking), and more nice-to-have features and luxuries (eg: PCIE lanes) in general.
It's not just about the chipset, due to market segmentation and companies trying to squeeze the most out of the consumer, basic features like 7 segment displays are missing on mobos which aren't the highest tier.
reckon we're also entering the territory where even older hardware is "good enough", especially since so much work is now in the browser. My 4 year old Thinkpad runs fast enough that I won't feel the need to upgrade for a while. My other 5 year old Macbook is the same.
I also built a desktop 2 years ago and that's so smooth and fast that unless something physically breaks, I can easily stretch it out for 5 years.
This. My gaming computer is a 10 or 11 year old machine, whenever the first motherboards with PCIE 3 came out. Only the GPU is relatively recent (an AMD RX5000 series). It works well enough even for recent games. The limiting factor is the GPU VRAM if I want to play in 4k.
Sure, my work zen 3 laptop is somewhat faster for compiling and stuff and only eats a fraction of the power, but for what I do, it wouldn't make enough of a difference to justify buying a new computer.
Always has been. Buying top of the line technology is paying an early adopter penalty. People talk about FPS (frames per second) with gaming PC's and I think its an unnoticeable arms race about numbers. If the human eye can't observe more than 60 FPS and you aren't playing competitively (aka professionally) what will that extra FPS boost get you? Paying for bragging rights (ironic observation for gamers)?
I've extensively tested framerates and times across a lot of monitors over the years. The 60FPS human eye limit is either incorrect, or the display of frames on a monitor affects how movement interpolation is handled.
After about 160Hz/FPS you start to not be able to tell the difference.
The difference between 60hz and 120hz is night and day.
The difference between 120hz and 144hz is noticably better,
the difference between 144hz and 165hz is very slightly better,
the difference between 165hz and 240hz is not really noticable,
the difference between 240hz and 360hz is imperceptible.
I agree that there are diminishing returns, but I can promise you that it's easy to stop a difference between 60 FPS and 144 FPS if you have a 144hz monitor. I don't think anyone actually believes that 60 FPS is the "limit of the human eye"
Paying for that difference makes sense for some games/genres. For some that doesn't matter.
Yeah you can. One of the dumbest things I did was spend too much money on a nice pair of 4k@60hz monitors for computer, then mount a 4k@120hz OLED TV right next to them for couch gaming. The quality difference is staggering. Even on games that only run at 80-90fps.
Seconded. Fast games specially benefit from >60Hz refresh rates. My wife has a 300Hz laptop and playing OW2 on it is amazing, I can track shots better and I can do quick flick shots better than on a 60Hz monitor.
Everyone's talking about foreign prices and inflation, but foreign prices have always been absurd.
I think we've just hit the end of the COVID-era hardware refresh wave. Literally everyone has already bought new hardware they've been wanting to buy, the supply chain crush ended months ago. In addition, the number of people who were desperately waiting on Apple to move away from Intel have now all bought in. We've just entered a quiet period.
I doubt this is about price like some people in here are suggesting.
Maybe a little bit overall market trend, but primarily I would wager it’s because many, many people bought the M1 when it came out and it’s so good that the only people buying M2 are those who waited - it’s a fine spec bump, but not something you would be tempted to upgrade from M1 for.
Same.. I have a 13" M1 that I bought right when they came out for a personal machine.
For work I have a 16" i9 from 2021. The M1 is so much faster and nicer to use.
Maybe if work gives me a M2 Ultra/Pro/Super/Titanium/whatever in 2024 that will make me want to replace the personal machine. But I doubt it. 90% of my computing is on my work machine and I don't get to use my personal machine for much that strains it. The personal things I do that "strain" a machine have become trivial these days in terms of non-pro photo & video editing.
Realistically I bet it's late 2025 or late 2026 I would be starting to think about upgrading it.
You have exactly the same home/work setup I have, and I have the same opinion. My 13 inch M1 kicks the crap out of my work 16 inch Intel MBP in every meaningful way that isn't screen size. And even then, I prefer the much more portable smaller laptop anyway. Quieter, faster, incredible battery life. I'm not-so-secretly hoping my 16 inch MBP will croak so I can get it replaced with M1/M2/whatever.
I had a last-gen 16" Intel MBP for work that started developing a number of frustrating issues in mid-to-late 2021, and was lucky enough that my IT department was able to replace it with an M1 Max in early 2022.
The difference in the experience between the two has been night and day. The M1 Max just handles everything I throw at it, only gets warm when I'm running something with heavy load for a long period, and never gets hot like the Intel MBP did.
I'd argue some of them have been, those looking for a more user friendly experience or see it as a premium model/status symbol. I write this as someone who bought a new macbook for their partner a month ago, which was a painful experience for someone with average european income.
The pricing wouldn't be so bad if their offerings aligned with the market, or at least made sense. Their base level specs are uncompetitive and borderline unusable. There's too much overlap at the lower level between macbook airs and pros. I bet a lot of people are turned off by the idea of spending over $2k on a laptop that still only has a 512 GB SSD.
