The sticker shock of having to purchase the RAM/storage for the lifetime of the device isn't typical, and is above market rates for those things.

Their base models are usually vaguely reasonably priced. But they charge a huge markup for RAM/disk upgrades.

I got a surprise when going to System76’s buy page. Upgrades to 1To or 32GB are only two-digit numbers, not three digits! Coming from Apple, it’s refreshing.

(But the second adapter is 110$ and requires a separate 120$ shipment).

I feel like Apple is shooting themselves in the foot with app developers. First you make your system a complete walled garden, you need Apple hardware to develop MacOS/iOS apps and there is no alternative. It would be one thing if you had a walled garden + affordable hardware but that's not the case, you have a walled garden and you have prohibitively expensive hardware to develop apps for that walled garden.

Hell even when it comes to development, you can't just build your iOS/MacOS app on a regular Linux CI machine, no you must have MacOS machines for building, so you need that special hardware on top of all the other expenses.

I almost feel like Apple setup the developer program with the idea that it's just going to be 15 year old prodogies making apps on their parents computer, their whole stack just seems incompatible and PIA to work with when it comes to actual software development. It should be a sign when you have popular products like CodePush that were designed specifically to address the shortcomings of developing iOS apps.

Yes because app developers aren’t going to develop for the phone being bought by people with the highest incomes and willingness to spend money.

It’s been over a decade since indy developers really made a dent in the App Store.

Android is not exactly a piece of cake to develop for, the tool chain is slow, the emulator is slow, the device market os fragmented and people are still mostly running old versions of Android you have to support.

Not to mention most Android devices on the market are slow.

I can agree with the market all you want but on the tech side, Android is miles ahead of Apple for any developer stuff, there's not even a debate.

xcode itself is 12GB and doesn't support partial updates, the projet file is some hot garbage and plays badly with git, the whole ide is lagging pretty hard on clicka, app upload is so broken Apple themselves had ro release a third party tool to bypass it, the developer portal looks like it hasn't changed since 2010 and has a number of shameful bugs...

How many test devices do you need to make sure your app works well from a high end Samsung to a shitty low end $150 unsubsidized phone?

How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?

I never had that on Android but I experienced that with Apple actually! I had to buy a second phone because the first one glitched and broke the developer mode, resetting it did not solve the issue. Apple support had no idea what caused the bug, this bug still exists now and is common on stackoverflow.

> How slow is the emulator? How many Android versions do you have to test for because of the piss poor support for OS updates from Android manufacturers?

I prefer to use my real device since it's not taking any screen space but the Android emulator is much much faster than the one from Apple, every click takes 3s on the Apple one, I don't know what they have done exactly to make it perform so badly.

I gave up on Apple because of the overall poor dev experience actually, I now consider the devices legacy and tell users who ask that I will only support Android to guarantee a better experience, I won't upload the app back.

There isn’t a Mac emulator, when you run in the simulator on x86 based Macs, it compiled the code to x86 and links against native libraries.

Of course it doesn’t even do that on ARM based Macs.

If you’re not testing on a wide variety of devices for Android or OS’s, how complex is this app?

> There isn’t a Mac emulator, when you run in the simulator on x86 based Macs, it compiled the code to x86 and links against native libraries.

I don't know how it works, is that the reason it's so slow?

> If you’re not testing on a wide variety of devices for Android or OS’s, how complex is this app?

around 30k lines of code I'd say, I only had minor problems due to screen sizes but that's pretty much the same everywhere.

Why do I have a feeling that you aren’t that experienced with iOS or mobile? You are running into problems that most iOS developers don’t run into and you’re not having to experience supporting a fragmented Android ecosystem that most developers have to go through with complicated apps

I've also used iOS for about a year and it was hands down the worst mobile experience I ever had. I don't criticize here though, it's a matter of personal taste unlike the dev experience.

> You are running into problems that most iOS developers don’t run into

Those problems are real and you have tons of threads online. The thing is, the iOS dev stack looks brittle, you're unlikely to have the different problems as somebody else and there's no way to debug it anyways.

By the way Framework also has no cheap options like $400-$500: the prices start with 750 Euro for tiny 13-inch version. I guess you can't profit much from selling reasonably priced laptops.

I suspect that the hardware margins might be there, and the sticking point is the additional overhead to cover support. When they sell ten million units and have six-sigma'd any manufacturing and support wrinkles to near-irrelevance, I wouldn't be surprised if they move down-market.

For the time being, there's apparently a customer base willing to pay those prices. They're not spec-competitive, but once you assign value to the brand, and the moral stance of supporting the idea, and the secondary value of intentionally-not-obsolete components, they have a lot going for them.

And notably, the customers who consider those factors to be important, are generally aiming mid-high in the market anyway.

Yesterday, the cheapest MacBook Air (M1, 8Gb/256GB) was under $800 at Costco in the US.

I suspect that's excluding VAT, which would add 25% where I am, making it a $1000 laptop. I understand Apple isn't responsible for VAT, but I still need to pay it. Still it's hitting the price point I think it should be at, it's just not really an offer that's available to me.

Where are you, because that's a pretty normal price point? E.g. where I am (The Netherlands), you can get that model for 949 Euro including VAT.