Yeah my initial thought was “because people are willing to pay more for it”; I’m happy to hear that that was somewhat the conclusion of the article.

People are irrational, they value things that don’t necessarily cost more to make, and sometimes even the fact that they need to pay extra for it, is in fact why they want it.

I’m reminded of that silly $1000 app in the beginning of the AppStore:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

> People are irrational, they value things that don’t necessarily cost more to make

That’s not irrational. It doesn’t cost any more to make a lemon cake than a chocolate cake but a lemon cake is more valuable to me because I don’t like chocolate. Perfectly rational.

This is clearly irrational. Chocolate cake is way better ...

(otherwise good point)

We’d like to see you make a rational, purely logic-based, and objective line of argumentation to justify why you like lemon cake instead of chocolate cake.

A shot at the why, would be that his digestion system might handle lemon better than chocolate, in combination with aquired taste, like the good memory of eating the first lemon cake at his birthday party and so on.

But objectivly proofing it, would require a very complex bio-chemical anaylsis of his digestion and neurological system as well as a deep psychoanalysis. Interesting research probably, but not necessary for determining that objectivly lemon cake has a higher value to him, because he simply likes it more.

Not sure why you're being so demanding?

Acting against what makes you feel better is rational. I don't think that's controversial.

maybe his nervous system randomly prefer it?

If you're Betty Crocker and only 10% of your customers want lemon cake mix but 80% want and buy chocolate...yes, it does cost more to make lemon cake mix, because you buy chocolate ingredients at nine times the volume you do lemon.

If you're a cake mix company that only sells chocolate cake mix, switching up production to include vanilla has expenses all by itself. You now have to manage extra ingredients in your supply chain, schedule time to switch production and all the overhead and downtime in doing so...and your factory-to-retail logistics chain is now both more complicated and split between the two products.

If you retail cake mixes, why would you dedicate capital, storage, and shelf space to something that sells at one ninth the rate?

Etc.

I don’t understand this comment - the premise was the two items cost the same to make.

Given that premise, it’s still possible to value one less than the other.

Given another premise that wasn’t in the comment… we’ll you can still value one less than the other but so what?

I don't see how not liking chocolate could be by any stretch of the imagination "rational".

You can swap it out for any other preference - that's not the important bit.

In continued good-spirited-conversation - if you get sick every time you eat something containing chocolate, I think it's completely rational to form an aversion to it.

I get pimples!

I don't think that valuing something different from the production cost is irrational.

If I never paid more than production cost + some "reasonable" markup I wouldn't be able to buy a lot of things that I enjoy.

A smart business sells things at roughly the price that people value them. A key job of the business is making that cost them less then the selling price.

This is important in another way, too: by offering almost the same thing at two different prices, consumers get to self-select based on how price sensitive they are.

Since some people are willing to pony up significantly more for the black, they can offer the non-black at a slightly lower cost than they otherwise would, which means they can sell MacBooks to a segment of the market that would otherwise consider them out of reach.

Any time virtually the same thing is offered at different prices, you can either complain that it's unfair one target segment has to pay more... or realise that the flip side of the coin is that less price sensitive people subsidise lower costs for more price sensitive people -- which could seem completely fair depending on ideologies.

If you're a hardcore capitalist you see it as a way for the manufacturer to expand their target market without sacrificing profitability. If you're more on the left you see it as taking from the rich and giving it to the poor, without having to resort to coercion.

I have a minor quibble with the term 'subsidizing', since it is still being sold at a profit. It's just a lower margin, because the point of maximal profit in the lower end of a segmented market is necessarily lower than the point of maximal profit in a non-segmented market. It's not going to go into negative profit (and thus enable the customer to buy it "at a loss" for the business, whereby the business is effectively paying part of the cost of the thing on behalf of the customer) as a result of segmentation. So it's neither costing the business profit, nor is it offering the good at a per unit loss. It -is- offering the good at a lower margin than would make sense in an unsegmented market.

You're right, of course. That was a sloppy choice of words on my part.

You might say this is why the iPhone is missing a telephoto lens rather than missing the ultra-wide lens.