512GB and 8GB ram is actually quite usable for the cast majority of people who laptop; but their existing computer is likely to already have that so why upgrade?
(Also I think Apple have a long term issue that the MacOS software story is very, very bad and getting worse and now the sheer performance hype of the M chips has worn off customers might actually look at things like "this is literally no use whatsoever for gaming" and get put off by it.)
That's fundamentally not true. If someone is a hardcore gamer then they probably weren't buying Macs, but most customers do a bit of everything, and I would wager a very significant percentage of Mac users want to game a bit.
But major gaming studios like Blizzard who have normally made Mac versions of their titles are abandoning the Mac now. Epic is banned. The great white (and always misguided) hope that iOS games would come en-masse has not panned out at all. The library has been decimated by the withdrawal of 32bit support. Metal is not gaining development traction. Boot Camp is no longer an option.
The software story for the Mac is getting worse not better, and that is a problem for Apple.
Yeah I agree with this. I’ve used MacOS for a while and am intrigued by Apple Silicon. But for the prices they’re charging, I need it to do everything. I don’t game much, but I do want to game _some_.
I’m thinking about going back to Windows and learning into WSL where needed. If that gets annoying, I’ll go full Linux and put Windows in a VM.
I’m not excited at all about Window 11’s telemetry, advertising, and general infestations by Microsoft tendrils. Still, Windows 10 is pretty good from a productivity standpoint. I figure I should be able to configure things to keep annoyances under control.
M1 generation was so good that it prompted way more users to jump to it; that demand would spread over multiple generations if it was not so good.
On the other hand purposefully gimping M1 would gimp ARM adoption. By delivering great performance, they've build up a lot of goodwill - people willingly port their stuff to macs.
I'm on an M1 MacBook Pro, and had to check settings to remember it's almost three years old. Zero issues, performs wonderfully, probably going to keep for at least another two.
Same, bought an M1 16" MBP w/the Max chip, basically all the best specs. Unless there's a titanic shift in performance I probably won't be buying any new laptops for a while.
I'm on an Acer 16GB/1TB laptop from 2015 that runs as smooth as day one (Ubuntu). I think the workload just hasn't increased much except for gaming and some niches like GPU workloads.
Also using the 2020 M1 as a work laptop. If you stuck the internals in to the new case and told me its the 2023 model, I wouldn't notice it wasn't brand new.
Dock it to two - the M1 can only handle one external display; the previous Intel MacBook Pros could do four; and the M1 Max brings this back. I have four external monitors + the internal and the M1 couldn't do it; the M1 Max can so I held out.
Yes, I did this. I had a 2019 16” i9 that I replaced with a 14” M1 Pro as soon as I could because the Intel/T2 TouchBar machine was so crash prone, glitchy, and hot. The i9 was the worst Mac I’ve ever had. The M1 Pro is probably the best.
> because the Intel/T2 TouchBar machine was so crash prone, glitchy, and hot. The i9 was the worst Mac I’ve ever had.
I'm running the same machine, but for me it's the best Mac I ever had. Decent keyboard very similar to my prior 2015 MBP, larger screen while at the same time keeping the exterior footprint of the 2015, it can run virtually everything you throw at it (sans 32-bit legacy games, but not because of the hardware), and if you remember to restart MS Teams after a videocall (because Teams "hogs" the external GPU and doesn't release it after a video/screenshare call ends) the battery lasts hours, even after three years of extremely intensive abuse.
The only (but massive) issue I have with all post-2013 MacBooks is that their storage cannot be easily recovered in another machine in a disaster event, and with the 2019ff it is completely impossible "thanks" to Apple soldering the flash chips and locking the encryption keys in the T2 processor - without TimeMachine and an expensive NAS you're completely and utterly fucked.
Switching to an M-series Mac would provide me with even longer battery life and probably a notch better performance with IntelliJ, but that's it - I'd have to give up on running x86 Docker images which is a real problem as a lot of third party images don't provide ARM images.
Same for me. My 2018 15" MacBook Pro has been great. I use it every day and have had almost zero issues with it. It has the "bad" keyboard and it is only now starting to act up. I still have AppleCare on it and plan to bring it in and have the keyboard replaced. Hopefully it will last another 5 years after that. I do suspect it will only get one more MacOs update though. But, I have some older machines that still run just fine on Catalina.
AMD64 Docker images generally work fine, and have recently improved with the integration of Rosetta 2 with Virtualization Framework. It seems to just work, and the performance is much better than when Docker was emulating things through QEMU.
And I’ve actually considered upgrading to an M2 Max as I kind of regret only getting 32 GB of RAM in the M1 Pro. However, the trade-in price from Apple is too low.
Yeah, if I had an older machine I would. The advantage of a direct trade is no downtime. Apple trades have worked well enough for me in the past, but I wouldn’t benefit from the new machine enough to take the lower price.
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.
