Apple has put a lot of effort into (successfully) creating a customer-base that thinks overpriced goods and different colored texts make them in a special club, I’m not surprised that an exec thought this excuse would fly
It’s a bit more complex than that (and you probably know it).
When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board. Their UX is excellent. Their support is good. Things work well, applications are easy to use and pretty stable and well built. And if they violate your privacy like the others, at least they don’t make the open-bar sale of your data their fucking business model (wink wink Google).
Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.
I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore. Nor the urge to do it. I need things to work out of the box in a predictable way. I don’t want a digital mental load. Just a simple UX, consistency across my devices and good apps (and no Google, fuck Google). Something I wouldn’t have with an Android + PC setup. :)
The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it. Neither the Apple nor the Google/Microsoft environments are satisfactory. Not even speaking of Linux and FOSS. We must aim higher.
I’m gonna have to argue against a few of these points:
When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board.
Consistent: yes. Every Apple device leverages a functionally very similar UI. That said, the experience is, in my opinion, not very coherent or well thought out. Especially if you are attempting to leverage their technology from the standpoint of someone like a Linux power user. The default user experience is frustratingly warped around the idea that the end user is an idiot who has no idea how to use a terminal and who only wants access to the default applications provided with the OS.
Things work well
Things work…okay. But try installing, uninstalling, and then reinstalling a MySQL DB on a macbook and then spend an hour figuring out why your installation is broken. Admittedly, that’s because you’re probably installing it with Homebrew, but that’s the other point: if you want to do anything of value on it, you have to use a third party application like Homebrew to do it. The fact that you have to install and leverage a third party package manager is unhinged for an ecosystem where everything is so “bundled” together by default.
Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.
I guess the ultimate perspective is one in which you have to be happy surrendering control over so much to Apple. But then again, you could also just install EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma or any given flavor of Debian distribution with any DE of your choice, install KDE Connect on your PC and phone, and get 95 percent of the experience Apple offers right out of the box, with about 100x the control over your system.
I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore.
I don’t know of anyone who would describe themselves as a hardcore “PC/Linux user,” or what this means to you. I’m assuming by PC you mean Windows. But people who are really into Linux generally don’t like MacOS or Windows, and typically for all the same reasons. I tolerate a Windows machine for video game purposes, but if I had to use it for work I’d immediately install Virtualbox and work out of a Linux VM. For the people who are really into Linux, the management of the different parts of it is, while sometimes a pain in the ass, also part of the fun. It’s the innate challenge of something that can only be mastered by technical proficiency. If that’s not for you, totally fine.
The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it.
It’s less argument and more of a general negative sentiment people hold towards Apple product advocates. You can look up the phenomenon of “green bubble discrimination.” It’s a vicious cycle in which the ecosystem works seamlessly for people who are a part of it, but Apple intentionally makes leaving that ecosystem difficult and intentionally draws attention to those who interact with the people inside of it who are not part of it. Apple products also often are associated with a higher price tag: they’re status symbols as much as they are functional tools. People recognize a 2000 dollar Macbook instantly. Only a few people might recognize a comparably priced Thinkpad. In a lot of cases, they’ll just assume the Macbook was expensive and the non-Macbook was cheap. And you might say, “yeah, but that’s because of people, not because of Mac.” But it would be a lie to say that Apple isn’t a company intensely invested in brand recognition and that it doesn’t know it actively profits from these perceptions.
Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)
You are right and make good points. But you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.
(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)
Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)
Wow. Talk about coincidences…
you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.
I’m a dumbass and if I can do it anyone can. But, yes, technology is a daunting thing to most people. Intuition and experience go far. That said, it’s literally easier today than it ever has been. You put in the installation usb, click next a whole bunch, reboot, and you have a working machine. Is it sometimes more complicated than that and you have to do BIOS/UEFI bullshit? Sure, but past that hurdle it’s smooth sailing.
(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)
Ah, the joys of rolling release distros. Endeavor has been stable for me so far. I’m running it on an X1 Thinkpad. Generally works more reliably than my own vanilla arch installs and more low profile tiling window managers. I’ve found myself sticking to KDE Plasma for a DE because it’s so consistent and has enough features to keep me happy without having to spend all my time fine tuning my own UX, which I just don’t care about. My realization has been that arch distros are best suited for machines running integrated graphics and popular DEs, rather than ones with separate cards and more niche or highly customizable DEs. Prevents you from having to futs about with things like Optimus, with graphics drivers being the primary cause of headaches for that distro, per my experience. That said, I used to run an old Acer laptop with arch and a tiling window manager called qtile. Qtile was great, but every other update completely altered the logic and structure of how it read the config file for it, so the damn thing broke constantly. I’m like…just decide how you want the config to look and keep that. Or at least allow for backwards compatibility. But they didn’t.
Yea sorry but I disagree with the vast majority of things you said. Consistent, coherent, and well thought out experiences are pretty par for the course at this point, regardless of what flagship phone company you’re buying from. The UX is great for people who grow up with the UX, just like android UX is great for people who grow up with it. Android users who switch to Apple generally think Apple’s UX is dogshit, and vice versa. The UX argument is trash and the reality of it is that people just think whatever UX they’re used to is the more intuitive one. Support is pretty much the same in my experience between the two, and I have an android personal phone and an apple work phone. The major difference is the image that Apple support airs is better. The vast majority of popular Android applications are just as stable and usable as Apple apps, and the ones that aren’t are often niche enough that similar apps aren’t even on the apple appstore. So it’s a question of basically the same service for most apps, and then either no service or degraded service for lesser apps.
The one thing they have over android is the security argument, which is fair to an extent, but not this bulwark that a lot of people like to pretend it is. The Fappening, for example, still got plenty of explicit images from Apple phones.
All in all, apple is an advertising company first, and a tech company second, with admittedly improved security, but also admittedly security that isn’t good enough to justify the price hike.
Actually no. There’s some pairing trickery going on on the SoC level, so if you change the NAND chips by higher capacity ones without apple’s special sauce, you’ll just get an unbootsble system
DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.
It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that’s fine. But it’s definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.
I switched back to Apple recently, but used to sell them.
1 week before Bootcamp was released, I was selling Apple gear, and I showed a sales manager who was visiting how we got Windows running on the new Intel Mac Mini, and explained how this was great, because it was a great transition technology
In front of customers, as I was explaining, he basically called me an idiot, and said “why would anyone want to run windows on a mac”.
A week or so later, bootcamp was released, and he was back… He was now using the arguments I made a week early as a template for bragging about bootcamp to us and explaining the benefits. No apologies for any of the previous discussion.
They make decent products otherwise, and management doesn’t even need to act like wankers or be deceptive either
I only now using Apple again because Microsoft has finally pushed me over the edge with windows (literally, when they started hijacking my chrome tabs EVERY bootup, and opening Edge automatically), and the fact my Xbox Series X wouldn’t even play remote on Windows (their own OS)
Absolutely agree. Unfortunately, Apple attracts the kind of idiots too who think they know what they’re talking about too. When I was selling them, I had a customer tell another that Macs can’t get viruses as I was talking to them.
