> who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM?
Let's say you use a laptop for 6 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, and that it lasts for 3 years. That's 4,320 hours of usage. For many people, it's worth paying 35 cents per hour to use a machine that's even just a little bit better than one that costs half that. I'm writing this on a high-end Macbook Pro that's 8 years old. It was very expensive when I bought it, but the "cost per hour" has actually been quite low. The benefit of a better experience during the entire duration of usage is well worth the added cost, in my experience.
I think the idea is that a power user would be using the computer to earn money at a large enough hourly rate where 0.35$/h is literally insignificant.
800 dollar laptops today are more durable than M1 with max 16 GB of RAM at double the price, because their RAM is actually upgradable most of the time.
It's so funny see Mac fans argue about everything and its contrary that it's worth the obvious down votes.
And let’s be honest, objectively apple’s products will beat the rest in longevity hands down. In case of mobiles, it is unfortunately not even a contest, but even an 8 years old mac will run fine with OSX.
If you ignore their macs from 2016 to 2020. All of those years have keyboards and display connectors that are very prone to failure, and they had negative thermal headroom, so they throttle down more and more as dust gets lodged in them.
I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they wouldn't buy it in the first place (it's not a Prada handbag). Especially for high income earners from wealthy western countries, the cost of ownership can be easily justified for the convenience it brings.
But if you're not currently into the Apple ecosystem, and consider going all-in, the total costs of ownership are indeed a bit eye-watering for those without six figure jobs, if you disregard or don't need or don't care about the whole ecosystem and just look at the specs to price ratio of the laptop on it's own (I got a 13 inch QHD thin and light laptop with an 8 core Ryzen 5800U and 16GB RAM and 1TB NVME removable!!! SSD and 8 hour battery life for 750 Euros, where I can dual-boot Linux and Windows and run absolutely any (non-Apple)SW I could ever need).
So, since I don't need any component of the Apple ecosystem, I can't justify spending double the money to get more limited functionality in return, though I am tech savvy enough to use Windows and Linux and create for myself a similar (and subjectively better) ecosystem to Apple's for cheap/free using various OSS and proprietary SW.
However, lost of doctors I visit and most high-earners I know seem to own Macs and iPhones, so for them most likely it's worth the extra penny for the magic of the ecosystem where everything Justworks(TM) and they don't have to spend extra time learning and fiddling with tech related stuff they don't care for.
And TBH, if I didn't have to worry about money, and didn't have a career and hobbies that required the need to run X86_X64 binaries and Android apps, then I'd probably go all-in on the latest Apple MacBook Pros with extra-ports plus iPhone ecosystem for the convenience and time savings.
The other thing is that specs alone don’t tell the whole story. There’s plenty of x86 laptops that on paper have better looking specs than the MacBook Air, but few or none of them are as good at what makes a laptop a laptop — mainly, battery life and heat output. There are laptops that are thinner and lighter, like the Thinkpad X1 Nano that I own, but that thing can’t touch an Air in battery life, heat output, and in some aspects performance.
> but few or none of them are as good at what makes a laptop a laptop — mainly, battery life and heat output
Meh, my Ryzen laptop, while not M1 level, handles performance, heat and battery just fine for my needs, considering it costs well under half the price of an equivalent M1, and, as a major necessity for me, is easier to repair/upgrade but most importantly, it runs both Windows and Linux plus all X86 binaries I could ever want natively and I have full control over it (on Linux at least), instead of the manufacturer dictating what I'm allowed to run on it.
M1s are great but they aren't the magic silver bullet that solves everyone's problems, as I have no use for benchmark topping chips that can't run the SW I use. <shrug>
Yes they're expensive. But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new? My 2013 MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16GB of ram still screams. The trackpad works, no keys fail, the screen is still good being retina. The amount of money paid divided by how long it has lasted me makes it a ~300 USD computer!*
*if replaced every year ... or a 900 usd computer if replaced every 3 years.
Just anecdata, but from walking through German trains, I disagree. I still see non-Retina MacBook Airs on some trays, for example, last sold in 2015.
Some Mac models are clearly more reliable and maintainable than others, see the butterfly keyboard fiasco. But I think companies should be judged by their better products, not the duds.
> that's a big if.
> The assumption is that Pro market will drive general adoption.
> It's a false premise.
> Pro market, especially Apple Pro market, it's predictive of exactly nothing.
Hah. It is actually. Apple releases the MacBook Air... what does the PC market do in lock step? Try to copy it. We can thank Apple for insisting on SSDs in the laptop for all our PC laptops having them. When Apple moves industries follow. That won't be like that forever but it is currently.