After the last five years of MacOS releases I have no idea why I would buy a Mac. The software is Windows levels of garbage. At this point I honestly think GNU/Linux is the best desktop operating system. I don't care about the hardware when the OS is straight up trash. They even broke decades old keyboard shortcuts. This is Digg levels of self-ownage. At this point Apple is anti-user and especially anti-developer. They finally got rid of Ives, I hope they do the same for whoever tanked their software direction. I hope Musk does to Apple the same he did for Twitter. Burn it down.
I know a comment like this is more about you expressing your emotions than making a coherent point, and I agree there are things to dislike about MacOS. But have you actually used windows lately? The windows that forces tabloid headlines into your start menu?
Apple is a long way from putting tabloid headlines into Spotlight results
Yes, I have used Windows recently. MacOS barely manages to be the less bad option, but is still essentially useless.
"We don't put ads in your desktop search" is an incredibly low bar. Apple can't do that because Spotlight is too busy reindexing itself again, for some reason. It's embarrassing.
It's trash. My MacBook has been an adversary for years now. My 2014 MacBook finally aged out and doesn't get updates. I have no idea why I would buy another Mac. There's zero value proposition. I'd rather replace the battery and install Linux.
I hate it with a burning passion. I can get used to it, but I wush I could just runlinux on it. Apple absolutely has a worst software engineering culture on a planet.
Yeah this really isn't surprising. They had built up a huge demand surplus in the years before the M1. Everyone with a 2013ish Macbook Pro immediately jumped onto M1. Nobody in that cohort is upping to M2. This is a non-story, other than that Apple wouldn't know that?
This is a good point. The M1 was the first MBP in years that inspired me to upgrade from my 2015 model. They fixed so many annoyances that were holding me back. But I have no particular reason to upgrade again a year later for evolutionary change. I bought two M1s last year and will probably keep them for years.
Many people here say that they don’t see reason to upgrade from their M1. My first thought is that it would be ridiculous to be seeking upgrades so soon. But then doesn’t the fact that so many people here already have those M1’s mean that they have been successful?
Perhaps sales are just going back to the normal apple-laptop level?
Yes, I think a lot of stories about Apple cutting production are really about reversions to the mean after big surges.
This happened back with the iPhone 6 big-screen upgrade cycle as well. So many people bought the iPhone 6 series for the new design and larger screens that the following iPhone 6S was portrayed as a sales flop, despite it selling better than the gen before the iPhone 6.
They are overpriced to the extent that I am discouraged to even buy a MBP now because I would have to baby it so much given the absurd price tag. It would just end up sitting on a desk for its entire life, and at that point I might as well buy a Mac mini.
I remember buying a Macbook Pro a long time ago (I want to say around 6 years ago? Back in the dark Ive days...) and I can relatively confidently say that it's always been approximately this bad. Inflation plus mental factors are likely the trick that's playing on some folk's mind. They always charged e.g. 200$ for memory increments and 400$/800$ for storage increments, IIRC.
The Apple tax on ram and storage has always been ridiculous, but a long long time ago in a galaxy far away you could use aftermarket RAM and drives, and batteries even used to be removable (and give easy access to RAM and drive, on the old polycarbonate macbooks). On my 2010 I could even replace the DVD drive by an aftermarket drive caddy.
With soldered ram and drives, Apple’s the only game in town, and that means the Apple tax is a lot dearer.
"The Apple tax on ram and storage has always been ridiculous, but a long long time ago in a galaxy far away you could use aftermarket RAM and drives, and batteries even used to be removable (and give easy access to RAM and drive, on the old polycarbonate macbooks). On my 2010 I could even replace the DVD drive by an aftermarket drive caddy."
Those were the good days. I loved dropping dual SSDs and additional RAM in my MBP. I harvested guts from broken ones off craigslist and kept it going for about 13 years before it finally kicked out.
Software also uses a lot more RAM than it did 10 years ago.
10 years ago I lived easily inside 8GB with all native apps.
Nowadays I have 16GB and I’m constantly running into swap. That’s without running any demanding workloads. Granted the swap is a lot faster with modern SSDs, but it’s not good for the drive.
Apple thinks that anyone who needs more than 16GB of RAM is a professional color grader or audio producer or something. But I just want to run Discord.
I’m agreeing with you on the absurdity now; this weekend though, I happened to click through to a video of a guy who upgraded the RAM on a MacBook Air. The video title isn’t clickbait; he did it successfully, but it was a pretty advanced project (as in "let me put the circuit board on my rework preheater to get started")
Except you can't because their new precision workstations use their own new proprietary format. You can only buy it from Dell. They said they will make a SO-DIMM adapter but it doesn't support 128GB.
The base prices have also gone up. Base M1 MacBook Air was about 1100€ new and could even be found for pretty good discounts (I bought one new for 880€). But the base M2 MacBook Air is 1400€.
Is the M1 Air still being sold? It still is in the US. If so, at what price? That is the relevant figure to compare.
In the US, M1 Air is 8GB/256GB for $1,000 and 16GB/512GB for $1,400. I think those are the same prices from original release. And so due to decreasing purchasing power of USD since 2020, they have gotten cheaper.