Each lens/sensor theoretically costs a very similar amount of manufacturing cost to include, so theoretically if your goal was to give the customer the best value on a cheaper 2-lens phone, you would want to give them the two most used lenses: the normal wide lens and the telephoto lens.

However, Apple gates the more-desired telephoto lens to the Pro model, because it needs to balance the significant price increase with the reality that there isn't much of a manufacturing cost difference between Pro and non-Pro phones.

So, it's a market segmentation based on some desired features.

I disagree with the idea that there's any sort of a positive "flip side" to this strategy from the customers' perspective. This is how profit is maximized. Apple could sell the iPhone 13 Pro for less money and still make a profit, but they know that customers of certain income brackets will pay over a thousand bucks for a phone.

If the iPhone 13 had a telephoto lens instead of the ultra-wide lens, and the ProMotion display, the iPhone 13 wouldn't cost a dime more to manufacture. In this configuration, there would be very little reason for most people to upgrade to the Pro model.

So the theory is basically that if they were to not segment the market this way, the price point of maximal profitability if they offered only one model would be higher than the price point of maximal profitability of the lower segment(s) achieved by segmenting it.

I.e., if the 13 and 13 Pro were nearly identical, yeah, there'd be no reason to upgrade to the pro model, and so Apple, being sensible, would instead offer one model. And the price of that one model would fall somewhere between the 13 and the 13 Pro; meaning that some people who can justify paying for a 13 now would not buy one at all (and you're not extracting as much as you could from those willing to spend more as you could by segmenting it).

By segmenting it, though, the (obviously highly inflated, still super high margin) cost of the 13 is lower, and Apple can put the cost of the 13 Pro higher, because each segment now has its own point of highest profitability (the point where price * number of people who will purchase it at that price is highest; generally the higher the former the lower the latter).

This is also why some graphics cards, for instance, were all made to the higher end specs, and then had chips locked away, damaged, or etc, just to create market segmentation. Even with the fixed margin costs, segmenting the market allows the company to maximize profit, but by doing so it also allows the lower segment to come in at a lower cost than if they were trying to maximize profits with a single segment. It's a "win/win" from an availability/affordability of goods and a corporate profit maximization perspective, even if it feels stupid and unfair to pay extra for the high end card, or be purchasing a 'crippled' card.

>However, Apple gates the more-desired telephoto lens to the Pro model, because it needs to balance the significant price increase with the reality that there isn't much of a manufacturing cost difference between Pro and non-Pro phones.

I believe this choice is because of another much more desired feature: Night Mode™

IIRC It works by overlaying and processing the two images from the ultrawide and wide angle lenses. It's why Night Mode is limited to the wide angle lense, and not available on the ultrawide, as the wide angle lense doesn't provide enough coverage for the ultrawide to produce a Night Mode image.

If Apple included only wide and telephoto, then Night Mode (As currently implemented) would be limited to the telephoto images, which would be a lot less desirable.

> People are irrational, they value things that don’t necessarily cost more to make, and sometimes even the fact that they need to pay extra for it, is in fact why they want it.

I think it would be irrational to value things based on how much they cost to make. The rational thing would be to value something based on utility to you. Why should you care how much it cost to make, unless you have as an alternative the ability to make it yourself?

If I understand you correctly, "my kingdom for a horse" is actually a good economic decision.

The better aphoristic horse-kingdom-related summation is probably For Want Of A Nail:

  For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
  For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
  For want of a horse the rider was lost.
  For want of a rider the message was lost.
  For want of a message the battle was lost.
  For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Maybe not economical, but definitely rational.

Could also be economical depending on how much you value your life

If a horse is the sole means of surviving an attack, the horse is worth way more than 100 kingdoms because what use is a kingdom to a dead man?

It's an effective business model if you can pull it off. For example a variation thereof made Marcus Licinius Crassus the richest man in Rome[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_firefighting#Rome

Aesthetic benefits, perceived at least, are worth $200 to some people...and that black thing looked cool.

Especially SWEs who work in products w/ zero marginal costs shouldn't complain about market value of a product vs. BOM costs

It’s quite a phenomenon that tech seems culturally committed to a disdain for anything it deems “not real”, such as emotions, aesthetics, law, or philosophy.

…especially if you consider that even product that don’t end as ‘vaporware’ are often immaterial.

