13 ms·

The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. That's not within reach for a large

The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. That's not within reach for a large majority of the worlds population. Not even within reach for a lot people in richer western countries. Most people need a Webbrowser that can do Email, Streaming, and some social media. What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease.

blagie 3y ago
> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease. Of what? Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM. I think my observations are a little biased, but not a lot. According to statcounter: Android 41.56% Windows 28.29% iOS 17.29% OS X 7% Unknown 3.05% Chrome OS 1.32% Critically, it's no longer a monopoly; there's a lot less lock-in than there once was. Even Microsoft Office is gradually moving to the PWA model. Most servers and embedded systems I see run some variant of Linux as well. The market Microsoft has 75% share in seems to increasingly by a niche market within a much larger ecosystem. Microsoft seems to have pivoted, and as someone pointed out, no longer cares too much. However, the Wintel monopoly is dead. If Intel is tied to Windows, they'll increasingly be swallowed alive. TSMC manufactures most of those ARM chips. There's no way a smaller player can keep up in fabs and manufacturing technology.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM Comparing cell phone OS to a desktop OS is a bit silly. Nobody in the corporate world is doing work on Android.
  - blagie 3y ago
    Intel is in the CPU market, not in the "corporate desktop" market. If you'd like to see how well trying to focus on that niche works, have a look at DEC Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, Itanium, Sparc, PowerPC, etc. At the end of the day, it comes down to manufacturing volume. Volume leads to investment in next-generation technologies. More investment means, at some point, competitors can't keep up. Manufacturing doesn't care too much about who the ultimate end user is.
  - shortrounddev 3y ago
    Why not
  - josteink 3y ago
    His point was trying to measure OS market-share by checking desktop-only is no longer a valid approach. Even big players like Microsoft are forced to offer their software and services on non-Windows platforms (like mobile and tablets!) if they want to remain relevant. So counting desktop only paints a false picture, wrt where users are and where computing is happening. And that last bit is what is relevant from a Intel POV. An increasing amount of compute is now done outside the Intel-chip arena of desktops, like it used to be before.
- whynotmaybe 3y ago
  The "niche" market is corporate and gouv. These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design) No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon from those. The android market share is mainly mobile devices and Microsoft gave that market up a few years ago, focusing on azure and office. Here again, focusing the corporate/gouv world. The corporate/gouv world has many windows only app and processes that would cost a fortune to replace. Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.
  - JKCalhoun 3y ago
    (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.) I generally agree with your point though but I am seeing that as more and more of office work moves to living within a web browser, it is becoming more hardware agnostic.
    - blagie 3y ago
      > (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.) No. It's reality. Mainframes are here to stay. IBM continues to develop and sell plenty of mainframes. Several other manufacturers do as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z16 Where I work has applications dating back decades with complex data analysis algorithms developed by very smart people. Strict backwards-compatibility is critical. We have mainframes. There are many other reasons to run mainframes. For example, mainframes offer pretty incredible features with regards to redundancy, and making everything hot-swappable in case of failure without interrupting workloads. That's especially useful in places like the financial industry. There, a single failure or error can cost much more than a mainframe. They're a niche, but a big enough one to support a multi-billion dollar business. It shrunk for many years, but it's currently even growing.
    - danaris 3y ago
      I was doing work on an IBM AS/400 mainframe in my previous job, just over a decade ago. It supported Java and Tomcat (which was fairly current at the time) out of the box. The only oddity I needed to deal with was making sure I had a proper JDBC driver for its DB/2 database. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't have to deal with it anymore, but mainframes are definitely still around.
sokoloff 3y ago
You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m1-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-space-gray/5721600.p?skuId=5721600 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m... I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up. Looking at the best selling laptops at Microcenter, they're $600, $700, $700, $1100, $800, $800, $750, $900... Having an M1 Air slotted in at $800 seems right in-line with the market.
- coffeebeqn 3y ago
  8GB is pretty sad though and it’s soldered on with no ability to upgrade
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years. Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't actually need the M1. BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200 EUR.
  - shinycode 3y ago
    But it’s more than RAM and it’s enough even for web dev so for most people it’s way enough
    - heavyset_go 3y ago
      I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you have things like browser windows open, you will have a bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of the question which made mobile app development difficult. If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.
mrtksn 3y ago
Macs are incredibly good value. The M1 Air actually starts at 800$ if you chase the deals and $900 if you buy from Apple with education discount. Nothing ever comes to the quality at that price, so even if you can buy much cheaper laptops those suffer in quality and performance. This means the value per dollar is not any better than MacBook Air, unless you are extremely short on dollars. Also the re-sell value of Apple products is good and combined with the durability of Apple laptops(this is where the repairability folks fail to convince most people because for most people Apple devices don't break down, they become obsolete after extensive use) the money spent on Macs turns to be an investment. The "Apple premium" you pay when you buy an iDevice is actually a recoverable when you sell it.
- mschild 3y ago
  I agree they are but what if you can't afford to spend 800 or 900 on a laptop? There's also plenty of people who use their laptop until it's dead. Infact, I'd argue it's probably more economical to purchase a repairable laptop and replace parts as needed.
  - mrtksn 3y ago
    If you can't afford $900 you shouldn't be buying a laptop unless you absolutely need it in short term to get out of your current situation. You are probably in a precarious state, not really a chooser at this time and all you can do is to sort by price and buy the cheapest.
    - mschild 3y ago
      Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world doesn't run high paying western salaries. Most people earn significantly less. The average monthly indian salary, by now the largest country in the world population wise, is roundabout 450 USD. Your advice boils down to just get richer and don't be poor.
      - mrtksn 3y ago
        My advice is, don't spend your money on low quality stuff unless you absolutely have to(i.e. maybe you will do some data entry stuff to buy food, then maybe you can spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop but if you are not in that kind of a situation save up buy something of good value later).
SamuelAdams 3y ago
> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share The biggest threat to Windows isn’t Apple and Linux, it’s mobile phones. People aren’t buying computers like they used to. Most day to day things can be done on a smartphone now. I see this first hand in my own family. My wife and mom both use their phones for pretty much everything. Email, web browsing, etc. If my wife needs a bigger screen for something like a yoga video, she usually uses a TV in the house which has a Roku, chrome cast, or similar attached.
bhouston 3y ago
> The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. Get the MacMini. The low end M2 Mac mini is $599.00 USD right now, although the one I run for my desktop is the more expensive one at $2,199 with 32GB, more cores, more gpu and more drive space.
- mschild 3y ago
  That's not a laptop so you still need to buy a screen, keyboard, and mouse.
  - bhouston 3y ago
    Adding that will add another $150 if you buy it at Walmart. You are correct.