Edit: yes, the M1 Air has the same nominal price as when it was released 2.5 years ago:
Apple care+ isn't available everywhere. Here in Poland a basic Air is about 1.5x national average monthly wage and apple won't sell you apple care+ for any apple device(you can only buy regular apple care which is just an extension of original warranty,nothing more). So yes, if I had one I'd also baby it.
If "looking after" means not using your thing for what it was made for (in this case, carrying your laptop around with you), then everything is wrong with it.
Sure. There's really not giant risk of damage though. I don't use a case and my mbp has been going from home to office and around the city for four years with just a dent in the corner to show for it. MBPs are very hard to damage if you just keep it in a sleeve in your backpack and don't have liquids right next to the keyboard :-)
While it is OLED, it's also unfortunately only 1080P resolution. When I was comparison shopping before picking up my MBP the displays were always the sticking point - tons of great specced laptops with disappointing screens compared to what Apple offers.
I wonder with all the talk of layoffs, cost-cutting, and chasing short-term cashflow if we're seeing most businesses say to themselves 'let's just get one more year out of the laptops we have'. A lot of companies have a 2-3 year turnover on laptops and pushing things out a bit for most people wouldn't be an issue.
In the short term that kind of change would have a severe impact on sales, but will smooth out a bit over the long term.
The only way I buy new MacBooks now is I try to keep it as long as possible as upgrade only to the oldest and cheapest available model. Last time I bought a m1 Mac air for a bargain price. That’s the only way I’m getting real value. The newest models are simply overpriced. Until they launch something new and discount the current models to a decent price. Same goes for iphones
I think also as the range of stuff the Mac does continues to contract (less software as legacy was dumped for 32 bit, no boot camp, shrinking gaming) the applications that need significant power continue to shrink.
There's really not much that still runs on a Mac that needs more than the base Air. Some more RAM would be nice, but unless you're a high end video editor the use case of higher powered Macs for the price differential seems pretty small.
If Apple overpriced their gear as much as people complain then they wouldn't be one of the largest corporations on the planet. That doesn't mean it makes sense for you of course but I'm sure they spend a lot of time considering how they are going to price their products.
They are expensive, but in the same range as other manufacturers in the similar segment. It’s just that Apple doesn’t make a cheap laptop, unlike Lenovos and HPs.
Surface laptop with the same specs is 1129 EUR in Germany (Mediamarkt). And M2 is going to have a better performance than i5 inside Surface. It’s the same price class. You can get ridiculous and compare both to something like Lenovo V17 for 479 EUR, of course…
I know it's my own niche case, but with apple silicone I have more issues with external monitors than I've ever had in my entire life. I run my own business and I've always liked Macs because having the same software as my team makes fixing issues so much quicker but this is the first time I've thought about moving us to PCs.
In my case, it is a start of the day, every single day, issue where I'm unplugging and re-plugging in monitors waiting for it to 'take' and then it's fine for the day.
I haven't had a problem so far, but I just want to plug rtings.com for this -- when I've looked at monitors, I see that they have a specific review for MacBook compatibility for every monitor. That's really helpful, and their reviews are otherwise top notch quality as well. At least one monitor got axed from my recent search based solely on the review that said it was finicky to get working without compromising on the performance.
It's around £3000 for a high-end 16" MBP. Apple pricing went from 'premium' to 'luxury' for a lot of their audience. Meanwhile, the world is in a seemingly permanant omni-crisis.
Yes, there's a lot of great things about these machines. But there's also some very real downsides (repairability/upgradeability and a non-user-replacable battery), and the higher the prices get, the more those downsides need to be considered.
Luxury brands usually do better than people expect during a recession, surprising to see. Apple product prices are far too high for the struggles of the working poor or proletariat to notice. Apple's always been a 1%-er aspirational purchase and that income sector is doing fine.
The problem I've seen WRT apple is techie type people see specs and salivate over the numbers, but the subjective experience of this years products is no different than the old products for the general public. Not even styling for conspicuous consumption sales. My wife's friendd with this anesthesiologist's wife, and her response to the new products fits the above; aside from numbers she doesn't understand or care about, there's nothing exciting about the latest model year, so she's not buying.
If I want a premium car there are a ton of brands I can choose from. Don't want a BMW then go for a Lexus instead, or an Audi or Jaguar and so on. If I want a premium PC then it's Apple or I can grit my teeth and go for a Lenovo with all the Microsoft crapware installed.
My gut feeling is Sony, HP and all the others gave up too early and allowed WinTel to dominate. We have been paying the price ever since.
I "downsized" from a MacBook Pro 15 with high specs (i9, dedicated GPU, 64 GB RAM) to a MacBook Air M2 and don't regret the decision. I don't feel I'm missing out on anything except when I want to run a VM locally (Win 98 SE to play retro games). I think the M1/M2 chips are so good that there is no reason to want to upgrade as often and the baseline chips are good for 95% of the workloads people have.