I used a lot of Linux in the past too (everything from playing unreal tournament on Gentoo in 3DFX days to Ubuntu more recently), and unfortunately, in the past Linux tended to also attract the upstuck crowd too.
But, slowly, the LInux culture does seem to be changing. But, we still regularly see people argue about things like SystemD vs Init Scripts (and anyone who has ever written a Init script knows exactly what a pile of crap they are to write) and Pulseaudio vs AlSA/OSS/ESOUND/ETC (whereas, any old school user also remembers the pain of sound servers conflicting with each other). Linux does finally appear to be on the right path to improving things, improve interoperability and the general common sense crowd finally seems to be drowning others out (and new technologies like Wayland or Pipewire are no longer getting heavy blowback). It may also be because Linux developers these days tend to be a lot better at communicating the benefits (Compiz was another case where the benefits were well communicated).
There’s a lot of things honestly Apple should be fixing
Why did you decide to go back to Apple instead of giving Linux a try? It’s free so it literally would have cost nothing to try, and you could keep your other OS(s).
It’s pushy to ask why someone made a large purchase when there’s a free alternative they might not have tried that they may or may not like better? Unlike buying an Apple product, it takes little effort and no cost to just boot up Linux and give it a shot. Some people won’t like it and that’s fine. It’d be pushy to say you will like it better, which is not what I said.
I used to use Linux exclusively (I was actually the top poster on a few major Linux news sites, and my linux project once got published in LinuxWorld Magazine).
Whilst it has certainly gotten better, I still feel some parts of linux need refining. Also, one thing both Microsoft and Apple do have is available integration of mobile apps… I thought Apple could do both via Parallels (android in windows, iPhone in MacOS), but turns out Android in Windows on parallels won’t work.
For the type of development i do, windows and macos are still the best options unfortunately too. If Linux had more seamless mobile app integration, I probably would have highly considered it to be honest
By mobile app integration, do you mean a connection between your mobile phone and your computer? KDE Connect is pretty good from my experience. It has more features than the Windows alternative at least (and I think there’s even a Windows version oddly enough).
If you mean running a mobile app in the system, I have no experience with that.
Running mobile apps on computer. It’s really the one use case Apple does extremely well, and it’s a pity because Linux could actually do it well if distros sorted themselves out
The thing is even if that were true, which it isn’t, I’d still prefer him with two legs. Especially if I’m paying the amount of money I would normally pay for 50 legs.
I don’t necessarily even begrudge them a profit margin on RAM. Sure it’s kind of a scam but also I guess it’s just the price you pay for convenience. If you want to better price you upgrade the RAM yourself (assuming that was actually possible).
But the markup they have on RAM isn’t reasonable it’s totally insane.
If you went to McDonald’s and cheeseburger was $0.99 and then a cheeseburger with extra cheese was $2 do you think was something was up but that’s essentially what Apple are doing. Cheese does not cost $1.99, you are literally almost doubling the price for a subcomponent
The Apple M series is not ARM based. It’s Apple’s own RISC architecture. They get their performance in part from the proximity of the RAM to the GPU, yes. But not only. Contrary to ARM that has become quite bloated after decades of building upon the same instruction set (and adding new instructions to drive adoption even if that’s contrary to RISC’s philosophy), the M series has started anew with no technological debt. Also Apple controls both the hardware to the software, as well as the languages and frameworks used by third party developers for their platform. They therefore have 100% compatibility between their chips’ instruction set, their system and third party apps. That allows them to make CPUs with excellent efficiency. Not to mention that speculative execution, a big driver of performance nowadays, works better on RISC where all the instructions have the same size.
You are right that they do not cater to power users who need a LOT of power though. But 95% of the users don’t care, they want long battery life, light and silent devices. Sales of desktop PCs have been falling for more than a decade now, as have the investments made in CISC architectures. People don’t want them anymore. With the growing number of manufacturers announcing their adoption of the new open-source RISC-V architecture I am curious to see what the future of Intel and AMD is. Especially with China pouring billions into building their own silicon supply chain. The next decade is going to be very interesting. :)
The whole “Apple products are great because they control both software and hardware” always made about as much sense to me as someone claiming “this product is secure because we invented our own secret encryption”.
Here’s an example for that: Apple needed to ship an x86_64 emulator for the transition, but that’s slow and thus make the new machines appear much slower than their older Intel-based ones. So, what they did was to come up with their own private instructions that an emulator needs to greatly speed up its task and added them to the chip. Now, most people don’t even know whether they run native or emulated programs, because the difference in performance is so minimal.
The Apple M series is not ARM based. It’s Apple’s own RISC architecture.
M1s through M3s run ARMv8-A instructions. They’re ARM chips.
What you might be thinking of is that Apple has an architectural license, that is, they are allowed to implement their own logic to implement the ARM instruction set, not just permission to etch existing designs into silicon. Qualcomm, NVidia, Samsung, AMD, Intel, all hold such a license. How much use they actually make of that is a different question, e.g. AMD doesn’t currently ship any ARM designs of their own I think and the platform processor that comes in every Ryzen etc. is a single “barely not a microprocessor” (Cortex A5) core straight off ARM’s design shelves, K12 never made it to the market.
You’re right about the future being RISC-V, though, ARM pretty much fucked themselves with that Qualcomm debacle. Android and android apps by and large don’t care what architecture they run on, RISC-V already pretty much ate the microcontroller market (unless you need backward compatibility for some reason, heck, there’s still new Z80s getting etched) and android devices are a real good spot to grow. Still going to take a hot while before RISC-V appears on the desktop proper, though – performance-wise server loads will be first, and sitting in front of it office thin clients will be first. Maybe, maybe, GPUs. That’d certainly be interesting, the GPU being simply vector cores with a slim insn extension for some specialised functionality.
Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if/when Microsoft is going to hop on the RISC train. They did a crap job trying themselves at a ARM version a few years back and gave up. A RISC Surface with a compatible Windows 13 and proper binary translator (like Apple did with Rosetta) would shake the PC market real good!
the mac pro is a terrible deal even compared to their own mac studio. It has the same specs but for almost $1000 extra. Yes, the cheese grater aluminum case is cool, but $1000 cool?
Yeah, I gave Apple a try over the last two years, largely because I was annoyed with Google and wanted to ditch Android. I’ve been fed up since about 6 months in, but gave it some more time, which led to an eventual waiting game to get the replacements I want.
I just picked up a Thinkpad P14s g4 AMD with a 7840u, 64GB of RAM, and a 3 year onsite warranty for $1270 after taxes. I added a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro for another $270. I can’t imagine spending more than that and only getting 8GB RAM (and less warranty), which is what I have assigned to the GPU. Plus I get to run Linux, which I really didn’t realize how much MacOS would leave me wanting.
The thing I’ll miss is the iPhone 13 Mini size. I found iOS to be absolute trash, but there’s just not an Android phone that’s a reasonable size. But at least I can run Calyx/Graphene on a Pixel and get a decent OS without spying.
I do like the M1 MBA form factor, too, but I’ll grab the Thinkpad X13s successor for portability and get a better keyboard. I don’t need top end performance out of that, I really just want battery life and passive cooling.
