I don’t know where to begin with this, but on topic, the M1 came out in 2020 and was a big tech leap in how PCs are done.
Sure, all the individual technologies within existed elsewhere first. But Apple executed and delivered great products.
You could buy a desktop with 4 gigs of ram in 2010.
There's always research ongoing to improve tech and a lot of it is on the market already, but just because researchers figured something out doesn't mean it's feasible on a large manufacturing scale or that thermodynamics will even allow it to work well. Comparing devices in 2002 to 2023 and not noticing the drastic improvements just shows a lack of understanding and or signs of living in complete denial to just complain.
Given that the next generation Snapdragon offers comparable performance to Apple's M line, it appears that node advances were responsible for a very large percentage of any performance gains.
If you look closely, yes apple is bit better in manufacturing, bit better in materials etc. and I have many apple products, but its products isn't that different from many small companies. Unlike say Google, whose software engineering and scale they can handle for complex services is almost impossible to match for small companies.
Also you missed the point of thread. I said I like Apple products. It's just that the stage they are in, they aren't trying to solve really tough problems which very likely will just loose money like say google does with quantum computing or AI.
My followup question: if it's so easy and unimpressive, why aren't other companies doing it -- especially at similar performance-per-watt? The market is obviously there and they release "answers" to Apple Silicon that aren't really answers (again, perf-per-watt isn't there).
I'm sure it was even more so in the 80's into the 90's, but that's a little before my time.
We have not really had a quantum leap in the last 20 years. Even longer. Apple's M-series chips are the closest we've gotten in recent times I think.
But it was obsolete before I opened the box
You say you've had your desktop for over a week?
Throw that junk away, man, it's an antique
Your laptop is a month old? Well that's great
If you could use a nice, heavy paperweight
Yes, especially if you were considering a low-end M3 model. Also consider a MacBook Air, which are great.
Desktop was fine since I was working from home the last 2 years. But I’ve finally got an office and also need to travel so need something more portable
Will be switching over from Ubuntu to Mac as well
The M series SOCs are just fucking absurd. In every space besides gaming and graphics, they utterly lap PC's. I don't even remember the last time my Macbook wasn't charged enough to use, and I use it away from my desk quite a lot. Moving from my office PC to a Macbook has felt like being flung 6 years into the future.
If you were considering a 14" or 16" M2 Pro MBP, the equivalent M3 Pro MBP would not be the base model, and WOULD be an upgrade... just avoid the base M3 (non-Pro) config.
If you were considering the M2 MBP w/ touch bar, then the base M3 MBP is the equivalent chip.
On the other hand, if you don't need the GPU improvements, or the mild CPU speed bump, that M3 gives and you can find an M2 Pro cheaper because they're "old", go for that.
edit: Adding "Pro" to M2 and M3 to indicate which were the proper MBPs.
When said Touch Bar pro was the top of the line, the cheapest pro was the one without a Touch Bar, missing half of the USB C ports, basically a MacBook Air in a pro shell.
I’ve never understood why they do this but it must sell well in some markets or something.
The author feigns indignance at Apple's margins, as if the only possible purpose for that markup is to line the pockets of Apple execs. But this isn't pure profit for Apple. Apple develops feature and security updates which they make available for free (at the point of use) for years to their hardware customers. The significant hardware markup is what enables this!
Contrast this to companies that sell hardware at cost. You find phones and laptops crammed with programs to collect and monetize your data, and zero security or driver updates.
A company that charges full price up front is at least in a position to afford to be able to do the right thing by users.
This company is making obscene amounts of profit only to hand most of it over to people whose contribution to apple’s success is zero, instead of spending it on improving the products or customers actually responsible for that success. If this isn’t a condemnation of what’s wrong with capitalism, I don’t know what is. Tim Cook may have no other choice, but it is despicable that he doesn’t.
the lack of (competent) competition is what's the problem, not that that there's return on capital. I don't like Apple, but I hardly can blame them, when they can make all this money by simply being the least shit generally okay-ish option.
People who pretend Apple wasn't different under Job are magnificent gaslighters and should not be taken seriously about anything really...