Decades plural might be a stretch but 8-12 years is doable now. My home desktop and that of my kids are some lightly upgraded Haswell (2013) i7 Dells.
The kids are getting new gaming PCs this week, but we got a solid 5 years from those Dells (after a business got 4) without feeling like it was a painful sacrifice. The kids gaming PCs are definitely faster, but the killer must-have is they support the anti-cheat checks for Valorant, otherwise I might have only upgraded GPUs.
We do build computers that last a decade. The core of my desktop is 10 years old albeit with newer SSDs and GPU. My old computer can do anything that a new computer can, just a little slower.
The M1/M2 MBPs are a pretty significant leap technologically. At some point intel Macs will receive less and less support and the price point of the M1 (used and new) will drop enough to justify the upgrade.
My PC from 2013 still has all of the components working except for the AMD GPU that got fried mainly due to a problem with my power supply.
The i7 is still going strong, brings back memories considering that at the time it was the latest generation of i7's and I was one of the first to buy it from my town according to the people working there.
Decades is a long time for anything to last. Mean time between screen breakage in my house is measured in months (I think I’ve shored that up to years by getting really good cases, fingers crossed).
My gaming PC is a decade old. Apple iPhones usually get feature updates for 70 months (sometimes more) and bug fix updates for 100 months or more. iPads are similar. This is longer than a single battery usually lasts, so you either get an external battery pack or you replace the battery.
Beyond a decade, and you need to throw Linux on them. But things physically wear out at that point. And the increased power consumption of older devices means that much past a decade, you’re paying much more in electricity costs than you would if you had replaced it with a similarly-specced modern device. …at least in principle.
If it’s a rarely used machine, you’re still better off with the old one.
With Moore's Law finally almost dead, it could be done. Though I should confess that my current laptop has been my current laptop for almost a decade, so it's been doable.
I wonder if the US tech hiring slowdown is big enough to have an effect here? Most of my friends do not own a personal laptop anymore but every job they get comes with a shiny new corporate MacBook.
I happen to be regularly in touch with distributors due to having written a Mac blog for the past 20 years. There might be figures out there, but I don't think they're easy to come by.
No surprises here. The new Mac release cycle is not transparent to the consumers, and the differences between M1 and M2 are marginal for most use cases.
I've not see any evidence of power issues. Saw a minor miss that they had some ray tracing functionality in the GPU, but ended up being more power hungry than planned, so they disabled it. But the chip with the same cores is doing fine in apple phones, ipads, and their thin/light mba, mbp 14", and mbp16" with no power/battery life/heat issues that I've heard of.
Sadly they didn't bring out a Mac Studio M2 max, but clearly if they can fit that in 14" laptop they could fit the same in the studio.
Honestly, the price increase from M1 to M2 really wasn't justified. Performance improved but that's the minimum you'd expect from gen to gen so the new price doesn't seem like that good of a deal.
Most users wanting to get into Apple Silicon are either getting M1 machines or waiting to see what happens with M3.
Also, temps increased significantly from M1 to M2 which isn't really good marketing.
My M1 MBP is built and still performing so well, it’s going to last at least 3 more years.
Unless Apple integrates a new accelerated ML chip next year that’s going to revolutionize the way we’re able to train and interact with small, specialized AI models in macOS.
I thought Nvidia cards already had some kind of ML hardware for upscaling video games? Which seems them going full circle, since large AI models (except Google TPU code) are usually trained on GPUs, which were originally intended for games.
The Tensor cores on nVidia GPUs are effectively "a separate chip", they're just on die. That's where they can run DLSS and frame generation ML inference.
Separating them out would hamstring them, since they wouldn't be able to process the frames as they're being rendrered without performance penalty.
A lot of finger-pointing at price in this thread (or how the M1 captured new MacBook sales) but I would be more worried about the segment in general.
I think we've all seen a trend among users away from general-purpose PC's and toward phones and/or tablets.
My bigger fear is that the rest of us, like some kind of ham radio enthusiasts, are going to become a dwindling market segment that fewer and fewer computer companies will continue to produce for.
PC and laptop sales exploded during the pandemic. It's clear that these devices absolutely have their place and aren't going anywhere. I know it's popular to be contrarian, but sometimes the obvious answer actually is the answer. When you're facing double digit inflation in much of Europe and the Euro is falling against the USD, a 1650 Euro price tag for an entry level device simply isn't realistic.
Isn't the euro currently gaining on the dollar? It was heavily down last year, but except for a small recovery--which is mostly already gone again--the chart I was just looking at shows the dollar falling, not the euro...
Seems to be going up again in value, but prices are sticky. MSRPs made when the it was down to 1:0.9 (USD:EURO) are probably gonna be permanent. PS5 was hiked up to 550 Euros. Even if Euro goes up again, Sony's just going to pocket the difference and move on with their lives.
I'd welcome that. The broader the market for PC's the more dumbed down they become. I'd be happy to see a bifurcation into dumb terminals for most people and workstations for the power users.