They’ll joke about the uselessness of philosophy, then argue the differences between == and ===.

It’s really no surprise from there that they’ve happily embraced “fiat isn’t real” conspiracies and seek to improve that terrible state of affairs with a zoo of inscrutable algorithm-money.

I agree with some of this but totally disagree with the point about aesthetics. Form over function is a major strain of modern design, especially within Apple specifically.

Just as one example, I've been using a work issued macbook for over a year and I still regularly send the screen brightness or volume off the rails because I lightly rested a finger on the stupid touchbar. But hey, it looks cool to use the volume slider!

Yes, „form follows function“ is the version of aesthetics best suited for the enjoyment of people who are unwilling to admit that they can enjoy something without the need to legitimize their emotions with a sciéncy backstory.

More broadly, look at any discussion of web fonts here and you’ll find three suggestions to give everyone „three fonts and be done with it, screw those designers and the strange feelings I get when I see them on their skateboards.“

> People are irrational

People are boundedly rational. The client base purchasing the black enclosure valued it for a few extra hundred USD relative to other things they may choose to spend their funds on.

I mean it’s a little unfair to compare it to the “I am Rich” app because there was a functional difference - a substantial increase in internal storage. 90gb may not seem like much but in 2008, going 160gb->250gb? That was a decent chunk. Worth $200? No. Worth something? Absolutely.

You may say spending $200 extra for a black enclosure is irrational, but then most of the world will say spending $1500+ on any MacBook is itself irrational. Ultimately people have their own reasons and justifications for spending their own money.

Having own both the black and white Macbooks around that time, the extra $50 (over the white version with the same drive space) was worth it for a wrist rest that didn't look like it stained as fast as the top case on the white MacBook.

OTOH, I had the original white MacBook and ended up getting the topcase changed for free like 3 or 4 times though the first few years I had that machine (while the AppleCare was in effect). It was annoying that it was necessary, but pretty spiffy to periodically get a brand new keyboard and trackpad.

The real hack was to get the black macbook off the refurb store for the same price of the new white macbook. Same warranty and apple gave all their refurbs a look over. Sure you didnt get the white box but the regular brown box isn’t bleached but no one cared in 2007 anyways so maybe i’m wrong

yeah I bought a certified refurb a couple times. saves some money, item is indistinguishable from used

To be fair, "because the market will pay it" is entirely the correct answer. It's certainly not interesting, but it is correct

This does seem to be contrary to, at least, many people's intuition about how pricing does or should work. I've seen an awful lot of small business owners start out pricing at what seems fair to them, as a professional in their space. Turns out market price was 50% or more higher than what they were charging, every single time, and getting over "I feel like I'm ripping people off" is sometimes a significant hurdle for them. In fact, it's my understanding that notions of fairness hold greater sway over pricing in some cultures than they do in the US and similar places. That seems to be closer to how people naturally want to operate, from what I've observed.

IMO, just price economics remains the default intuition for most humans. “The price is what you can sell it for” is too nihilistic for most people to accept.

Yeah, I'm not sure why this is notable at all really

On the note of exclusivity, remember when the trash can MP shipped with black Apple stickers? Think I still have a stash of those somewhere.

The stereotype for "those people" is that they're willing to pay a premium for purely cosmetic differences, but the emblematic white shells are just the cheapest option available. By paying extra for the black macbook, you ironically became one of "those people" by trying to not look like one. :)

Indeed. If, on the other hand, you had bought a cheap white one and used some masking tape and spray paint, you would have Thought Different™.

FJ!!! was way ahead of the curve in 1998 with his fuzzy PHKL: Pink Hello Kitty Laptop.

https://web.archive.org/web/20011212120420/http://www.exonom...

So saying the same thing in an insightful way would have been acceptable? Because that’s literally what it is.

One can say “Apple prices are exorbitant”, or “Apple offers its customers a premium and select pricing line”.

I thought the cpu was faster too?

Same specs except 250gb HDD instead of 160gb which, in my opinion, isn’t something to scoff at in 2007/2008. Overpriced? Sure. But $200 wasn’t exorbitant for the upgrade. The blog dismisses that a little too readily IMO.