And don’t even get me started on the overpriced mess that are the Airpods Max. I much prefer the Audeze Maxwell and Sennheiser Momentum 4 I replaced them with.
I think this is one of those words which has lost its meaning in the personal computer world. What are people doing with computers these days? Every single technology reviewer is, well, a reviewer - a journalist. The heaviest workload that computer will ever see is Photoshop, and 98% of the time will be spent in word processing at 200 words per minute or on a web browser. A mid-level phone from 2016 can do pretty much all of that work without skipping a beat. That’s “professional” work these days.
The heavy loads Macs are benchmarked to lift are usually video processing. Which, don’t get me wrong, is compute intensive - but modern CPU designers have recognized that they can’t lift that load in general purpose registers, so all modern chips have secondary pipelines which are essentially embedded ASICs optimized for very specific tasks. Video codecs are now, effectively, hardcoded onto the chips. Phone chips running at <3W TDP are encoding 8K60 in realtime and the cheapest i series Intel x64 chips are transcoding a dozen 4K60 streams while the main CPU is idle 80% of the time.
Yes, I get bent out of shape a bit over the “professional” workload claims because I work in an engineering field. I run finite elements models and, while sparce matrix solutions have gotten faster over the years, it’s still a CPU intensive process and general (non video) matrix operations aren’t really gaining all that much speed. Worse, I work in an industry with large, complex 2D files (PDFs with hundreds of 100MP images and overlain vector graphics) and the speed of rendering hasn’t appreciably changed in several years because there’s no pipeline optimization for it. People out there doing CFD and technical 3D modeling as well as other general compute-intensive tasks on what we used to call “workstations” are the professional applications which need real computational speed - and they’re/we’re just getting speed ratio improvements and the square root of the number of cores, when the software can even parallelize at all. All these manufacturers can miss me with the “professional” workloads of people surfing the web and doing word processing.
Indeed! It makes the benchmarks that much more disingenuous since pros will end up CPU crunching. I find video production tedious (it’s a skill issue/PEBKAC, really) so I usually just let the GPU (nvenc) do it to save time. ;-)
Also, one of these days AMD or Intel will bolt 8GB on their CPUs too, and then they’ll squash M.
I can’t remember who it is but somebody is already doing this. But it’s primarily marketed as an AI training chip. So basically only Microsoft and Google are able to buy them, even if you had the money, there isn’t any stock left.
It’s actually just the display backlight which is why I had to cover it with aluminium tape instead of just disconnecting the wire. Not only don’t I want an ad on my computer I especially don’t want an illuminated one.
Lol. My personal iMac has 32GB, and I’m happy with it. My POS work MBP has only 8GB, and I wanna frisbee the fucken thing out the window pretty much every day.
Instead I feel it’s the opposite because that memory is shared with the GPU. So if you’re gaming even with some old game, it’s like having 4gb for the system and 4gb to the GPU. They might claim that their scheduler is magic and can predict memory usage with perfect accuracy but still, it would be like 6+2 GB. If a game has heavy textures they will steal memory from the system. Maybe you want to have a browser for watching a tutorial on YouTube during gaming, or a chat. That’s another 1-2 gb stolen from the CPU and GPU.
Their pricing for the ram is ridiculous, they’re charging $300 for just 8gb of additional memory! We’re not in the 2010s anymore!
8GB for this price in 2023 is a SCAM. All Apple devices are a SCAM. Many pay small fortunes for luxurious devices full of spyware and which they have absolutely no control over. It’s insane. They like to be chained in their golden shackles.
You know I have software on my PC old enough I can’t run it even in compatibility mode, I’d need to spin up a VM to run it or a pseudoVM like DOSBox, it’s not unheard of it’s not even uncommon.
I don’t trust MacOS, its proprietary code obviously hides evil spying and control functions over the user. Apple has always been an enemy of the free software community because it is not in favor of its loyal customers but only its greedy shareholders. There is no balance, Apple has always adopted anti-competitive measures. That’s just to say the least.
It’s not even USB 3 it’s USB 2 delivered via USB-C. Because that’s something everybody wants isn’t it, slow charging on a modern standard that should be faster and indeed is faster on every other budget Android phone.
Apple has always been an enemy of the free software community
Apple is one of the largest contributors to open source software in the world and they’ve been a major contributor to open source since the early 1980’s. Yes, they have closed source software too… but it’s all built on an open foundation and they give a lot back to the open source community.
LLVM for example, was a small project nobody had ever heard of in 2005, when Apple hired the university student who created it, gave him an essentially unlimited budget to hire a team of more people, and fast forward almost two decades it’s by far the best compiler in the world used by both modern languages (Rust/Swift/etc) and old languages (C, JavaScript, Fortran…) and it’s still not controlled in any way by Apple. The uni student they hired was Chris Lattner, he is still president of LLVM now even though he’s moved on (currently CEO of an AI startup called Modular AI).
Well, look at the annual contribution that Apple makes to the BSD team and see that Apple uses several open source software in its products but with minimal financial contribution. Even more so for a company of this size. Apple only “donates” when it is in its interest that such software is ready for it to use.
True. Sometimes I look the specs and prices of Apple devices while visiting large electronic stores. I don’t understand how people who aren’t rich can rationalize buying an Apple device. While it’s true that Windows has become increasingly plagued by invasive ads recently, and macOS seems like the only alternative for many, this issue is relatively recent. On the other hand, MacBooks have been overpriced for years.
I bought a PC the other day and it only had 6 gigabytes of RAM which is pathetic for what I paid for it but there you go. The thing is for a fraction of the price Apple are asking to upgrade it to 16, I upgraded it to 32 gig.
I honestly think I could upgrade it to 64 and still come in under the Apple price. They’re charging something like a 300% markup on commercially available RAM, it’s ridiculous.
That’s too simplistic. For example, the entry level M1 MacBook Air is hands down one of the best value laptops. It’s very hard to find anything nearly as good for the price.
On the high end, yeah you can save $250-400 buying a similarly specced HP Envy or Acer Swift or something. These are totally respectable with more ports, but they have 2/3rd the battery life, worse displays, and tons of bloatware. Does that make them “not a scam”?
(I’m actually not sure what “spyware” you’re referring to, especially compared to Windows and Chromebooks.)
I 'm not refering to Windows or ChromeOS ( that are full of spyware too ) . The first generation of Mac M1 had a reasonably more “accessible” price precisely to encourage users to migrate to ARM technology and consequently also encourage developers to port their software, and not because Apple was generous. Far from it.Everything Apple does in the short or long term is to benefit itself.
And not to mention that it is known that Apple limits both hardware and software on its products to force consumers to pay the “Apple Idiot Tax”. There is no freedom whatsoever in these products, true gilded cages. Thank you, but I don’t need it. Software and hardware freedom are more important.
I didn’t claim that Apple is doing anything to be “generous”. That seems like it’s moving the goal posts. Say, are other PC manufacturers doing things out of generosity? Which ones?
Even the M2 and M3 Macs are a good value if you want the things they’re good at. For just a few hundred more, no other machine has the thermal management or battery life. Very few have the same build quality or displays. If you’re using it for real professional work, even just hours of typing and reading, paying a few extra hundred over the course of years for these features is hardly a “scam”.
