The price hikes drove me back to windows. If I'm paying those prices I may as well be able to play games with my kid again. I see no advantage to using Apple right now outside of the iPhone.
Best of luck getting a good deal for new hardware right now from anyone right now. All hardware pricing negotiations these days start with give us your company credit card, drop your pants and bend over the table.
Unfortunately the price hikes are affecting the entire industry, and it's not just high-end rigs for gaming and local LLMs. Game consoles and even the Raspberry Pi have gone up in price. In fact, Apple was one of the last holdouts; it didn't start raising prices until June.
I paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.
Once you price out similar specs for a Windows gaming build, I don't know how much better you'll be doing, and it won't have unified memory so you'll be "paying twice": once for RAM and again for VRAM.
"exotic" only means you won't find it at Wallmart. Buying a PC with a Strix Halo chip or Core Ultra is not some obscure quest or back alley deal.
On money, being about the same price as a mac is good enough, given the machine will have vastly more versatility and expandability.
It won't resonate as much if you're straight into the "one size fits all" target of Apple machines. I used to have a macbook and an iPad, the iPad being the primary device, and it was an utter pain. Moving to a windows tablet cuts my costs in half while being able to do more things in total.
Those L1 cache specs have to be wrong, right? Bigger L1 on the e core than p core seems like it has to be incorrect (unless the lower clock lets them get away with something?)
When prices go way up on new hardware, it makes prices go up on used hardware too, because people snap up the best possible alternative. Used Mac prices have gone up so much lately that Apple actually increased how much they pay people for trade-ins, which I assume they wouldn't do unless the situation was really dire. I wouldn't expect $200 M4 Minis anytime soon.
Noticing how the M6 has finally doubled the M1's single core performance, nearly six years later. The M1 mini was my first foray into mac computing. I used it as my daily driver until I got the M1 Macbook Pro a year later. Been using that ever since. I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last. I've had no interest in upgrading or buying something else, even though I want to just for pet projects but can't justify the extra cost.
Problem? Aren't they selling like cake because of how good their MacBooks are? Other companies aren't that good and I imagine they don't sell as many laptops as Apple does.
Curious to know how many of these sales are 'corporate purchases' for fleets versus 'personal purchases'. Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product? How many have Lenovo/PC IT-managed work machines and also (choose to) purchase a PC for personal use versus choosing an Apple?
> Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product?
I certainly would, because I demand Linux on all my computers. I can't stand the idea of being forced to sacrifice x% of my disk for things like "Apple Intelligence" or other bloatware that Apple decided I can't remove because it is a "system component." That, plus all the privacy and user control issues posed by an operating system effectively remotely controlled by a third party.
I feel apple is huge mostly in the US, rest of the world apple has a reputation for being overpriced so people have mostly never used a Mac and if you have a lifetime of windows usage switching is jarring.. speaking from experience
Precisely. And using Linux is a joy. A absolutely hate working on MacOS. If Linux was not an option for me, I would most likely crawl back to Windows than use MacOS.
And boy, Limux runs awesomely on Thinkpad. I got one with 32GB RAM, 512 GB SSD for a mere 600 bucks. Works like a charm, perfect for any software development work.
> In most countries without 100% tariffs and outright bans Toyota's sales are in decline because of competition from BYD.
Is because BYD is more reliable or 'just' cheaper?
There are a number of folks for who H/T would be their first pick if not for (a) waitlists and/or (b) price considerations. And there a lot of folks who don't necessarily care if the car will last 10 or 15(+) years because they'll replace it earlier that that, so as long as it's 'good enough' it's fine.
12.5B rmb is like 1.5% of BYD operating revenue. It's nothing. Western brands range from 1-3%. BYD subsidy is pedestrian, ~400 USD per car. Do you think any western brands can compete with BYD if they bumped unit costs by $400, the answer is no.
Also what dumping? They're selling abroad at 2x domestic MRSP, i.e. $10,000s over domestic price, aka fully covers any subsidy. PRC "dumping" is just delulu innumerate cope at this point. The reality is without subsidies PRC struturally make cars for much less than western auto, a few $100 per chasis of subsidies is immaterial.
OPs post was from BYD filings. But parsimonious answer is look at literally every industrial sector PRC involute/value engineered to more and more affordable prices, which they have been doing, for decades, and still remains cheap. Hence entire PRC industry subsidize + dump and take over narrative is mathematically stupid. PRC isn't continuously/ruinously subsidizing global TVs, phones, toy, clothes, machine tools insert whatever category for the last 20+ years in some grand scheme to drive western industry out of business. They are simply good at value engineering, and they have to simply to compete domestically.