Another happy Chromebook user here. Apple has become too expensive when one can easily spec a PC laptop to be far better for less and have money left over for accessories. I can write code on my Chromebook (Linux), I have an SSH terminal for remote servers, and a great, always-on and updated machine. Total cost: $650 (Pixelbook Go). I've never understood why so many programmers and sysadmins feel the need to go straight to the Mac without considering any other option. I have an issued laptop from work running Fedora 35 and I in no way feel like I'm missing out. I'm not impugning Mac users, but it sometimes feels as if some of them have a holier-than-thou attitude towards anything not Apple.

>I've never understood why so many programmers and sysadmins feel the need to go straight to the Mac without considering any other option.

One reason I like my Mac is because the number of options is so limited. More or less, all modern Macs are pretty good. Solid machines, good OS, good long-term support, few surprises. Just pick your price range.

Chromebooks? Well, I'm glad you found one that you like, but from what I've seen of others' choices, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Some are okay, some are great, some are crappy, and there isn't necessarily a good cue (like price) to tell the difference.

I've done laptop Linux in the past (well, Linux and various BSDs), and the top recommendation for any problem you have with it is to change distros. When I was 26, okay, yeah, I liked doing that. I'm well and truly over that now. I'm aware that it's a heck of a lot better these days, but even so, it still seems like a bit of a moving target.

Another thing in Apple's favor is their hardware is quite good. The $600 Chromebook will be worth zip in a year, while I could probably get a significant percentage of the sticker price for my Macbook. Not that I'd sell it, because my previous 2011 Macbook lasted (with some upgrades) as my main axe for a decade. That's not nothing.

I think the sysadmins and programmers aren't just moo-mooing like cattle when they go for the Mac. They often have particular and very good reasons. E.g., in my case, I'd rather go back to a clay tablet and pointy stick than give up BBEdit.

You make some good points. For me, my Chromebook, if still working in a couple of years, will be handed down to my kids to watch YouTube and surf the net. I rarely sell computers once I've used them. While Apple does offer iCloud as a backup, I dislike storing anything locally. This is where Google really shines. If something happens to this Chromebook that's fatal, I take a ball peen hammer to the SSD and screen, chuck it in the trash, buy a new one, and in less than 5 minutes, I am back up and running with almost nothing to configure. This is hard to beat. Since I do most of my work on remote servers, I really don't need more than this, but I understand why others do and can appreciate it. I guess I'm just tired of quite a few people I work around looking at me and my choices with disdain because they're not Apple. I have nothing against Apple HW or SW. It's not my need or want, but I understand why others feel differently.

I tried chromebook for quite a while and I could just never quite get it to match my workflow.

One thing that always messed with me was how much work it was to set up. If you step off the yellow brick road, the work arounds get to be really funky and hard to automate. So I had android apps that I'd download and then log into. For a lot of years my password safe didn't work well with it. Signal was an issue for a long time until they got the linux containers or whatever working, though for that you'd have to reset to dev mode and get a bunch of stuff installed.

I really like the idea. I run a linux machine, (usually whatever flavor $work is willing to provide), and at the end of the day, I run a bunch of terminals with tmux, a web browser, and signal. So in theory that seems like it should work. And, it seems like that was getting better last I tried. But you really have to be bought in on the google way to make it go.

I haven't messed with it for a couple years so maybe I should fire up my pixel book and give it another shot.

>If something happens to this Chromebook that's fatal, I take a ball peen hammer to the SSD and screen, chuck it in the trash, buy a new one, and in less than 5 minutes, I am back up and running with almost nothing to configure.

This is a compelling feature, and I get it. I'm old school enough that I much prefer having things local. I'm also contrary enough that I don't like how much clout Google has, and paranoid enough that I don't trust Google. But I definitely get the appeal.