You didn’t elaborate on your “spyware” claim. Was that a lie? And now you claim it’s “known” that Apple limits hardware and software. Can you elaborate?
MacBooks do have excellent screens, software integration and everything else, that’s a fact and I don’t take that away from Apple. But the problem is that it’s not worth paying for this in exchange for a system that is completely linked to your Apple ID, tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides. Privacy and freedom are worth more. If you can’t check the source code you can’t trust what Apple says, they can lie for their own interests. Have you ever read Apple’s privacy policy regarding Apple ID, for example? If not, I recommend it.
What you said got me worried, so I looked into the claim that it is “tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides”. That’s a convincing concern, and you’ve changed my mind on this. I don’t see any evidence that they’re doing anything close to this level of tracking — the main thing they seem to track is your Mac App Store usage — but they may have the potential to do so in the enshittified future. That gives me pause.
Apple has repeatedly stressed that they’re privacy focused in the past, while a major departure from that could happen absolutely it feels a bit like borrowing trouble to assume it will happen soon. Google is an advertising company first, microsoft is just a mess, but Apple is a luxury hardware producer, they have minimal reason to damange their reputation in a way that would make those sorts of consumers upset.
Please note that I’m not saying it’s impossible just unlikely in the near future
That assessment sounds right. I think we just need to stay vigilant as consumers. We have defeasible reason to trust Apple right now. But we’ve seen, especially recently, what happens when we let corporations take advantage of that hard earned trust for short term gain.
When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).
That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.
They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad
Is that important for a professional laptop? I mean, if you use it for work every day, you probably want a screen that is at least 27 inches, preferably two. It should be capable of adjusting its height for better ergonomics.
One of the features they highlighted is is the built in display has very similar specs to their 6K 32" professional display (which, by the way, costs more than this laptop). So when you’re not working at your desk you’ll still have a great display (and why are you buying a laptop unless you occasionally work away from your desk?)
Both have a peak brightness is 1600 nits (a Dell XPS will only do ~600 nits and that’s brighter than most laptops).
Both have 100% P3 color gamut (Dell XPS only gets to 90% - so it just can’t display some standard colors)
even though it’s an LCD, black levels are better than a lot of OLED laptops
contrast is also excellent
120hz refresh rate, which is better than their desktop display (that only runs at 60Hz. Same as the Dell XPS)
245 dpi (again, slightly better than 218 dpi on the desktop display, although you sit further away from a desktop… Dell XPS is 169 dpi)
I love Dell displays, I’ve got two on my desk. But even the Dell displays that cost thousands of dollars are not as good as Apple displays.
The bloatware really isn’t an arguement because it takes all of 30 seconds to uninstall it all with a script that you get off GitHub. Yeah it’s annoying and it shouldn’t be there but it’s not exactly going to alter my purchase decision.
The M1’s ok value for money, but the problem is invariably you’ll want to do more and more complex things over the lifetime of the device, (if only because basic software has become more demanding), while it might be fine at first it tends to get in the way 4 or 5 years down the line. You can pay ever so slightly more money and future proof your device.
But I suppose if you’re buying Apple you’re probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don’t understand why because it’s not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it’s got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
But I suppose if you’re buying Apple you’re probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don’t understand why because it’s not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it’s got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
I think you’re basing your general estimation of the Apple customer on the iPhone customer a bit too heavily. E.g., I have never had an iPhone and wouldn’t ever consider buying one, considering how locked down and overpriced it is, and how competitive Android is as an alternative OS.
Meanwhile, I’ve been on MacOS for something like 7 or so years and cannot look back, for everyday computing needs. I have to use Windows occasionally on work machines and I cannot emphasise enough how much of an absolute chore it is. Endless errors, inconsistent UX, slow (even on good hardware), etc. It is by contrast just a painful experience at this point.
And one of the reasons people buy MacBooks, myself included, is to have longevity, not to refresh it after a year (that’s insane). It’s a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later. My partner has a MacBook bought in 2014 and it still handles everyday tasks very well.
It’s a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later.
I think you missed my point.
You want to keep laptops for ages regardless of what OS it was it runs (really not sure how that would have any bearing on spec fall off), but the MacBook M1 is only competitive now, but it won’t be competitive in 4 to 5 years. The chip is good for its power consumption but it isn’t a particularly high performance chip in terms of raw numbers. But the laptop costs as if it is a high performance chip.
There’s no such thing as a Windows laptop you just buy a laptop and that’s the specs you get so not quite sure what you’re comparing the MacBook too.
“Unparalleled”, huh? So I’m sure gamers have fully embraced Apple hardware because it’s objectively better, correct? You surely have links to benchmarks of Apple devices beating the pants off PCs… Right??
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Just upgrade the RAM yourself.
Oh wait, you can’t because it’s 2023 and it’s become inexplicably acceptable to solder it to the motherboard.
Not even soldered, it’s part of the CPU/GPU die now.
Ah yes, it’s the SSD that’s soldered.
Just 300 of your English pounds to upgrade from 512GB to 1TB.
Meanwhile, a 2TB drive at PS5 speeds is under £100.
For unupgradable kit, the pricing is grotesque.
Apple has put a lot of effort into (successfully) creating a customer-base that thinks overpriced goods and different colored texts make them in a special club, I’m not surprised that an exec thought this excuse would fly
It’s a bit more complex than that (and you probably know it).
When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board. Their UX is excellent. Their support is good. Things work well, applications are easy to use and pretty stable and well built. And if they violate your privacy like the others, at least they don’t make the open-bar sale of your data their fucking business model (wink wink Google).
Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.
I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore. Nor the urge to do it. I need things to work out of the box in a predictable way. I don’t want a digital mental load. Just a simple UX, consistency across my devices and good apps (and no Google, fuck Google). Something I wouldn’t have with an Android + PC setup. :)
The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it. Neither the Apple nor the Google/Microsoft environments are satisfactory. Not even speaking of Linux and FOSS. We must aim higher.
I’m gonna have to argue against a few of these points:
Consistent: yes. Every Apple device leverages a functionally very similar UI. That said, the experience is, in my opinion, not very coherent or well thought out. Especially if you are attempting to leverage their technology from the standpoint of someone like a Linux power user. The default user experience is frustratingly warped around the idea that the end user is an idiot who has no idea how to use a terminal and who only wants access to the default applications provided with the OS.
Things work…okay. But try installing, uninstalling, and then reinstalling a MySQL DB on a macbook and then spend an hour figuring out why your installation is broken. Admittedly, that’s because you’re probably installing it with Homebrew, but that’s the other point: if you want to do anything of value on it, you have to use a third party application like Homebrew to do it. The fact that you have to install and leverage a third party package manager is unhinged for an ecosystem where everything is so “bundled” together by default.
I guess the ultimate perspective is one in which you have to be happy surrendering control over so much to Apple. But then again, you could also just install EndeavorOS with KDE Plasma or any given flavor of Debian distribution with any DE of your choice, install KDE Connect on your PC and phone, and get 95 percent of the experience Apple offers right out of the box, with about 100x the control over your system.