> But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new?
>> many
I find that hard to believe. You're claiming plastic race-to-the-bottom laptop pc makers are building machines that last as long as all aluminium premium Macs? Fat chance.
Re the software issue, yeah, that's a pain. I do plan on putting Linux on it when I replace it with another Mac laptop, probably a M1. But that just furthers my point that Apple makes the best, longest lasting hardware.
If you wanted your comparison to be as lopsided as it sounds like you were thinking it was, you should've listed different companies. All three of those companies make high-end business laptops (EliteBook, Latitude/Precision, ThinkPad) that are absolutely built to last and have a cult following for it (ThinkPads especially). You should've listed Acer or some of the gaming brands to represent the ones that don't seem to last. I can say personally I have a ThinkPad X220T (Sandy Bridge) and ThinkPad T440p (Haswell) that are still working great. I sold a ThinkPad T60p just a few years ago that was still working as well, although it was showing its age with its 2GB of RAM and 32bit CPU (upgradable to a 64bit Core 2 Duo in theory).
> find that hard to believe. You're claiming plastic race-to-the-bottom laptop pc makers are building machines that last as long as all aluminium premium Macs? Fat chance.
I'm not saying that, at all.
I am saying that people keep reasonably priced hardware for longer than Mac owners because they don't have money to waste and can actually repair and upgrade them for cheap.
It’s not a waste. Referring to mac purchases as “wasteful” recycles tropes that are just false. That’s all I’m getting at. But I realize I’m shilling for a company that doesn’t need me to. Buy them, or don’t. It doesn’t matter to me or to Apple really. I prefer them for hardware. I like MacOS most of the time but sometimes yearn for Linux though things on my mac just work and I’m super keen to move to the M1 or M2.
And you can no longer install the latest macOs, and linux still has battery/sleep problems with it. I know. I have the same one. Truly incredible hardware. I wish I wasn’t forced to replace it.
I think if you get snarky with the HN crowd and tell them they're bad people and living life the wrong way they will get snarky back. HN isn't a unimind, there are lots of opinions here. Look at the way you approached it, you did well, you had nuance, you didn't assault the reader.
The thing is, I’m not sure your laptop is better than an M1, let alone the newer gen ones. Apple is really ahead in the CPU game and I say that as someone who was never there fan.
It doesn't have to be better than an M1 when it's under half the price. It needs to fulfill my needs with minimum compromises, which it does admirably. The limitations of the Apple HW, OS and ecosystem would nullify any performance benefits the M1 could ever bring for me (A Ferrari might be the fastest car on the road but if I need a 4x4 to get to the top of the mountain where my work or leisure is, then owning a Ferrari is not much use for me, is it?)
Therefore I am more comfortable buying something that, while not the fastest in the world at topping benchmarks, is plenty fast enough (faster than anything Apple ever made pre-M1 which many users still use just fine), fits my needs better, is easier to repair/upgrade, and as an added bonus, is significantly cheaper than an M1, so I can take the difference in money I would have spent on an M1 and buying into the Apple ecosystem and put it into Apple stock and I'd be even better off in the long run :)) Everybody wins.
>My biggest gripe with laptops have been the battery life. They were basically glorified PCs with like few hours inside them when not plugged in.
Online reviews show multiple laptops with near full-day battery life (>8h) exist if you do some googling, so that's almost a non-issue ATM if that's your main concern.
>Your laptop is still much more expensive than a significantly better desktop PC.
Of course it is, but so what? I need a laptop, not a desktop.
well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is listed at € 1.429 on the Italian Apple web site.
My sister bought a Lenovo thinkbook with a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32) for € 729
My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and 32GB of RAM for € 1.780 and he's using it to render complex scenes.
Does the increase in performance justify the ridiculous price?
It doesn't, in my opinion.
Also, Apple doesn't want to be a mainstream company, their market is never gonna be huge, premium prices are only justifiable if the product is somewhat exclusive.
My company has Lenovo Thinkpads as their standard laptops, and they cost basically the same as MacBooks. So it's not like Apple are charging uniquely high prices for their laptops
So your 3D artist friend got a 1-pound-heavier machine with a plastic build that still gets beat in a single-core CPU benchmark, and he payed extra for that privilege. Let me know how it goes when he drops it.
Not to mention the unusable trackpad and keyboard, and the lack of video camera. Or even the fact that this machine gets super hot and loud, while an air doesn't even have fans.
