Even if you depreciate at $1000k/year, that's not too bad for a professional tool. It's not worth $0 after 4 years either.
Barring any major fiascos (like past keyboard issues), the 2021 MBP does look built to last. We're in a good spot now in terms of stuff like a great screen (if you don't need constant 120Hz), low-power video decoding, a solid 8-core CPU, and probably even a passable gaming GPU. Should remain very usable even as it's outclassed in subsequent generations.
Now if only I could get Deus Ex: Human Revolution to work on it.
Looks like you are not in the target audience for those machines. The value is absolutely there if you need the CPU to do as much work as possible. As someone who spends a big chunk of my day compiling, a speedup by x2 means I need to wait half as long. And it won’t even toast my lap. The 1K nits screen means I can finally work outside in summer. This is _exactly_ the machine the disgruntled ecosystem has been calling for, for at least 5 years now.
While the 5nm process will certainly yield good AMD CPUs, the iOS/macOS optimizations built into Apple Silicon are hard to match for general-purpose CPUs. And the GPU story looks bad for Nvidia - the Max 32 core GPU uses half the power envelope for almost the same output as the mobile RTX 3080. And afaik the 3080 is already produced on 7nm, so there will be some engineering to do to get there.
Look at a Mobile Workstation class laptop and those are easily 5k+. Those are the ones to compare with the high end MBPs. Not your USD 1500 Windows laptops.
The MBPs are astonishingly good machines, but I agree the price is always forces tough questions about value and fit.
I suspect the lack of a Mini update was in part to buffet purchases of these more expensive laptops. So many people are traveling and commuting less now, cheaper Mini's would have undermined sales of the MBP.
I'm running an XDR Pro Display off a 2018 Intel mini with an eGPU, and going to wait out for presumably a 2022 M2 Mini.
I like the mini in theory but I'd never shell out to buy one. I almost never work just from a desk. With WFH, the average person is likely to lie in bed or couch or work from the kitchen counter and dining table, than they are to work from a proper desktop.
(Not even to mention the fact that you'd need to have/buy a good display and keyboard setup to go with it.)
I was also surprised at how high the maxed out laptops can go in price. From memory, around the 2015 model line the top end would be at around $3000 without the crazy disk options.
There was a rule of the thumb that Apple priced their product at a rough ratio of $2 / day. That would give 4 year for my 2014 laptop, and it mostly did. That would be 5.5 years for the top end 16" laptop, I guess that's reasonable ?
- Mid CPU
- Lowest available discrete GPU
- Max RAM
- 2 TB SSD
RAM was my absolute must have, and to get the same on today's MBP:
- I would have to at least max the CPU
- That’s substantially better GPU than I’d buy otherwise
For the same RAM and storage, the price is almost identical (in fact it might be identical but I don’t feel like digging up my old order to compare such a small difference).
I am disappointed they didn’t move the price down more. And I’m disappointed I have to buy more compute than I care about to get the other specs I want. But it’s clear at least to me this is more value for my money than I paid 2 years ago.
I like the M1, but I could have chosen the 16" intel at the time I bought it, even if it's to switch to the M1 Pro/Max next year for instance.
Have you come across many instances where you wish you had an Intel CPU?
I realize I haven’t looked at the exact price / performance jumps between the releases across MBA and MBP for Intel to Apple Silicon.
I’m curious just how big of a change there was across common metrics.
MSFT is the opposite. So it makes sense it be much slower/harder to get going in this area.
I am always fascinated by seeing how the "core competency" of a company constrains its execution options later in its existence. Sun, for example, really was a 'sales' company first and it couldn't "sell its way" out of the wave of Linux clusters that started displacing its servers. Now as a hardware company it too was let down by Motorola and that was some of the genesis for SPARC much like Apple's move. But as a sales company Sun kept shooting anyone who used their "open" architecture CPU by ruthlessly out selling them.
I'm not sure that's the right perspective. Steve Jobs said in an interview [0] that "Apple views itself as a software company."
But at their core selling hardware is where the money comes from.
I look at Lenovo Thinkpad with Ryzen 5000 CPUs, they are stuck with crappy displays.
Dell has better displays but not the Ryzens CPUs I wanted.
Framework is modular but no Ryzen.
Nothing makes me want to open my wallet.
I’d love almost exactly a MacBook Pro spec with M1Max replaced by Ryzen 5000 series CPU and 64 GiB of memory, and an excellent display. May be that unicorn of achieve will cost as much as your configured MacBook Pro :-(
It runs loud af, fan is constantly pulsing, but it's an alright machine for ~1200eu.