For media consumption (aside from games) I can see that happening, but with the sheer amount of _work_ that gets done on laptops and desktop I can't see them disappearing, or really even dwindling.
This is probably not far off. I regularly do software development on my Samsung phone using Samsung Dex plugged to a monitor. Sometimes even without a monitor, just a wireless keyboard and mouse.
I'm disillusioned with Apple. With any operating system, you can easily develop with good tools for Linux, Windows and Android. But for MacOS and iOS, you need to buy their hardware.
Not sure why this anti-competive behaviour has been accepted for a whole industry. There is no valid technical reason for it.
The small-ish company I'm a consultant at has started buying apple hardware to some of its developers. Not because they prefer the hardware, not because they prefer the operating system. But, we need someone to run xcode to build software.
100%. An SD card slot and a video out port are not pro features. A typical college freshman will need both of those, regardless of their discipline. In fact, my entry level, 13" MacBook Air had those a decade ago.
SD card is kind of niche these days - it's really just for people with a camera and most people just use a phone at this point. HDMI out though is definitely still useful for regular people (presentations, conferences, TV, etc...)
The SD card slot is a pretty good way to get yourself a little more disk space - a perennial problem with students in particular.
There are a couple of companies that make aluminum trays sized to exactly fill the sd card slot on older Macbooks and remain flush (there's a detente for sticking a wire in to pull it out. The tray has wiring for a microSD card. On that machine, I moved my iTunes library there. Since it's read-only, I don't need to worry too much about wear or write IO bandwidth.
> a perennial problem with students in particular.
is it? AFAIK kids these days need less storage than ever before, because everything's cloud based. No one has itunes libraries, its spotify/applemusic subscriptions. etc.
Some stuff like photo or video will eat up your freeish cloud based storage for long. iphone backups into icloud too. then you are into the $120 a year plans for like 2tb of storage even though that can probably buy 4tb of local storage these days. they sell 1tb phones for a reason, people have a lot of files.
There's plenty of reasons why Apple would halt M2 (beyond the fact that M3 production should be ramping now).
There are clear market reasons at play: for example Samsung Electronics have estimated a 96% drop in profit for the quarter and have subsequently reduced production of memory chips.
Demand for new hardware is expected to be softer:
- WFH brought forward a lot of purchases
- Inflation/cost of living pressures will slow upgrade cycles
- Consumers are forced to redirect funds to mortgages due to higher interest rates
- The global economy is slowing, with large corporations already laying off significant numbers of staff
However it's also worth noting that this is a small serving of data with a big serving of conjecture: Whenever Apple decreases production it's always toted in the media as some kind of fuck up or failure, only for the quarterly results to convincingly disprove that theory.
The HN talk about the strong dollar isn't entirely relevant, the USA alone is a massive buyer of apple hardware, and a strong dollar is common.
I bought a MacBook Pro M1 about one and a half years ago, and a week ago I bought a Linux Ryzen laptop, after giving up hope of doing my x86 Linux development on the MacBook. I’ve followed every guide I could find on emulating x86 Linux on my MacBook M1 without success.
Also, I bought the MacBook with 32GB RAM, and later found out I needed 64GB, and I wasn’t willing to pay the extra price of selling my old MacBook to buy a new one with twice the RAM.
I have been using Macs for work since around 2014, and for me it was a combination of missing x86 Linux emulation, a high price, and lack of flexibility (e.g. adding more RAM or disk space) that made be stop using Macs for work.
64 GB is a lot. I wouldn't buy a machine with less than that (Macs tend to last a long time), but, still, wanting to max it out just in case and actually needing it is rare.
In other words, even Mac people don't feel an urge to upgrade their systems so often anymore. A slowdown of consumption, in these times of climate crisis, is nothing but good.
It used to be you basically had to upgrade your computer and smartphone to do anything at all with it in a few years. Not just run the latest programs, but to just browse the web at all. Now a days, we've plateaued on compute for basic consumer purposes at least.
I use a 2012 mac. It only shows its age when I try and run a game on it. Other than that, for writing code, for watching things, reading, browsing, emails, zoom, etc, its no slower than anything modern I could buy. I hear the fans and it gets hot but there's no lag or anything, and it boots in a minute with the ssd I put in a few years ago. I did have a new mac for a bit recently, but I went back to this one because it was clear there wasn't much of a point with my usage for how much it cost. No withdraw from retina either, because at the distance you use a laptop you can't see the pixels on the 2012 anyhow. Maybe I can get another 11 years out of it at this rate.
I was on the boat of "Apple hardware will last longer and service will be superior" for many years (being Apple user since 2001). Recent changes in macOS got me to decide to get a ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 9) for work and I must say that not being a cheap device either, it's on par in hardware quality (does not have an M1/M2, but still more than enough) and battery it's about 7-8 hours. The nice thing is that is gonna last really long since I can just keep updating Debian for many years to come.