I find the hardware in the more "elite" laptops lasts longer. In 2015 I bought an Asus ROG middle of the road priced computer and have had to replace the hard drive in it and two keyboards. I have a macbook from the same year and 0 problems, and use it more than the Asus.
The MacBook Air a low spec "luxury" quality device for people who want a well built laptop (that has decent battery life and a good screen) but do not have heavy demands on performance.
If your argument is discounts then I don't support that pricing model (unpredictable frenetic oscillation) anyway.
And, yah, if you're a company you get a flat rate discount based on volume with Apple products.
I bet the hardware will be working 10 years from now as well. Apples tends to use great hardware even if it is sometimes a little underperformative compared to PCs at the same price point.
I hesitate to say such a thing given the keyboard fiasco and the time nvidia sold them a batch of GPUs that got so hot they desoldered themselves.
I have a MacBook from 2011 that works perfectly well (almost as good as the day I got it, save the battery and a few bits of corrosion on the edge of the front where your palms rest). I’ve definitely cycled through other laptops much faster than that.
Why can’t a luxury product range have entry level models? Even Ferrari has cars ranging in price from $220k up to $1m. Search for “Ferrari entry-level” and you’ll get plenty of hits using that phrase for various Portofino, Spider and Roma configurations.
I can’t make this comment without seeming condescending, but please understand me when I say that I don’t intend it that way.
You’re having an emotional reaction to a brand and a product, and this is not ideal.
I struggle to deal with people who are emotional about brands, both love and hate because I find that there’s no room for objectivity or discussion. There are circumstances where interacting with a brand can be wholly toxic (Oracle) or largely good (Linux, if you can call it a brand). But when you only respond in an emotional way it prevents an intellectually curious discussion.
Stop thinking of these as “Apple” computers and instead look at them as.. computers.
It makes the trade offs a lot more obvious when you remove the emotive element.
I’d love to see a reference where Apple or anyone else says their products are cheap. It might be possible to argue they are good value for various reasons such as long product lifetimes, but that’s not the same thing as cheap.
> An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time (that's what they say).
I have no idea what you’re referring to. Apple has some laptop models that are less expensive, I might even say cheaper, than others. That’s just comparing them relative to other Apple products though. The MacBook Air is cheaper than a MacBook Pro, that’s not the same thing as saying it’s objectively cheap relative to laptops generally. These are the entry level products in the MacBook product range.
You can get capabilities from even the low end M1 MacBooks that you can’t get from even very expensive notebooks from other manufacturers. You can get faster notebooks elsewhere, or lighter notebooks, or… actually no, you can’t get notebooks with better battery life anywhere else. However you can’t get the combination of lightness power and battery duration of even a low end M1 MacBook anywhere else at any price. That can absolutely make it better than more expensive models from other manufacturers in ways some people find very important.
> An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time
Yes. Yes they can. Because that's their new entry model in the new line-up. And can be both entry level and better than high-end models from the previous line-up.
These are entry models for Apple products. So no sense comparing them with entry models for other products (which could be shoddy plastic netbooks for all those brands care)
I am not what you would call an Apple fan still I bought a Macbook Air M1 with 16Gb of RAM in France for around 1200€ a couple of months ago (to replace an early 2011 Macbook Pro - I don't change my personal laptop often). While I would never buy a Macbook Pro, I think the Air pricing was fine. The price is pretty close to other ultraportables, performances are very good, battery life is incredible, the screen is beautiful and I don't mind paying a small premium for a sleek design and good quality control. I don't feel like I wasted my money.
I'm not saying it isn't the price people will pay, I'm only saying it's a price point that will convince people to upgrade, but won't allow Apple market to expand in a meaningful way.
Apple had already a boom years ago, I still remember Peter Jackson editing LOTR on set with his MacBook Pro + Final cut.
Then Apple stagnated and studios replaced their Macs with PCs.
Now maybe they will buy Macs again, it's a cycle, it's the same market shrinking a little and expanding a little over time.
Pro Macs are not iPhones, there are countless alternatives.
It's not interesting to buy these laptops straight from Apple. Large national resellers like Darty or Fnac offer better services and discount them very often.
> Pro Macs are not iPhones, there are countless alternatives.
I have a very different reading of the market.
I don't think iPhones are priced competitively. They are not really better than Android phones which are far cheaper. That's why they have such a ridiculously low market share in Europe.
The Macbook Air is competitively priced however. Its price is in line with the rest of the market and it is a good cost to value offered proposition.
Statcounter is not really a serious source for market share.