Way back in the day, Sun came around to the corporate office where I used to work to demo the Sun Ray. Most of the tech people dismissed it out of hand as a gigantic heap of crap (and as it turned out, they were right, or at least in agreement with the free market), but I understood the appeal.

everything on my apple computer is also backed up in the cloud. if something untoward were to happen to the machine, I would also be up and running in 5 mins or so after purchasing a new one. so I am not personally sure what you mean by saying that google shines in this dept. I don’t see any difference.

also, not sure if you meant this literally — would you please consider taking any destroyed computers to electronics recycling instead of throwing in the trash, if at all possible based on your location? these things contain stuff that’s not really desirable to go into landfills - heavy metals, batteries, etc

Point me to one competing laptop (Windows or ChromeOS) with:

- 10+ hour battery life even when working on periodic compiles, and easily 15+ hours web browsing

- high DPI display

- faster multicore CPU performance than a Ryzen 5800X desktop CPU

- less than 5 lbs

- good trackpad and keyboard

- decent build quality

I believe this doesn't exist outside an M1 Pro/Max MBP. My MBP14 uses less than 0.5W package power during a Zoom meeting, that's less than what modern AMD machines use at _idle_. My old MBP15 used over 2 watts package power at idle. I can hit all threads with a big C++ or Java compile and the fans won't even be audible, and my laptop fits in a backpack and is small enough to use anywhere. The extra cost (~$1000) is not really that big a concern when you make software engineer salaries and your laptop is a tool you use every day on side projects to improve your skills.

I personally don't like osx, but I see why developers and sysadmins go for them. it's nice to have a product with "good enough" posix compatibility that is supported by a large company. the price doesn't really matter to the individual when it's paid by their employer. and a wise employer recognizes that a brand new MBP is still a very small part of the total cost to employ an FTE.

I would've written something just like this a few years ago, but when the M1 was released, things really changed. It really is a lot faster than most other laptops for many types of work, and especially so for its price point.

What are you talking about? Apple offers the most powerful laptop on the market, with the lowest power draw and longest battery life, for the price of a midrange PC laptop.

> the most powerful laptop on the market

In what way?

Unsure where you've been for the last year, but there's no laptop that has a better single thread performance or GPU.

Even at twice the power draw and expense, there's nothing quite as good as a macbook at the moment.

However, this requires you to be using ARM and not x86, and it requires you to use MacOS which has _interesting_ performance characteristics for certain workloads.

M1 is a beast.

But Intel 11th and 12th gen laptop processors beat M1 in single-core processing. See chart: https://i.imgur.com/KoNjGq5.png

Here's an article from 3 months ago comparing them: https://www.pcworld.com/article/608419/laptop-brawl-apples-m...

(that intel laptop beat M1 Pro in multi-core too)

(and M1's integrated GPU got destroyed by RTX 3080 laptops in OpenCL but that could be due to architecture/emulation)

I think it's not a fair comparison since M1 runs much more efficiently. Almost different purposes.

You might be right but your citations of cinebench are misleading, geekbench has much different performance numbers, the m1 is only beaten by a brand new and much more power hungry/thermal cpu.

It’s also not exactly an indicator of real world performance which is why I avoided linking to benchmarks.

It's possible the M1 has been dethroned for single core performance, but what you link is not a good comparison.

Claims of future performance are going to be met with a clear shrug because ultimately I've been able to put my hands on an M1 for over a year, theoretical future CPUs are absolutely no consequence.

Additionally what is failed to mention here is how much battery life you get. Which, Apple is easily leading on.

I'm quite envious of the M1 to be perfectly honest, for the thermal envelope it's unbeaten, and its barely being challenged one year on. But you'll take my Dell Precision and my Linux installation from my cold dead hands.

I have Cinebench R23 installed and I can tell you 1T means 1 thread, thus single core as the article mentioned.

You can set how many threads the renderer will use. https://i.imgur.com/kBNvLe1.png

And it is pure CPU render. No GPU is used. It would be borderline comical if the article used a GPU benchmarking tool to measure CPU performance.

> Claims of future performance are going to be met with a clear shrug because ultimately I've been able to put my hands on an M1 for over a year, theoretical future CPUs are absolutely no consequence.

It is not theoretical. They ran their tests on a laptop that is already available for purchase.

When I replied there was commentary about AMDs upcoming 5nm CPU which seems to be gone now.

In fact, the entire tone of the comment has changed, not it's much more balanced.

Yes, the article shows a Geekbench win of 3% in single core performance. It fails to detail the enormous power consumption penalty Intel is paying to get that performance. That makes a huge difference in laptop usability.

Indeed the Geekbench was much closer. And I agree, the M1 does it with much better efficiency.