I don’t know of anyone who would describe themselves as a hardcore “PC/Linux user,” or what this means to you. I’m assuming by PC you mean Windows. But people who are really into Linux generally don’t like MacOS or Windows, and typically for all the same reasons. I tolerate a Windows machine for video game purposes, but if I had to use it for work I’d immediately install Virtualbox and work out of a Linux VM. For the people who are really into Linux, the management of the different parts of it is, while sometimes a pain in the ass, also part of the fun. It’s the innate challenge of something that can only be mastered by technical proficiency. If that’s not for you, totally fine.
It’s less argument and more of a general negative sentiment people hold towards Apple product advocates. You can look up the phenomenon of “green bubble discrimination.” It’s a vicious cycle in which the ecosystem works seamlessly for people who are a part of it, but Apple intentionally makes leaving that ecosystem difficult and intentionally draws attention to those who interact with the people inside of it who are not part of it. Apple products also often are associated with a higher price tag: they’re status symbols as much as they are functional tools. People recognize a 2000 dollar Macbook instantly. Only a few people might recognize a comparably priced Thinkpad. In a lot of cases, they’ll just assume the Macbook was expensive and the non-Macbook was cheap. And you might say, “yeah, but that’s because of people, not because of Mac.” But it would be a lie to say that Apple isn’t a company intensely invested in brand recognition and that it doesn’t know it actively profits from these perceptions.
Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)
You are right and make good points. But you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.
(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)
Wow. Talk about coincidences…
I’m a dumbass and if I can do it anyone can. But, yes, technology is a daunting thing to most people. Intuition and experience go far. That said, it’s literally easier today than it ever has been. You put in the installation usb, click next a whole bunch, reboot, and you have a working machine. Is it sometimes more complicated than that and you have to do BIOS/UEFI bullshit? Sure, but past that hurdle it’s smooth sailing.
Ah, the joys of rolling release distros. Endeavor has been stable for me so far. I’m running it on an X1 Thinkpad. Generally works more reliably than my own vanilla arch installs and more low profile tiling window managers. I’ve found myself sticking to KDE Plasma for a DE because it’s so consistent and has enough features to keep me happy without having to spend all my time fine tuning my own UX, which I just don’t care about. My realization has been that arch distros are best suited for machines running integrated graphics and popular DEs, rather than ones with separate cards and more niche or highly customizable DEs. Prevents you from having to futs about with things like Optimus, with graphics drivers being the primary cause of headaches for that distro, per my experience. That said, I used to run an old Acer laptop with arch and a tiling window manager called qtile. Qtile was great, but every other update completely altered the logic and structure of how it read the config file for it, so the damn thing broke constantly. I’m like…just decide how you want the config to look and keep that. Or at least allow for backwards compatibility. But they didn’t.
Yea sorry but I disagree with the vast majority of things you said. Consistent, coherent, and well thought out experiences are pretty par for the course at this point, regardless of what flagship phone company you’re buying from. The UX is great for people who grow up with the UX, just like android UX is great for people who grow up with it. Android users who switch to Apple generally think Apple’s UX is dogshit, and vice versa. The UX argument is trash and the reality of it is that people just think whatever UX they’re used to is the more intuitive one. Support is pretty much the same in my experience between the two, and I have an android personal phone and an apple work phone. The major difference is the image that Apple support airs is better. The vast majority of popular Android applications are just as stable and usable as Apple apps, and the ones that aren’t are often niche enough that similar apps aren’t even on the apple appstore. So it’s a question of basically the same service for most apps, and then either no service or degraded service for lesser apps.
The one thing they have over android is the security argument, which is fair to an extent, but not this bulwark that a lot of people like to pretend it is. The Fappening, for example, still got plenty of explicit images from Apple phones.
All in all, apple is an advertising company first, and a tech company second, with admittedly improved security, but also admittedly security that isn’t good enough to justify the price hike.
I mean, the NAND chips can be replaced fairly effectively if you know what you’re doing
Actually no. There’s some pairing trickery going on on the SoC level, so if you change the NAND chips by higher capacity ones without apple’s special sauce, you’ll just get an unbootsble system
And paging in & out of RAM frequently is probably one of the quickest ways to wear out the NAND.
Put it all together and you have a system that breaks itself and can’t be repaired. The less RAM you buy the quicker the NAND will break.
I was under the impression that had been solved by third parties? Or is chip cloning not enough?
Unbelievable …
It’s not “inexplicable”.
DIMM mounting brackets introduce significant limitations to maximum bandwidth. SOC RAM offers huge benefits in bandwidth improvement and latency reduction. Memory bandwidth on the M2 Max is 400GB/second, compared to a max of 64GB/sec for DDR5 DIMMs.
It may not be optimizing for the compute problem that you have, and that’s fine. But it’s definitely optimizing for compute problems that Apple believes to be high priority for its customers.
I switched back to Apple recently, but used to sell them.
1 week before Bootcamp was released, I was selling Apple gear, and I showed a sales manager who was visiting how we got Windows running on the new Intel Mac Mini, and explained how this was great, because it was a great transition technology
In front of customers, as I was explaining, he basically called me an idiot, and said “why would anyone want to run windows on a mac”.
A week or so later, bootcamp was released, and he was back… He was now using the arguments I made a week early as a template for bragging about bootcamp to us and explaining the benefits. No apologies for any of the previous discussion.
They make decent products otherwise, and management doesn’t even need to act like wankers or be deceptive either
I only now using Apple again because Microsoft has finally pushed me over the edge with windows (literally, when they started hijacking my chrome tabs EVERY bootup, and opening Edge automatically), and the fact my Xbox Series X wouldn’t even play remote on Windows (their own OS)
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Absolutely agree. Unfortunately, Apple attracts the kind of idiots too who think they know what they’re talking about too. When I was selling them, I had a customer tell another that Macs can’t get viruses as I was talking to them.
I used a lot of Linux in the past too (everything from playing unreal tournament on Gentoo in 3DFX days to Ubuntu more recently), and unfortunately, in the past Linux tended to also attract the upstuck crowd too.
But, slowly, the LInux culture does seem to be changing. But, we still regularly see people argue about things like SystemD vs Init Scripts (and anyone who has ever written a Init script knows exactly what a pile of crap they are to write) and Pulseaudio vs AlSA/OSS/ESOUND/ETC (whereas, any old school user also remembers the pain of sound servers conflicting with each other). Linux does finally appear to be on the right path to improving things, improve interoperability and the general common sense crowd finally seems to be drowning others out (and new technologies like Wayland or Pipewire are no longer getting heavy blowback). It may also be because Linux developers these days tend to be a lot better at communicating the benefits (Compiz was another case where the benefits were well communicated).
There’s a lot of things honestly Apple should be fixing
Why did you decide to go back to Apple instead of giving Linux a try? It’s free so it literally would have cost nothing to try, and you could keep your other OS(s).
Good grief, I had a lady behind the counter try to berate me onto the store’s rewards card and she wasn’t as pushy as this comment.
