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Out of curiosity, I specc'd out a Thinkpad T480 as close as I could to the base model MBP, and they are reasonably similar in price (the Thinkpad is $2100 to th
by ac29 8y ago
Out of curiosity, I specc'd out a Thinkpad T480 as close as I could to the base model MBP, and they are reasonably similar in price (the Thinkpad is $2100 to the MBP's $2400).
Thing is, if you drop a few upgrades, such as dropping the CPU speed by a few percent, dropping the dGPU, going to a 1080P screen, and using a SATA instead of NVME drive, you're down to $1400 for largely minor decreases in performance and capability (none of those things would affect my use cases appreciably, you might be different). Apple doesn't give you those options in a MBP, and the standard MacBook is pretty outdated, topping out at an old dual core i7.
- isatty 8y agoI’m sorry but dropping to a 1080p after using a Retina display or even a 2K dell screen is absolutely horrible. If you’re a programmer you spend your day looking at screens - make it nice. Also, the difference between a SATA SSD and NVMe is night and day.
- kbenson 8y ago...that's largely irrelevant to what was said. A similar model to the base MBP is ~$300 (~12%) cheaper, but by also dropping some other features they didn't feel were important for their use case, they could get the price close to $1400 (40% cheaper), but Apple doesn't even offer those options. The point is not to say that a $1400 laptop is equivalent to the base MBP, but that a $2100 laptop is, and a cheaper MBP might be possible if apple was willing to offer some lower end/dated features. But they aren't.
- voltagex_ 8y agoHow heavy are both of those laptops, though?
- carlob 8y agoFWIW I specced out a T480s and I got something that in terms of RAM wasn't even available on macs at the time (24 GB), weights under 1.5kg, has HDMI, ethernet USB and USB-C, a matte HIDPI display and a proper keyboard (and it came out costing like a top of the line MBP).