Or just do the simple math, if one assume western auto production is somehow competitive with PRC auto if PRC auto simply no subsidies, we are talking about PRC subsidizing each vehicle to tunes of $10000s... PRC made 35m cars last year. For this frankly retarded position to mathematically square, PRC would have to subsidizes ~300B+... aka more than they spend on defense in one sector. The entire position PRC competitive because subsidies is unserious. Even overinflated CSIS study only assumes PRC spend ~250B over 15 years. Like you can come up with the dumbest propaganda numbers on PRC auto subsidies (which CSIS is), and PRC structural production advantage is simply economically unassailable.
In South Africa Toyotas (Hilux in particular) get stolen all the time because they are so reliable (and you get parts throughout Africa). So then you end up making new sales when people replace their stolen cars. One way to get around the problem for them I guess? /s :)
I also use the M1 mini. It replaced my 2009 Mac Pro. Apple didn't always make solid machines, like the crap 2016-2019 MBPs, but now they've gotten it right.
This is why they are pushing into services. Now the devices are (profitable) channels for upselling. Cook was willing to do some of this, but the new guy seems more interested in this.
Unfortunately it degrades a major value prop of using Apple in the first place.
Yeah, my M1 mini with 16GB is great as a daily driver even on Golden Gate. Noticed some slowness recently indexing a huge mail archive, but otherwise I don't even really notice slowdowns.
Their machines have always lasted. I mean, I bought a refurbished Intel Macbook Pro 13" for personal use in 2015, and kept it for 7 years (I did replace the battery with an iFixit kit along the way). I only upgraded because I figured there's no way I would tell people I work with professionally to depend on hardware that old, so in later 2022 I replaced it with a refurbished M1 MBP 13" which I'm still using and have no plans to replace any time soon.
2015 MBP was golden. I held onto that, skipping the whole bad 2016-2019 generation, until replacing it with that $750 M4 MBA deal earlier this year. Only thing is I miss having USB ports.
We really need to move past this USB port garbage, it's holding the whole industry back and there was nothing good about USB A compared to C aside from its prevalence.
It's a thicker port, single orientation and slower. Why you would still want this legacy port is beyond me and it should be a industry wide mandate by now. Very surprised to see it on the Mac Studio this year, just get an adapter/dongle.
I got the M4 mini and then bought a refurbished M1 MacBook air so I could ssh/remote desktop into my mini from the couch. Love that MacBook Air, cost like 200 bucks and is super-fast.
We've been using M2 Pro machines at our workplace and they still are fast, quiet and have long battery life even at ~85 percent of battery life. It would feel wrong to upgrade from these. 10 years ago it would've been a no brainer to upgrade a 2 year old MacBook in a professional setting but nowadays I feel like I could go 5+ years on a single Apple Silicon macbook with how light our workloads seem to be for these chips
> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last
There has always been a healthy used apple market
Part of it is that traditionally new machines take away or invalidate good features like ... replaceable graphics cards, or pcie slots or expandable memory/storage or ports in general...
> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last.
When they can justify it, they will add features to macOS which bog down the older systems. Eventually they will say that older systems just don’t have what it takes to run macOS and stop supporting them
Apple has never had an issue with taking machines that can last out of the market
Maybe just run on an A18Pro instead of one of the M processors. If you're not needing a screen, I think the actual box could be quite small too. Maybe the size of an iPhone. One or two USB ports.
I guess you could build it into a keyboard if you wanted to, but I don't like the apple keyboards so that would be a downside for me.
+1100€ for the 2TB upgrade nowadays, thats not an "Apple tax" anymore thats just straight up robbery. Even a pcie gen5 nvme costs only about 300€, even with todays prices, so 600€ would be quite in line with Apple pricing, but 1100€!? Thats just being a dick.
That would be ~$1,995 today due to inflation. That's basically what the entry-level 14 inch MacBook Pro costs today. You're comparing the Pro to the Air's pricing.
i feel m6 is good for daily tasks and its price is okay compared to m5. where m5 is best for local models because of its unified memory of 64GB but its expensive compared to NVIDIA Geforce RTX 5070Ti. with 64 GB you can fit models where it won't even load in 16GB VRAM.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 21.8 ms ] threadI paid $96 for 32 GB of DDR5 RAM for my Framework 13 laptop back in December 2023. When I checked a few months ago, the same RAM cost around $400; I don't know what prices are like now.
$250 just for 2x8gb DDR5 RAM.
Why wouldn't you choose unified memory if it matters to you ? A central point of Windows/linux is to get the hardware you want.
On money, being about the same price as a mac is good enough, given the machine will have vastly more versatility and expandability.
It won't resonate as much if you're straight into the "one size fits all" target of Apple machines. I used to have a macbook and an iPad, the iPad being the primary device, and it was an utter pain. Moving to a windows tablet cuts my costs in half while being able to do more things in total.