Both Counterpoint Research and Strategy Analytics give Apple a more credible 20% market share in Europe behind Samsung and Xiaomi.
It's not disastrous but it compares poorly to the between 55% and 65% of the USA market.
Well, it is a domestic product there (at least the HQ is US). Also, Eastern Europe probably worsens the percentages a bit because it is ridiculously expensive for us (like, there was a statistic recently on how many days one would have to work to buy the latest iphone and it was quite tragic from our perspective with something like more than 2 months worth of salary, while it is a few days in other countries)
These are pure guesses on my part, but I would guess that 99% of laptops that are sold each year are purchased with 16GB or less RAM and 99% of laptops that have been sold all time have never had their RAM upgraded.
So I would also guess the number of people willing to buy one of these is pretty high. I purchased the MacBook Air and love it. So fast, so quiet. Could I afford it? Yes. But I also typically use a Mac for 5-7 years so I did not consider it overly expensive.
I have replaced my Core i9 with 32Gb RAM with an M1 Air with 16Gb RAM and couldn't be happier.
I work as a platform engineer, code mostly in Go and Python, run VMs and containers as well as some crappy resource-hungry apps like Slack and Signal all day long, and have never felt the need for more RAM on this machine.
YMMV, of course, but 16Gb on an Apple Silicon machine takes you a lot farther than you would imagine. I have co-workers who go by daily with 8Gb M1 machines.
I monitor the RAM usage of my work machine with prometheus, and I haven't been above 16GB yet. This is on a machine with 40GB RAM and swappiness set to 1 (don't swap unless you reeeeeeeaaaalllyyyy have to).
This is running Linux rather than macos though, but it shouldn't really matter. I do have loads of web junk loaded. (Slack, Gmail, Gcal, YT music, Fastmail, plenty of browser tabs)
While I've recently stopped using Macs as my primary computers, I can definitely see the appeal of Apple computers for a large segment of the population.
E.g I still have my old MacBook around for running Ableton, because support for pro audio on both Windows and Linux is not great. Linux is almost there with PipeWire support landing in most major distros, but Windows still requires a lot of fiddling with drivers and random EXEs downloaded off the web to get a reasonable setup going. And I'm not even an audio professional, just a hobbyist with very mainstream hardware.
I suspect a lot of media/design/film professionals are in the same boat. Not to mention software developers who want a smoother experience than Windows/Linux can give them. This has always been Apple's market and they don't care about anyone else.
The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.
But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.
I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.
Weight and real world battery life would be two things. Almost certainly build quality. The screen almost certainly isn't as nice. Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. If I need 'real' performance I'll use a chunky Ryzen/Threadripper desktop computer running Linux over any laptop on the market.
Also I just don't trust Windows laptops to go to sleep properly when I shut the lid. With both high end Dell and Lenovo laptops I've on more than one occasion pulled out a scorching hot laptop with a dead battery out of my bag. Never had a Mac do that. It may be a small thing, but I'm willing to pay a pretty decent premium to never have that happen again.
Plus there's the fact that something almost certainly won't just work if I try to install a *nix based operating system on it.
edit: Oh yea another big one, with the Mac I get a trackpad good enough that I don't feel the need to carry a mouse.
At least on the 2021 model G14/15, sleep is outright disabled. They never did get it to work. There's also a relay-based cutoff for the discrete nvidia gpu, because that was the only way Asus could find to prevent phantom power draw on battery.
It still doesn't have anywhere near as good battery life as a macbook, and while the CPU is fast, it's slower than the M1.
> Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc.
Yeah! I feel like I have been needing a word for that for sometime.
Never had a mac, but surprisingly I have the same exact experience with my IT_managed_Dell+Windows+Antivirus vs my 6yo thinkpad with linux (even months of uptime)
even plain process spawning from powershell is slow, that AV is just hell.
4 GB dedicated VRAM instead of 16 GB shared memory is better/worse depending on workload.
Heat, battery life, fan noise, etc have been discussed to death so I'll gloss over those. Past that, the other huge thing is the screen:
62.5% sRGB coverage is a really garbage color gamut. Supposedly the "G513IM-HQ088R" gets you a DCI-P3 screen but I literally can't find that model available for purchase anywhere to check what it costs.
1920x1080 vs 3024x1964 is about 1/3 the pixel count of the 14" Mac. Or compared to the 16" 3456x2234 it's about 1/4 the pixel count.
You have to install Windows or none of the benchmarks are meaningful. That's a showstopper for me. Forums say installing linux on there is an undertaking and you end up with critical drivers still not working (Mic, etc).