It's now going on ebay to fund the mbp purchase, I want better thermals out of my laptop.
I'm curious, what exactly is this machine missing in your opinion and given the choice, what would you go with other than the recently introduced MacbookPro ?
The last few months have been watershed times for both Apple and Microsoft. Starting with Apple, their developer relations are starting to crumble in a major way. Not only have developers stood up against their highway robbery, but other companies like Microsoft have one-upped them just for the hell of it. Today's presentation was almost completely devoid of any software discussion, which is really what puts the nail in the coffin for me. A 5nm laptop chip will always be more powerful than the 14nm one I've got, but at least my chip runs the software I want. Without a commitment to replacing 32-bit libraries, updating their coreutils or making a package manager developers actually want to use, I think Apple's message is clear: We're pivoting away from the 'Pro' market and heading straight into 'Prosumer'. To their credit, it seems like they've made a fine prosumer laptop.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has usurped their enthusiast community with Windows 11. The strict CPU requirement in particular was a bad move on their behalf, and it's going to leave a lot of their install base out in the cold. While I don't expect a whole lot of consumers to pivot to Linux, I can imagine a lot of developers making the switch. Many devs already use WSL, so they're pretty familiar with Unix systems as-is. The Windows-to-Linux onboarding experience is getting better and better as Wine is continuing to close the gap in compatibility. Especially for the gamer/enthusiast market Microsoft traditionally caters to, the value proposition of using Windows is diminishing by the day. Windows 11 does nothing to change that, and actively impedes your workflow if you're on a Ryzen CPU.
I think for a lot of people's workflow, Linux will be the only thing left that "just works" in a few years time.
I don’t see anything particularly wrong with Apple’s developer relations. You certainly might hope they would give us more than they do, but you always hope for that. Bottom line is, Apple gives us what we really need — a market.
Today’s presentation was almost devoid of discussions of software… because it was about hardware. It’s not like WWDC doesn’t exist. You can hear about Apple’s software as much as you would care to.
“Apple doesn’t care about pros anymore” is a perpetual refrain, but it seems to go through phases of being more true and less true (there are many kinds of pros, so it’s never going to be all true or all false.) We’re in a middle state at the moment, IMO, mainly due to the uncertainly about what the higher end pro Apple silicon story will be. Still, these current laptops look awfully good for many “pros”.
Linux has a lot of nice points and some pretty good distos that are improving all the time, but that’s not near enough to displace Windows or MacOS.
The average consumer is more likely to switch to ChromeOS (which I guess is Linux underneath, for now) than to any Linux distro.
You're also describing Mac with that one. But worse.
You can't release a driver for Mac without Apple's permission. Apple won't allow Nvidia to release drivers for newer cards. Nvidia has stated this on multiple occasions.
Literally what? This isn't WWDC. It was an event for presenting new hardware. There was zero chance of it being software or (especially) developer focused.
And it always follows the announcement of the release at WWDC around July.
Going out on a limb here, but as a firm believer in open systems I think it's fine to buy an M1 Mac to the extent it's guaranteed to run Linux (or OpenBSD, or whatever) without any problems.
System that can't do that are the ones to really avoid.
It is more interesting to me to reflect on the comments from about 5 years ago that "ARM will never be in laptops, its a 'phone' processor."
That statement was both true and ignored the reality that if you wanted to put an ARM processor in a laptop you could add features and design it to work that way. Chip design is expensive of course, and so being a company like Apple really makes it possible to do this sort of thing as a 'risk' venture, but what surprises me is that Apple spent maybe $10B over the years developing an in house ARM design capability (after buying PA Semi) and here it is paying them some huge dividends.
If you compare that to Microsoft's efforts trying to use off the shelf ARM chips in the original Surface and now the Surface RT and you can really see the advantage of having the chip designers and the software designers depending on each other. That was true in the "WinTel" era when Intel and Microsoft were joined at the hip, but it was never the case for ARM CPU vendors who were more concerned about being in the next flagship phone than what ever it was that Microsoft was doing.
What an interesting alternate history if Microsoft decided to develop an in house production chip capability at the same time they decided to get into the hardware business for "real." [1]
[1] Yes, I'm aware they have done custom chips, the pixel/pen processor in the Surface is one such but they haven't really jumped in with both feet like Apple did, and certainly haven't had it front and center as long as Apple has.