I wonder that gives Cinebench an advantage of almost 24% to Intel.

(if your use case is running MacOS and using compiled-for-ARM software)

I mean for most users, Rosetta + the ever expanding number of apps/games build for MacOS over the last decade, means it really isn’t the barrier it used to be. Plus there’s always parallels.

> the ever expanding number of apps/games build for MacOS over the last decade

I was under impression that the number was shrinking after Mojave cut support for 32-bit apps/libraries, since many developers never bothered to update their apps and games to 64-bit, much less native ARM.

That’s a fair point, though ultimately everything will be 64-bit in time so there’s a bit of an asterisk there.

Hell Apple has ultimately been vindicated going whole-hog on USB-C. Anyone who’s made the swap got over the dongle stuff pretty quickly.

I'm fully willing to forgive them for that snafu when they decide to kill off the Lightning connector for good.

Amen. It's such a flagrantly anti-consumer plug at this point

>Apple has become too expensive

I’d argue the new Mac mini is one of the best computer deals on the market.

With the M1 line being ARM, they are now offering something unique, but in the past I would basically agree with you. I'm probably going to buy my first MacBook in the near future just to have an ARM laptop running GNU/Linux that's more powerful than the Pinebook Pro.

> I've never understood why so many programmers and sysadmins feel the need to go straight to the Mac without considering any other option.

One reason is availability. Chances are, the PC laptop you took such pains to spec out are not nearly as available in case you need one on short notice. If I dropped my Macbook in the ocean this morning, I can walk into an Apple store and have a reasonable replacement by afternoon. Unless your PC specs are ok with random consumer/gaming laptops from Best Buy, you are likely looking at several days minimum wait, probably a lot more if they happen to be at the point in the product cycle where last year's model is in low stock and next year's hasn't come in yet.

Apple also have this problem. If you want a laptop with 2TB+ storage you must get it as a BTO option. Or if you want a 14" machine with 32GB RAM. You have to be happy with Apple's random SKU choices that go light on SSD and RAM choices but heavy on CPU performance. Either pay a bunch more to get CPU performance you may not want or need to get the storage and RAM you do need or wait.

At least with a lot of PCs you can upgrade RAM/SSD yourself and get it quick from Amazon rather than wait two weeks for the factory in China to do it for you.

I'm not sure - what makes a Chromebook cheaper than similarly specced regular laptop? I've looked at price/perf/quality and they seem to be fairly comparable.

Why not just buy a regular laptop and put Chrome OS on it?

You can't just put Chrome OS on any laptop. It's cheaper by far, and there's not dealing with cruft building up, updates mangling your install, patch Tuesday nonsense, slowing down over time, drive-by downloads, you name it. I admit that I do most of my work on remote machines, so I don't have to have a machine with heaps of horsepower to crunch code, compile, etc. I also don't use an IDE. I write code in a terminal window. I'm not a pure programmer, more dev/ops. I do work with a fair amount of code, but it's all Linux (Bash, Python) or PowerShell based, meaning the majority of my work is done in terminal windows. This approach doesn't work for everyone. My work-issued laptop runs Fedora 35 and it's a lower-end machine (i5 processor, 8GB RAM, run-of-the-mill Dell workstation laptop). I can use Remmina for RDP stuff, and the rest I can do with a terminal window.

As a frequent Chromebook user, Google does a lot of work on the touchpad drivers to make it a pleasant experience that you don't usually see outside Apple.

Where can I learn more about web development on Chromebooks? I thought it was just Chrome made to boot as an OS, not that you have full Linux access.

ChromeOS has natively supported running full linux containers for a several years, with basically full GUI support. You can essentially treat it as a normal linux dev machine whose browser lives outside your chroot.

I guess running gitpods or code-server counts?

I'll admit to salivating over this way of working, all the grunt happening somewhere else but my keystrokes being low latency (since they're locally rendered and lazily synced by the web browser).

But anyone who says a chromebook is comparable to a macbook is smoking something.

I'm not even saying that as an Apple Lover, I use linux, but I'm aware of the limitations of the platforms.

IME most people use macs not because they think they're better than everyone else; but because the development experience is very "happy path" -- and the hardware build quality is high.