It’s pushy to ask why someone made a large purchase when there’s a free alternative they might not have tried that they may or may not like better? Unlike buying an Apple product, it takes little effort and no cost to just boot up Linux and give it a shot. Some people won’t like it and that’s fine. It’d be pushy to say you will like it better, which is not what I said.
I used to use Linux exclusively (I was actually the top poster on a few major Linux news sites, and my linux project once got published in LinuxWorld Magazine).
Whilst it has certainly gotten better, I still feel some parts of linux need refining. Also, one thing both Microsoft and Apple do have is available integration of mobile apps… I thought Apple could do both via Parallels (android in windows, iPhone in MacOS), but turns out Android in Windows on parallels won’t work.
For the type of development i do, windows and macos are still the best options unfortunately too. If Linux had more seamless mobile app integration, I probably would have highly considered it to be honest
By mobile app integration, do you mean a connection between your mobile phone and your computer? KDE Connect is pretty good from my experience. It has more features than the Windows alternative at least (and I think there’s even a Windows version oddly enough).
If you mean running a mobile app in the system, I have no experience with that.
Running mobile apps on computer. It’s really the one use case Apple does extremely well, and it’s a pity because Linux could actually do it well if distros sorted themselves out
My GeoTIFFs do not agree.
Pairing a chip this capable with just 8GB of shared memory is also just a waste of good silicon. Which makes the price all the more insulting to me.
Like, this is the equivalent of Usain Bolt losing one of his legs
“His one leg is still more capable than regular person’s two legs”
That is exactly what Apple would say, isn’t it
The thing is even if that were true, which it isn’t, I’d still prefer him with two legs. Especially if I’m paying the amount of money I would normally pay for 50 legs.
Somewhat stretching the analogy there
Your analogy is looking a bit leggy at this point.
They could just sell appropriately specced computers and make absolute bank like they do anyway, but nooo, that would be too nice of them.
I don’t necessarily even begrudge them a profit margin on RAM. Sure it’s kind of a scam but also I guess it’s just the price you pay for convenience. If you want to better price you upgrade the RAM yourself (assuming that was actually possible).
But the markup they have on RAM isn’t reasonable it’s totally insane.
If you went to McDonald’s and cheeseburger was $0.99 and then a cheeseburger with extra cheese was $2 do you think was something was up but that’s essentially what Apple are doing. Cheese does not cost $1.99, you are literally almost doubling the price for a subcomponent
Apple fans have a very different definition of the word convenience than I do, then.
It’s so annoying. They have the whole design industry by their balls with their great displays and perfect colour management in MacOS.
Putting more RAM in those models, or just cutting the lower-end models out entirely would do them no harm at all.
It’s always nice to have as many legs as possible. I love legs
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https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
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The Apple M series is not ARM based. It’s Apple’s own RISC architecture. They get their performance in part from the proximity of the RAM to the GPU, yes. But not only. Contrary to ARM that has become quite bloated after decades of building upon the same instruction set (and adding new instructions to drive adoption even if that’s contrary to RISC’s philosophy), the M series has started anew with no technological debt. Also Apple controls both the hardware to the software, as well as the languages and frameworks used by third party developers for their platform. They therefore have 100% compatibility between their chips’ instruction set, their system and third party apps. That allows them to make CPUs with excellent efficiency. Not to mention that speculative execution, a big driver of performance nowadays, works better on RISC where all the instructions have the same size.
You are right that they do not cater to power users who need a LOT of power though. But 95% of the users don’t care, they want long battery life, light and silent devices. Sales of desktop PCs have been falling for more than a decade now, as have the investments made in CISC architectures. People don’t want them anymore. With the growing number of manufacturers announcing their adoption of the new open-source RISC-V architecture I am curious to see what the future of Intel and AMD is. Especially with China pouring billions into building their own silicon supply chain. The next decade is going to be very interesting. :)
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Interesting, I thought they had ditched the ARM license completely, my mistake.
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The whole “Apple products are great because they control both software and hardware” always made about as much sense to me as someone claiming “this product is secure because we invented our own secret encryption”.
Here’s an example for that: Apple needed to ship an x86_64 emulator for the transition, but that’s slow and thus make the new machines appear much slower than their older Intel-based ones. So, what they did was to come up with their own private instructions that an emulator needs to greatly speed up its task and added them to the chip. Now, most people don’t even know whether they run native or emulated programs, because the difference in performance is so minimal.
Very confident it is ARM based.
M1s through M3s run ARMv8-A instructions. They’re ARM chips.
What you might be thinking of is that Apple has an architectural license, that is, they are allowed to implement their own logic to implement the ARM instruction set, not just permission to etch existing designs into silicon. Qualcomm, NVidia, Samsung, AMD, Intel, all hold such a license. How much use they actually make of that is a different question, e.g. AMD doesn’t currently ship any ARM designs of their own I think and the platform processor that comes in every Ryzen etc. is a single “barely not a microprocessor” (Cortex A5) core straight off ARM’s design shelves, K12 never made it to the market.
You’re right about the future being RISC-V, though, ARM pretty much fucked themselves with that Qualcomm debacle. Android and android apps by and large don’t care what architecture they run on, RISC-V already pretty much ate the microcontroller market (unless you need backward compatibility for some reason, heck, there’s still new Z80s getting etched) and android devices are a real good spot to grow. Still going to take a hot while before RISC-V appears on the desktop proper, though – performance-wise server loads will be first, and sitting in front of it office thin clients will be first. Maybe, maybe, GPUs. That’d certainly be interesting, the GPU being simply vector cores with a slim insn extension for some specialised functionality.
Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if/when Microsoft is going to hop on the RISC train. They did a crap job trying themselves at a ARM version a few years back and gave up. A RISC Surface with a compatible Windows 13 and proper binary translator (like Apple did with Rosetta) would shake the PC market real good!
the mac pro is a terrible deal even compared to their own mac studio. It has the same specs but for almost $1000 extra. Yes, the cheese grater aluminum case is cool, but $1000 cool?
When you’re nearing the terabytes range of RAM you should consider moving your workload to a server anyway.
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Yeah, I gave Apple a try over the last two years, largely because I was annoyed with Google and wanted to ditch Android. I’ve been fed up since about 6 months in, but gave it some more time, which led to an eventual waiting game to get the replacements I want.
I just picked up a Thinkpad P14s g4 AMD with a 7840u, 64GB of RAM, and a 3 year onsite warranty for $1270 after taxes. I added a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro for another $270. I can’t imagine spending more than that and only getting 8GB RAM (and less warranty), which is what I have assigned to the GPU. Plus I get to run Linux, which I really didn’t realize how much MacOS would leave me wanting.
The thing I’ll miss is the iPhone 13 Mini size. I found iOS to be absolute trash, but there’s just not an Android phone that’s a reasonable size. But at least I can run Calyx/Graphene on a Pixel and get a decent OS without spying.
I do like the M1 MBA form factor, too, but I’ll grab the Thinkpad X13s successor for portability and get a better keyboard. I don’t need top end performance out of that, I really just want battery life and passive cooling.
And don’t even get me started on the overpriced mess that are the Airpods Max. I much prefer the Audeze Maxwell and Sennheiser Momentum 4 I replaced them with.
