I think this comment is about 3 years out of date. Apple provides plausible value for money now, when it comes to laptops.

Hardly comparable. You can not actually own an Apple laptop. You buy some hardware that can not be used or repaired in any way Apple does not approve of... so it is not really yours.

Apple are not alone in moving towards closer integration.

I have a Dell XPS 13 Dev Edition 9370 and tried to replace the Killer brand wifi unit that’s about 80% reliable waking from sleep.

Turns out wifi is soldered in on that edition forward.

I think the same is true for RAM, although it came with 16Gb, which is the mac its processor supports.

Anyone else remember the days of socketed chips that would work themselves loose due to heat?

Putting everything into a single chip is a pain to upgrade but it does mean there’s less chance of things going wrong.

It also means when something inevitably does go wrong, you throw the entire thing away and get a new one. I do not consider this a reasonable or sustainable approach, particularly when out of warranty.

That’s true but if integration means that it’s very rare for anything to go wrong within the product’s lifetime that may not matter and in fact be a net win.

I’ve never had anything break on a laptop[1] I’ve owned regardless of brand since 2005.

I can’t be that atypical.

1. Apart from maybe the wifi on my XPS13 which I can just about live with by turning wifi on and off.

Meanwhile I have a stack of 6-7 old broken laptops that are unlikely to be repairable.

What's broken on them and are they made with discrete components vs highly integrated ones?

If they are made with discrete components and still can't be repaired then you'd loose nothing by going to a higher level of integration.

That's completely irrelevant to the question of whether it's a good value for the money.

I consider $6000 good value for a Raptor Engineering Talos II workstation because it is US made and you actually own every part of it down to the firmware and schematics.

Freedom is value.

You and the five others that buy one can keep buying them then. Most people don’t have $6k to spend on a computer.

Evil Apple, they don't approve of running Linux so... oh wait

Good luck with secure boot or disabling the ME on their closed firmware. It gets extra fun when internal modules or the battery get a firmware update that breaks or degrades Linux support again.

I have ported Linux to previous gen macbooks employers insisted I use and it was a mess to maintain.

Also consider your warranty void, so good luck with sanely priced repairs given only Apple can get parts or make repairs in most cases.

Those goalposts sure moved fast!

Really? That reply was as specific to your taunt as it gets.. who's the one moving goalposts here?

"You can't run anything on macs that Apple doesn't want" suddenly turns into "It's a mess to maintain", which is an entirely different thing from literally not being able to run something.

>Looks like Apple really has the “charge outrageously and be hailed for it” license.

A new M1 Macbook Air starts at $999, and will put that Ryzen to shame. Not to mention infinitely better build quality and battery life. Apple has always been a great value for the price, even if that price is slightly higher than the bargain bin stuff.

My Ryzen puts that M1 to shame since it can run any Linux distro with full graphics acceleration natively. An M1 can't even do that yet.

What a fair comparison. My Android phone is shamed too, given it can't run Windows.

Sure, but the M1 generally has a high-quality Apple screen (this laptop from HP advertises only “FHD” so - presumably 16:9 1080p and not Retina-quality 16:10…) and the Ryzen, though much less constrained than Intel still likely has a “boost clock speed” and power throttles itself when disconnected from power or due to heat. By comparison, it’s hard to call the M1 the fastest computer I’ve used - desktops are plenty fast - but it’s certainly the most consistently performing laptop chip I’ve ever used, and is entirely quiet and cool to the touch at all times.

It’s hard to compare the values of macOS and Linux because they are very different, but it’s still easy to say that an M1 has excellent uses on macOS and everyone interested in non-Apple machines is (to some degree) waiting to see what Qualcomm or Nvidia can come up with in the ARM chipset space for non-macOS laptops… I think ChromeOS laptops prove that iPad-like performance is possible, but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips.

> Sure, but the M1 generally has a high-quality Apple screen (this laptop from HP advertises only “FHD” so - presumably 16:9 1080p and not Retina-quality 16:10…)

This looks like their current generation Pro/EliteBook lines. I have one of the higher end ones (EB 845) and oh boy does the screen suck. Not just compared to my 9 yo MBP. But even on its own. Very low angles, washed out colors. It's only advertised as 72% NTSC IIRC. Cheaper models have 6-bit panels on which you can see the dithering in the window shadows. It's laughably bad. And it cost more than similarly-specced MacBook Air.

Other than that it's a usable PC, plenty fast for my needs, and the RAM and SSD are easily upgradeable. Battery life is OK-ish (I get around 6 hours).

Also, everything works under Linux and is even less of a hassle to get going than on Windows (you need an external mouse to install it).

> but so far only the Apple M1 has shown that traditional x64-like performance is possible on laptop/desktop from ARM chips

FWIW, ThunderX will sell you a 96 core arm64 desktop that definitely offers x64-like performance. And Ampere will sell you a 256 core arm64 2U server node that matches the performance of the fastest AMD Epyc Milan CPUs. AFAIK there is no desktop case that supports the motherboard of the latter, but there is no reason why you couldn't make one.

These things are a bit niche, since the main benefit of arm64 is the reduced power demand at a given performance level, which desktop/workstation users seldom care much about. In the data center though they are killing it, I believe Azure is using the Ampere Altra stuff for their Graviton2-competitor.

The actual real-world usage experience of M1 laptops far exceeds anything else on the market today.

macOS is pretty close to garbage for my needs, so it varies by the person. Of course I'm looking forward to Asahi becoming more mainstream (I do need Thunderbolt support for example).

Does anyone use an Apple m1 and just run a virtualized linux fulltime ?

Most people just don’t care about that.

It's $999 but it has half the RAM and a quarter of the storage.

If you want to match those specs it jumps up to $1,649 which is $550 more than the HP.

Is the Mac better though? Of course it is, but not everyone needs the latest and greatest and not everyone needs to pay $550 more for it.

The storage on Macs seems a bit mean for the price but story with RAM is more interesting.

From the benchmarks I’ve seen the M1 chips swap so fast that the penalty for less RAM is much less that I would expect on an Intel based laptop.

I’m pretty sure that if I was to move back to a mac right now I’d get 16Gb over 32Gb because there just isn’t much advantage to doubling the RAM.

I mean there’s a bit but to honest I don’t think I’d notice day to day.

Not when you run Linux on the HP, though. For most tasks, it’s much more efficient than MacOS, even on M1.

Then again, if you get to run Linux on the M1 some day, this might be slightly different.

Even before the M1, you paid a small (IMO) premium for better build quality, a great trackpad and (before the butterfly) keyboard, a solid Unix with really great tailored applications, etc…

With the M1 dominance (and inflation) there’s basically no premium at this point (although there is little to no low-end options).

As long as you don't need more memory or storage, at which point you'll pay about a 4X markup for each upgrade and will need to make sure you prepay that when you buy the laptop as everything is soldered.

If only the MacBook Air was user upgradable like the old 2017 models. There’d be little reason to buy anything else.

There's a reason the RAM is soldered on: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1460108068637712384.

SSD is very annoying, though.

So Apple wins by default with their two year old M1 Macbook Air and especially when they are already discounted for as low as $949 and you get better battery life and quality compared to that overpriced snake-oil contraption HP is selling.

For that Macbook Air, it is still a good deal but I'd wait for an M2 version. As for that HP laptop, no thanks and no deal from me.