On my side I appreciate the Macbook Pro M1 32gb that my company gives me to use, but I'll never purchase it out of pocket (unless I create a business and expense that). It's just too expensive and I'm not really using the full potential. I think it's a lot better to have a 4-core+16GB Ubuntu machine stripping off whatever eye candies that Linux has for my sys programming hobby and other uses. All entertainment goes to a 16gb Windows machine.
I suppose that might mean paying people in corporate currency. Paying your employee directly contributes to your sales. The employees can trade away the currency, but someone ends up with it and spends it on you.
This is the longest I’ve ever gone without purchasing a Mac like 20 years... something like 7 years now. Their offerings aren’t compelling for the price. Apple should have a massive competitive advantage in price, but instead of passing that down in anyway they’ve been keeping it to themselves.
Additionally, while they kill it in perf per watt, sometimes I just want performance. Ex. their current GPUs don’t compare well to NVidia but the machines are priced like they do.
Machines used to get more base RAM over time but they don’t anymore. I’m shocked 16GB isn’t the standard on every machine they sell. It should be cheap to get to 32GB. The base SSD is absolutely shameful, Apple at the price should have a TB minimum. It’s fucking 2023 for godsakes, it’s been like 10+ years of fucking people for a useful amount of storage. Isn’t that enough?
I wonder if you could throttle the m2 yourself and end up with greater battery life than m1? its easy to throttle a cpu in windows settings at least with a dropdown menu, not sure the process for mac but there has to be some analog.
I've been itching to get a new MacBook (still running my trusty 2015 MBP), but the price is a killer. I like my laptop screens "as big as I can get them" and the cheapest 16" MBP is over $3000CAD while still having the same RAM and storage as my 2015.
The SSD on my two year old M1 MacBook Pro is showing 25% lifetime left. The rest of the machine is just fine, but I am looking to replace it soon. Apple will get their money from me soon.
Your machine dies early and you want to give the same manufacturer more money to fix the problem? Not the first time I've seen this where manufacturer=Apple, either. The brand loyalty Apple inspires really is incredible.
I recently bought a mid-spec Macbook Pro for £3100 to replace the mid-spec 15" Macbook Pro I bought in 2017 for £2200, which replaced the mid-spec one I bought in 2013 for £1900.
Salaries in many jobs in the UK have barely increased in the past 15 years, and of those that have, many have not kept up with inflation. It's not the whole picture, but the UK (and it seems Europe generally) is increasingly poor by comparison to the US, and US products too have become increasingly unaffordable for many.
I feel like they went through a similar cycle at some point with the iPhone. They got to a point where they were so good and so expensive it was not necessary at all to upgrade every year. Now it is generally accepted that phones are upgraded on a 2-3 year cycle. The m series macs will be no different. Something that would help would be to roll out new series chips across the entire product line at the same time. Right now there is pent up demand for mac studio, mac pro, etc to get the m2.
Still rocking my iPhone 11 Pro. Unless it has a catastrophic failure I'll probably struggle through until the iPhone 16 comes out. For the most part it works fine (although the battery is getting a little ropey!)
> Facing "plummeting" Mac sales amid a severe PC market downturn
> The suspension is said to have continued through February, after which production of M2 series chips resumed, but they were "only half the level of the previous year," said the Korean-language report, quoting a person familiar with the matter.
[emphasis mine]
So they temporarily paused it for two months in response to a shift in the entire PC market. Headline is pretty clickbaity, this seems like a non-story
For all the people bitching about how Apple is "hogging" all of TSMC's production capacity, they should be happy. But they won't be, because the people who complain about that will complain about anything Apple does.
I have configured a new MBP with the M2 chip a few times when I consider upgrading my laptop mix. I'm still pretty happy with an Air M1, Lenovo X1 Carbon (6th gen) and a big ThinkPad P17. But the cost comes in well over $3K on a config that I think is "worth it." I understand that you can amortize it over quite a long period and at some point I just might buy it. But at that price point it keeps ending up as a "not click" buy for me.
The ARM chips had me seriously considering a mac for the first time in years. I was seriously thinking about an M2 MBA or 13" MBP - but the price to get either of those (or really any Mac) outfitted with a decent amount of RAM is obscene.
So, I just picked up a refurb 13" XPS with 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD from the Dell Outlet for under a thousand bucks and slapped Ubuntu on it. A similarly appointed MBP 13 would have been over double the cost.
I blame the M1. The M1 gave consumers a three-year head start on performance and battery life. Hard to compete against your previous SKU when it's still rips.
My two year old M1 Mac is going so strong I don't see why I should buy a M2 machine.
Yes, it has more cores and is more power efficient but the end user experience of browsing HN and running Xcode wouldn't be improved much. Not enough to shell out for a new machine at least.
The M1 is just too good. Unless Apple adds some insane stuff to the M3 I think I'll be upgrading with the M5.
In my case the M1 is more powerful than I need it to be. There's no reason for me to upgrade to M2 or M3 until this generation is too slow for my day to day use.
The only thing that would make me upgrade is Apple sponsoring a Proton port to M-series CPUs/Metal. I could play thousands of "Windows only" games on my Mac without hassle.