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[rant]
I think this is one of those words which has lost its meaning in the personal computer world. What are people doing with computers these days? Every single technology reviewer is, well, a reviewer - a journalist. The heaviest workload that computer will ever see is Photoshop, and 98% of the time will be spent in word processing at 200 words per minute or on a web browser. A mid-level phone from 2016 can do pretty much all of that work without skipping a beat. That’s “professional” work these days.
The heavy loads Macs are benchmarked to lift are usually video processing. Which, don’t get me wrong, is compute intensive - but modern CPU designers have recognized that they can’t lift that load in general purpose registers, so all modern chips have secondary pipelines which are essentially embedded ASICs optimized for very specific tasks. Video codecs are now, effectively, hardcoded onto the chips. Phone chips running at <3W TDP are encoding 8K60 in realtime and the cheapest i series Intel x64 chips are transcoding a dozen 4K60 streams while the main CPU is idle 80% of the time.
Yes, I get bent out of shape a bit over the “professional” workload claims because I work in an engineering field. I run finite elements models and, while sparce matrix solutions have gotten faster over the years, it’s still a CPU intensive process and general (non video) matrix operations aren’t really gaining all that much speed. Worse, I work in an industry with large, complex 2D files (PDFs with hundreds of 100MP images and overlain vector graphics) and the speed of rendering hasn’t appreciably changed in several years because there’s no pipeline optimization for it. People out there doing CFD and technical 3D modeling as well as other general compute-intensive tasks on what we used to call “workstations” are the professional applications which need real computational speed - and they’re/we’re just getting speed ratio improvements and the square root of the number of cores, when the software can even parallelize at all. All these manufacturers can miss me with the “professional” workloads of people surfing the web and doing word processing.
[\rant]
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Indeed! It makes the benchmarks that much more disingenuous since pros will end up CPU crunching. I find video production tedious (it’s a skill issue/PEBKAC, really) so I usually just let the GPU (nvenc) do it to save time. ;-)
I can’t remember who it is but somebody is already doing this. But it’s primarily marketed as an AI training chip. So basically only Microsoft and Google are able to buy them, even if you had the money, there isn’t any stock left.
Seems fair, you pay 1000 for the logo and 600 for the hardware.
It’s a very nice logo. And it lights up. Hard to argue with their pricing, really.
It’s actually just the display backlight which is why I had to cover it with aluminium tape instead of just disconnecting the wire. Not only don’t I want an ad on my computer I especially don’t want an illuminated one.
Apple laptops and gaming headphones, keeping it classy
It actually doesn’t light up anymore…
For $375 you can get an iFlashlight to point at the logo
Ordered the iFleshlight. Looking forward to seeing the jealous looks I get at the coffee shop.
Lol. My personal iMac has 32GB, and I’m happy with it. My POS work MBP has only 8GB, and I wanna frisbee the fucken thing out the window pretty much every day.
My research disproves this clown’s hypothesis.
If I wasn’t so broke, my 8GB MBP would enter the frisbee competition…
Instead I feel it’s the opposite because that memory is shared with the GPU. So if you’re gaming even with some old game, it’s like having 4gb for the system and 4gb to the GPU. They might claim that their scheduler is magic and can predict memory usage with perfect accuracy but still, it would be like 6+2 GB. If a game has heavy textures they will steal memory from the system. Maybe you want to have a browser for watching a tutorial on YouTube during gaming, or a chat. That’s another 1-2 gb stolen from the CPU and GPU.
Their pricing for the ram is ridiculous, they’re charging $300 for just 8gb of additional memory! We’re not in the 2010s anymore!
The most expensive 8GB DDR5 stick I can find on Amazon is about us$35. There are 64GB sets that are under us$200!
Apple should be ashamed.
Or five times that amount if you’re running Chrome
8GB for this price in 2023 is a SCAM. All Apple devices are a SCAM. Many pay small fortunes for luxurious devices full of spyware and which they have absolutely no control over. It’s insane. They like to be chained in their golden shackles.
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Just an example: If Apple simply wants to turn your iPhone into a brick, it can do that and there is no one who can reverse it.
Um. No they can’t. The class action lawyers would have a field day with that.
They already do so with apps.
If Apple deems the app too old, then it won’t be compatible and is as useful as a brick.
You know I have software on my PC old enough I can’t run it even in compatibility mode, I’d need to spin up a VM to run it or a pseudoVM like DOSBox, it’s not unheard of it’s not even uncommon.
they have the power to do it, is what I’m saying
I don’t trust MacOS, its proprietary code obviously hides evil spying and control functions over the user. Apple has always been an enemy of the free software community because it is not in favor of its loyal customers but only its greedy shareholders. There is no balance, Apple has always adopted anti-competitive measures. That’s just to say the least.
It took the EU legislation to force them adapt USB 3 charger port. Their consumer base are their cows.
Exactly lol
It’s not even USB 3 it’s USB 2 delivered via USB-C. Because that’s something everybody wants isn’t it, slow charging on a modern standard that should be faster and indeed is faster on every other budget Android phone.
And even though they have USB 3 ports, it’s not even a proper USB 3 port as the lower-end models only support USB 2 speeds (480Mbps max)!
USB 2.0 in 2023 LOL LOL LOL LOL
Lightning was also 480Mbps so I wonder if they just changed the port but kept most of the internals the same
They claim that the die that they use for the M1 chip doesn’t support USB 3 standards but the die that they use for the M1 Pro chip does.
Which is probably true, but they also made the chip so it’s not much of a defence.
yeah, I forgot about that, it’s a USB-C type port.
Apple is one of the largest contributors to open source software in the world and they’ve been a major contributor to open source since the early 1980’s. Yes, they have closed source software too… but it’s all built on an open foundation and they give a lot back to the open source community.
LLVM for example, was a small project nobody had ever heard of in 2005, when Apple hired the university student who created it, gave him an essentially unlimited budget to hire a team of more people, and fast forward almost two decades it’s by far the best compiler in the world used by both modern languages (Rust/Swift/etc) and old languages (C, JavaScript, Fortran…) and it’s still not controlled in any way by Apple. The uni student they hired was Chris Lattner, he is still president of LLVM now even though he’s moved on (currently CEO of an AI startup called Modular AI).
Well, look at the annual contribution that Apple makes to the BSD team and see that Apple uses several open source software in its products but with minimal financial contribution. Even more so for a company of this size. Apple only “donates” when it is in its interest that such software is ready for it to use.
True. Sometimes I look the specs and prices of Apple devices while visiting large electronic stores. I don’t understand how people who aren’t rich can rationalize buying an Apple device. While it’s true that Windows has become increasingly plagued by invasive ads recently, and macOS seems like the only alternative for many, this issue is relatively recent. On the other hand, MacBooks have been overpriced for years.
I bought a PC the other day and it only had 6 gigabytes of RAM which is pathetic for what I paid for it but there you go. The thing is for a fraction of the price Apple are asking to upgrade it to 16, I upgraded it to 32 gig.
I honestly think I could upgrade it to 64 and still come in under the Apple price. They’re charging something like a 300% markup on commercially available RAM, it’s ridiculous.