Who knows when a random driver stops working due to a kernel patch.
>> I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead
>I would!
>CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
You’re quite right. If you restrict your market segment of interest to budget products and overall market share, that’s Macs out of the picture before you even start. Apple does not care, at all, about the budget end of the market. It’s irrelevant to them.
Looking at the premium segment, and the market dynamics are completely different. The majority of retail laptops costing over $1k sold are Macs. They also enjoy about tripple the market share among university students that they have in the general market, although that varies greatly by country. The result is that Apple captures roughly 60% of the profits in the desktop/laptop computer market globally.
Aiming for market share would mean accepting much lower profit margins. That’s something they’re just not interested in.
It's weird isn't it, how Apple might become the first 3 trillion dollar company.... Even if all their products are overpriced horseshit. One could almost assume people value what Apple is making and are willing to pay for it.
Their products aren't twice as expensive, their upgrades might be (RAM, iPhone storage) but the base models aren't very expensive if you compare it with "closest to comparable" competitor models.
I see Apple users all around me. I also live in a country where $500/month is considered a decent salary. It's the power of their very competent marketing department and nothing else; otherwise you wouldn't see so many iPhone users who spent three months of their total income for the privilege of owning this "status symbol".
Not "nothing else". They're the only half-decent vendor if you don't want to have to think about your computer very much, and also want it to mostly work well and do useful things automatically or very easily (especially when used in concert with other Apple stuff). They're in a niche in which they have, essentially, no competition. I wish they did, and I'm sure plenty of other Apple "fans" do too. I'd rather be on an open source OS, for one thing, all else being equal (which it very much is not, which is the problem).
No but it gives you you better means to purchase an item you otherwise wouldn’t have if you had to do it upfront. There’s greater purchasing power in buying something over time rather than all at once.
I have no idea how much you're making (and no desire to know), but for the sake of the argument let's say it's $6k a month. Try to extrapolate our reality to your own. Would you go around with a phone that cost $18k? Would you even buy one, monthly installments or not (and then get the next one right after it comes out, like many iPhone users here tend to do)?
The M1 chips that have been released certainly can't compete on core count against desktop chips with Zen 3 cores, but compared to the laptop versions of Ryzen, the M1 is absolutely not being eaten for breakfast.
>The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
This article is one of the few anandtech articles which is just straight up wrong and/or incomplete on many points, notably only comparing to (relatively) old desktop chips. A 5900HX (released in January) scores 50% higher on multithreading on cinebench, and equal on single threaded tests like Geekbench. A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you.
So, really, what this is saying is that a brand new, constructor specific 5nm SoC that is tailor made with a CPU/memory quasi-direct link is about equal to a year and a half old 7nm CPU, while being twice as expensive. As much as the Apple fanboys can scream about pOwEr EfFiCciEnCy!1, making up a $1500 difference just in electricity costs is going to be hard. Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.
> Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.
Counterpoint: battery life and, for the first time in my life, being able to treat my laptop as actually portable and not have to carry a power brick and mouse (because other touchpads were so terrible) everywhere is the main thing that sold me on Macs, initially, after ~15 years of my computing life being totally Mac-free.
It sold me fast. Turned me from "pft, Macs, OK, whatever, they're nothing special" to "huh, maybe there's something to this" to "I'm never buying anything but a Mac again until competitors can match [list of features I now wouldn't want to give up]" in like a month.
Sadly, no other vendors seem close to closing that gap. Macs remain a category of their own. Not a great situation.
Most people spend a lot of time on the computer. I can't imagine working around a half screen of data and halfscreen of a keyboard. Make a proper wireless docking station and give me a keyboard and mouse and monitor and then we'll talk. After about half hour staring at a phone screen I'm ready to throw it through a window from the eye strain. I think laptops/desktops will be with us for a while longer.
A wholeful lot of working people need a computer, a phone is not enough.
A laptop that has top notch battery performance and can handle heavy work at the same time, being also very lightweight, has a lot of pluses.
The fact that it is well built and that it is battery efficient is, that alone, sort of an insurance policy. I can see many occasions arising in a timespan of some years where a professional could lose a lot of money if its main work device proves to be unreliable at a wrong moment. It might be more than those 1500 euros depending on the field.
A $200 smartphone isn’t enough for most people. They’ve been sold that ideology but all I see is people struggling with them constantly assuming that’s the best of the future in their hands.
Are there any other laptop currently on the market with similar performance and battery life? It’s not like M1s are the exact same as the models before.
general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority
who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM?
only people with lots of money to waste.