It's a forced and planned obsolescence and nothing else.
All the required cost for the product and support is already included in the product cost as it being costly compared to its competitors. All other stuff that they do around it is pure marketing and projection to make people believe and have that sense of something super duper is being offered to them which doesn't exist and is unique.
While some of is acceptable, but majority of it is useless or not used or used once or twice in it's lifetime. Except for some professionals.
Just swindling people of their hard earned monies...
Last I checked Apple products get about 7 years of updates. My 2016 MacBook Pro is falling off the edge of security updates about now.
I'd prefer 10 years, but it's more than two.
The exception may be more recent intel Macs which are likely to be obsoleted at a faster rate due to the ARM/Apple Silicon transition. Though I guess you can still run Windows. ;-p
Framing it as greed and lack of innovation seems like a not well thought out argument. Which companies are you buying tech from that aren’t aiming for a profit, and wouldn’t change more if they could? As a dev I feel like I’ve been forced out of the Apple ecosystem, and I’m having a hard time being a fan these days, but I wouldn’t dare claim they’re not innovating. The M-series is a massive innovation and challenging everyone, and it follows behind literally world-changing innovations like iphone. For its time, OSX was an innovative successor to unix built on unix. They have a long list and a solid history of innovation that continues to this day, despite always having had seemingly high prices on RAM, so let’s look for a better argument why they should offer it for less.
It’s like in the 90s when the base ford mustang became a poorly made vehicle with little power that looked like a sports car but really they selling out and taking advantage of their customers.
I would have more respect for Apple if they just charged $200 more for the base and put 16GB of ram it instead passing off machines with insufficient amount of ram as a premium model of their devices.
Look up their Mac sales figure - it's down. And I do believe it is because consumers aren't stupid and recognize that the new Macs have planned obsolescence built-in with their soldered RAM and SSDs.
The Gaslighting is also high with Apple claiming that their "8GB equals 16GB" because they are Apple:
> Comparing our memory to other system's memory actually isn't equivalent, because of the fact that we have such an efficient use of memory, and we use memory compression, and we have a unified memory architecture. Actually, 8GB on an M3 MacBook Pro is probably analogous to 16GB on other systems. We just happen to be able to use it much more efficiently. - https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/08/8gb-ram-m3-macbook-pro-...
I guess this is a factor, but the main reason I haven't bought a new Mac is that they quit making the 27" iMac. Turning that beautiful screen into a paperweight or strictly-retro computer, only to turn around and buy a Mini and Studio Display, seems silly. OpenCore Legacy Patcher has kept me up-to-date so far, but there's an end on it. It doesn't help that my office is part of the "fancy" part of the house and so having exactly one cable (power) running into the computer is a nontrivial aesthetic benefit. It really does look sleeker, because it is.
If Apple laptops have to use their system memory for their graphics stuff, doesn't this mean that their 8GB of RAM leaves even less memory available for applications? I mean, even the cheapest graphics cards out there ship with a few GB of dedicated memory.
Mac isn’t the only product they sell where the storage prices are higher than the alternatives and higher than the cost of the underlying hardware. All of Apple’s products come with SSD and RAM upgrades that are above market rates and above the competition.
I don’t think consumers are stupid either, I think they know the storage upgrades are marked up, and still buy Apple products, for other reasons. I bought Apple laptops and was happy about them despite their cost - they were truly great machines and outshined the cheaper non-Apple laptops I’ve had.
Anyway, Mac sales have been down for a while because what would have been laptop and desktop sales are being now replaced with tablets and phones. Apple’s strategy hasn’t changed yet, and their overall sales and revenue on premium priced products haven’t show any sign of downturn yet.
That's a creative euphemism for price gouging.
You're not going to shame a company into changing how it does market segmentation.
They do this because it makes them more money, and if you don't like padding their profit margins your best reaction would be to simply not buy their products. There are plenty of other PC vendors out there.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=a...
Prove me wrong? Do something genuinely new, like a mass produced cpu on germanium. Make a modern OS that’s a successor to unix-and plan9. Edit-Or at least a moddable iphone that can plug into a monitor/keyboard/mouse.