A proton port would be amazing. I look at the incredible M chips but have no workload for them without games. I suppose I could run some ML models locally, but that’s hardly a requirement.
Well as other have said here, the Macs are a bit pricey outside of the US. My story is I was going to replace my M1 Macbook Pro with a new M2 Air, however it's coming in a £1949, that's for 1TB hard drive and 16GB of memory, which is simply out of my budget, I need to hang on for the next cycle and get an M3 or M4 Macbook Air I think.
I wonder if this is a combination of the central banks around the world’s massive rate rises starting to really bite, combined with the profiteering we’ve been seeing in things like groceries, energy etc.
Either that, or it’s just made up… More than once I’ve seen reports like this about Apple and then strong or even record sales announced the next quarter.
Is it truly a global slump, or are people just buying more reasonably priced laptops that aren't Apple? No matter how much someone really likes an Apple, if they're financially strapped, they're going to buy whatever they can afford, and Mac's are most certainly a premium spend not everyone can make.
I suspect this marks the end of the Semiconductor shortage? Now that TSMC isn't backlogged with Apple products they will search out other people's chips to manufacture. Probably a good thing for other people wanting to manufacture 5mn products.
Please Broadcom, send some potential Raspberry Pi 5 chips their way!!!
If I was not a software engineer, I wouldn't own a computer. You can do almost everything that the average person needs to do on a phone or tablet. How many different > $1000 products does Apple expect people to buy?
Aren't people keeping their PC's for far longer nowadays?
In my experience they are far less brittle and far more capable than they used to be and we spend most of our time either running web browsers on them.
It's an Acer Nitro VN7 with 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM running Ubuntu 22. Workload is mostly vscode web development (Node.js), Gimp, OBS, VMware player for running macOS to test sites on various iOS simulators. Browsing and watching Netflix. Reasons to upgrade would be battery life and a brighter screen.
IMO M2 came in way too fast. I use MacBook Air M1 i.e. the worst M1 chip and this machine is still blazingly fast. There just is no reason for me to upgrade much less upgrade to some M2 pro machine.
Got about a quarter of the way down and then a full screen pop up appeared telling me something about the wind being fake. Closed and didn’t bother reading the rest.
I’m using a Macbook Air from like 2011 and it has basically the same specs as their current lineup in terms of memory etc. So why would I pay £2000 for the current one?
In a very rough sense, looking at Geekbench, the M2 MacBook Air has 5x the single core performance and 10x the multi core performance. Granted, if your workload is typing things into Vim, using the terminal and reading Hacker News, you might not notice. I suspect if you try to load CNN and its 100 ad trackers, you would most certainly notice.
A little off topic, but also illustrative: I found an old 3tb external NAS from 2011. I thought I would copy my backups onto it just to have some redundancy. I realized that the file 5MB/s transfer was going to take literally 7 days. I decided to hop on Amazon and get a 1000MB/s external SSD that could do the job in an hour. Tech really has changed a lot in the past decade+.
It has the same memory capacity, and maybe number of keys on the keyboard, but I feel like your "etc" is doing too much heavy lifting to try to make those comparable.
My problem is that their line up is all over the place, and even with the confusing addition to M1's to their tablets, they really need more consistency in my opinion. Not to mention the fact that they are being a little ambitious considering you cannot run specific types of software that Software Engineers will need to emulate, or wait for the maintainers to port over.
I would love to buy a new Mac, but I need them to entice me and give me confidence in their new direction.
Also right after 2020 I cannot imagine a lot of people are still using whatever computer / machine they bought during that time window, and those still work just fine.
I have a 9 year old laptop, and 3 in use desktops that are between 9 and 10 years old. Once you have 4 cores and 16+ gigs of ram, it's hard to need any more performance in typical day to day tasks.
I have a M1 Mac mini and even at the time it was overpriced. The base model specs are ridiculously low if you want anything more the browsing the web and use it for more than a literal couple of years.
Now if you got to laptops it's absolutely ridiculous. Given the inflation numbers, people having their dollars bills flying out of their pockets and the post-pandemic lull after everyone have bought a computer, I'm not surprised they have to adjust the production numbers.
Replaceability of an SSD doesn't provide much day-to-day benefit once it's installed and encrypted; for corporate users using enterprise images, removable storage may be a vulnerability. Buy an SSD up to your cloud storage capacity, double it, and call it a day.
Work just bought me a new M2 Macbook Pro. It works great, but it's SO UGLY! I was really surprised to have such a negative emotional response to a new Apple product.
Very boxy, the lines and curves all just feel "off" somehow. It just lacks elegance. The previous Intel Mac was thinner and just felt more refined. Having a machine that works better is a fair trade, but it's unfortunate to have a negative emotional reaction to seeing/touching it.
Yup, I skipped the previous gen. My last laptop was the Intel MBP. This one works so much better, so it's a fair trade, but unfortunate to have to trade so much form for function.
Unsurprisingly, sales declined.