On storage, the markup is about 2000%.
And on RAM if we compare to DDR5 (not totally fair because of how Apple’s unified memory works), it’s about 800% marked up.
That’s too simplistic. For example, the entry level M1 MacBook Air is hands down one of the best value laptops. It’s very hard to find anything nearly as good for the price.
On the high end, yeah you can save $250-400 buying a similarly specced HP Envy or Acer Swift or something. These are totally respectable with more ports, but they have 2/3rd the battery life, worse displays, and tons of bloatware. Does that make them “not a scam”?
(I’m actually not sure what “spyware” you’re referring to, especially compared to Windows and Chromebooks.)
I 'm not refering to Windows or ChromeOS ( that are full of spyware too ) . The first generation of Mac M1 had a reasonably more “accessible” price precisely to encourage users to migrate to ARM technology and consequently also encourage developers to port their software, and not because Apple was generous. Far from it.Everything Apple does in the short or long term is to benefit itself.
And not to mention that it is known that Apple limits both hardware and software on its products to force consumers to pay the “Apple Idiot Tax”. There is no freedom whatsoever in these products, true gilded cages. Thank you, but I don’t need it. Software and hardware freedom are more important.
I didn’t claim that Apple is doing anything to be “generous”. That seems like it’s moving the goal posts. Say, are other PC manufacturers doing things out of generosity? Which ones?
Even the M2 and M3 Macs are a good value if you want the things they’re good at. For just a few hundred more, no other machine has the thermal management or battery life. Very few have the same build quality or displays. If you’re using it for real professional work, even just hours of typing and reading, paying a few extra hundred over the course of years for these features is hardly a “scam”.
You didn’t elaborate on your “spyware” claim. Was that a lie? And now you claim it’s “known” that Apple limits hardware and software. Can you elaborate?
MacBooks do have excellent screens, software integration and everything else, that’s a fact and I don’t take that away from Apple. But the problem is that it’s not worth paying for this in exchange for a system that is completely linked to your Apple ID, tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides. Privacy and freedom are worth more. If you can’t check the source code you can’t trust what Apple says, they can lie for their own interests. Have you ever read Apple’s privacy policy regarding Apple ID, for example? If not, I recommend it.
I think that decision makes sense.
What you said got me worried, so I looked into the claim that it is “tracking all your behavior for advertising purposes and whatever else Apple decides”. That’s a convincing concern, and you’ve changed my mind on this. I don’t see any evidence that they’re doing anything close to this level of tracking — the main thing they seem to track is your Mac App Store usage — but they may have the potential to do so in the enshittified future. That gives me pause.
Apple has repeatedly stressed that they’re privacy focused in the past, while a major departure from that could happen absolutely it feels a bit like borrowing trouble to assume it will happen soon. Google is an advertising company first, microsoft is just a mess, but Apple is a luxury hardware producer, they have minimal reason to damange their reputation in a way that would make those sorts of consumers upset.
Please note that I’m not saying it’s impossible just unlikely in the near future
That assessment sounds right. I think we just need to stay vigilant as consumers. We have defeasible reason to trust Apple right now. But we’ve seen, especially recently, what happens when we let corporations take advantage of that hard earned trust for short term gain.
When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).
That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.
I agree with that. I think there are cheaper laptops, where you can spend less to get less. Not everyone needs a metal body and all day battery life.
Is that important for a professional laptop? I mean, if you use it for work every day, you probably want a screen that is at least 27 inches, preferably two. It should be capable of adjusting its height for better ergonomics.
If you work in something that involves graphic design or imaging absolutely
One of the features they highlighted is is the built in display has very similar specs to their 6K 32" professional display (which, by the way, costs more than this laptop). So when you’re not working at your desk you’ll still have a great display (and why are you buying a laptop unless you occasionally work away from your desk?)
I love Dell displays, I’ve got two on my desk. But even the Dell displays that cost thousands of dollars are not as good as Apple displays.
The bloatware really isn’t an arguement because it takes all of 30 seconds to uninstall it all with a script that you get off GitHub. Yeah it’s annoying and it shouldn’t be there but it’s not exactly going to alter my purchase decision.
The M1’s ok value for money, but the problem is invariably you’ll want to do more and more complex things over the lifetime of the device, (if only because basic software has become more demanding), while it might be fine at first it tends to get in the way 4 or 5 years down the line. You can pay ever so slightly more money and future proof your device.
But I suppose if you’re buying Apple you’re probably going to buy a new device every year anyway. Never understood the mentality personally.
My cousin gets the new iPhone every single year, and he was up for it at midnight as well, I don’t understand why because it’s not better in any noticeable sense then it was last year, it’s got a good screen and a nice camera but so did the model 3 years ago. Apple customers are just weird.
I think you’re basing your general estimation of the Apple customer on the iPhone customer a bit too heavily. E.g., I have never had an iPhone and wouldn’t ever consider buying one, considering how locked down and overpriced it is, and how competitive Android is as an alternative OS.
Meanwhile, I’ve been on MacOS for something like 7 or so years and cannot look back, for everyday computing needs. I have to use Windows occasionally on work machines and I cannot emphasise enough how much of an absolute chore it is. Endless errors, inconsistent UX, slow (even on good hardware), etc. It is by contrast just a painful experience at this point.
And one of the reasons people buy MacBooks, myself included, is to have longevity, not to refresh it after a year (that’s insane). It’s a false economy buying a Windows laptop for most people, because you absolutely do need to upgrade sooner rather than later. My partner has a MacBook bought in 2014 and it still handles everyday tasks very well.
I think you missed my point.
You want to keep laptops for ages regardless of what OS it was it runs (really not sure how that would have any bearing on spec fall off), but the MacBook M1 is only competitive now, but it won’t be competitive in 4 to 5 years. The chip is good for its power consumption but it isn’t a particularly high performance chip in terms of raw numbers. But the laptop costs as if it is a high performance chip.
There’s no such thing as a Windows laptop you just buy a laptop and that’s the specs you get so not quite sure what you’re comparing the MacBook too.
Macrumors just released an article talking about how the 8gb is a bottleneck in the new M3 models lol
Even if it was like 16GB on a PC still not worth $1.6k
Especially when 16g is something like $50.
At consumer prices. There’s no way Apple doesn’t pay wholesale rates for memory.
they have the memory controllers built into their processors now. So adding memory is even cheaper, it just takes the modules themselves
With Apple’s new iBits™ the 0s are so much rounder and the 1s are so smooth and shiny that they’re worth at least twice as much as regular bits.
I can’t wait for my iBits. Also the fact that iBytes have ten iBits is revolutionary. 25% more computing power in each iByte!
It’s actually about the bandwidth: https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/11/how-unified-memory-blows-the-socs-off-the-m1-macs/
The bandwidth provided by unified memory is just unparalleled because of the tightly integrated components found on Apple Silicon.
“Unparalleled”, huh? So I’m sure gamers have fully embraced Apple hardware because it’s objectively better, correct? You surely have links to benchmarks of Apple devices beating the pants off PCs… Right??
Emulators disagree.
Introducing the new Apple MagicRAM©™!
Tell that to Google Chrome