That's par for the course yes. The AI bubble didn't help it was never priced at entry level either.
I got mine the first year it got out, and the laptop (a Z13 with 64gb RAM) was price aligned with the top of the line MBP pro with the same ram.
We'll stream everything, so "computers" will exist in the cloud and users won't have to worry about upgrading their machines.
They'll just pay a monthly fee like for mobile data or whatever, and you just connect via screen.
All these data centers and shit around it (internet, etc.) will be actually useful to every day consumers.
Why should I have to upgrade my GPU every 2-3 years? I should just be able to pay to get 4k streaming top of the line graphics.
And <25ms ping latency will become a human right. Only back water countries will see their people having to suffer loading screens and 150ms+ ping
Curious to know how many of these sales are 'corporate purchases' for fleets versus 'personal purchases'. Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product? How many have Lenovo/PC IT-managed work machines and also (choose to) purchase a PC for personal use versus choosing an Apple?
I certainly would, because I demand Linux on all my computers. I can't stand the idea of being forced to sacrifice x% of my disk for things like "Apple Intelligence" or other bloatware that Apple decided I can't remove because it is a "system component." That, plus all the privacy and user control issues posed by an operating system effectively remotely controlled by a third party.
Global desktop market share for macOS is 15.31% according to https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
Given a choice, I would rather have the Thinkpad at work as well.
Lenovo contribute to Linux, and Apple is relatively hostile.
Look at how they break the GPU driver interfaces, and explain to me how that it isn't hostile.
And boy, Limux runs awesomely on Thinkpad. I got one with 32GB RAM, 512 GB SSD for a mere 600 bucks. Works like a charm, perfect for any software development work.
So do Toyota and Honda, and their sales seems be pretty steady.
For example, sales for the first half of 2026 vs first half of 2025 in Australia show:
Toyota is down 20% BYD is up 68%
Is because BYD is more reliable or 'just' cheaper?
There are a number of folks for who H/T would be their first pick if not for (a) waitlists and/or (b) price considerations. And there a lot of folks who don't necessarily care if the car will last 10 or 15(+) years because they'll replace it earlier that that, so as long as it's 'good enough' it's fine.
If you give any car company that amount of money every year they would be able to undercut the competition and grow their market share too.
When you don't need to make a profit you can afford to dump enough product to kill the competition.
https://eletric-vehicles.com/byd/byd-posts-first-annual-prof...
Also what dumping? They're selling abroad at 2x domestic MRSP, i.e. $10,000s over domestic price, aka fully covers any subsidy. PRC "dumping" is just delulu innumerate cope at this point. The reality is without subsidies PRC struturally make cars for much less than western auto, a few $100 per chasis of subsidies is immaterial.
Or just do the simple math, if one assume western auto production is somehow competitive with PRC auto if PRC auto simply no subsidies, we are talking about PRC subsidizing each vehicle to tunes of $10000s... PRC made 35m cars last year. For this frankly retarded position to mathematically square, PRC would have to subsidizes ~300B+... aka more than they spend on defense in one sector. The entire position PRC competitive because subsidies is unserious. Even overinflated CSIS study only assumes PRC spend ~250B over 15 years. Like you can come up with the dumbest propaganda numbers on PRC auto subsidies (which CSIS is), and PRC structural production advantage is simply economically unassailable.
The rest of the car industry was sleeping on electric, while BYD made it their sole focus. That s why they're now eating everyones lunch.
Unfortunately it degrades a major value prop of using Apple in the first place.
It's a thicker port, single orientation and slower. Why you would still want this legacy port is beyond me and it should be a industry wide mandate by now. Very surprised to see it on the Mac Studio this year, just get an adapter/dongle.
The dongle era sucked then and sucks now. All the minefields of FW chipset era with none of the disclosure on usbC controller du jour.
There has always been a healthy used apple market
Part of it is that traditionally new machines take away or invalidate good features like ... replaceable graphics cards, or pcie slots or expandable memory/storage or ports in general...
When it balloons, it's time to ditch the machine.
No worries, they will be unsupported by the software pretty soon
When they can justify it, they will add features to macOS which bog down the older systems. Eventually they will say that older systems just don’t have what it takes to run macOS and stop supporting them
Apple has never had an issue with taking machines that can last out of the market
See iOS for a great modern example
I guess you could build it into a keyboard if you wanted to, but I don't like the apple keyboards so that would be a downside for me.
My first 'modern' Mac was the 13" 2010 MacBook Pro, and it was $1299. The current Air is $1299. Inflation be damned.
Let's not even go back in time and look at what the PowerBook G4 or PowerBook 5300c cost...