blagie 3y ago

> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share and while that fluctuates, it doesn't seem to really drastically decrease. Of what? Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM. I think my observations are a little biased, but not a lot. According to statcounter: Android 41.56% Windows 28.29% iOS 17.29% OS X 7% Unknown 3.05% Chrome OS 1.32% Critically, it's no longer a monopoly; there's a lot less lock-in than there once was. Even Microsoft Office is gradually moving to the PWA model. Most servers and embedded systems I see run some variant of Linux as well. The market Microsoft has 75% share in seems to increasingly by a niche market within a much larger ecosystem. Microsoft seems to have pivoted, and as someone pointed out, no longer cares too much. However, the Wintel monopoly is dead. If Intel is tied to Windows, they'll increasingly be swallowed alive. TSMC manufactures most of those ARM chips. There's no way a smaller player can keep up in fabs and manufacturing technology.

itsoktocry 3y ago
>Most of what I see normal consumers doing is in Android, typically on ARM Comparing cell phone OS to a desktop OS is a bit silly. Nobody in the corporate world is doing work on Android.
- blagie 3y ago
  Intel is in the CPU market, not in the "corporate desktop" market. If you'd like to see how well trying to focus on that niche works, have a look at DEC Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, Itanium, Sparc, PowerPC, etc. At the end of the day, it comes down to manufacturing volume. Volume leads to investment in next-generation technologies. More investment means, at some point, competitors can't keep up. Manufacturing doesn't care too much about who the ultimate end user is.
- shortrounddev 3y ago
  Why not
- josteink 3y ago
  His point was trying to measure OS market-share by checking desktop-only is no longer a valid approach. Even big players like Microsoft are forced to offer their software and services on non-Windows platforms (like mobile and tablets!) if they want to remain relevant. So counting desktop only paints a false picture, wrt where users are and where computing is happening. And that last bit is what is relevant from a Intel POV. An increasing amount of compute is now done outside the Intel-chip arena of desktops, like it used to be before.
whynotmaybe 3y ago
The "niche" market is corporate and gouv. These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design) No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon from those. The android market share is mainly mobile devices and Microsoft gave that market up a few years ago, focusing on azure and office. Here again, focusing the corporate/gouv world. The corporate/gouv world has many windows only app and processes that would cost a fortune to replace. Windows is here to stay, just like mainframes.
- JKCalhoun 3y ago
  (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.) I generally agree with your point though but I am seeing that as more and more of office work moves to living within a web browser, it is becoming more hardware agnostic.
  - blagie 3y ago
    > (Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.) No. It's reality. Mainframes are here to stay. IBM continues to develop and sell plenty of mainframes. Several other manufacturers do as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z#IBM_z16 Where I work has applications dating back decades with complex data analysis algorithms developed by very smart people. Strict backwards-compatibility is critical. We have mainframes. There are many other reasons to run mainframes. For example, mainframes offer pretty incredible features with regards to redundancy, and making everything hot-swappable in case of failure without interrupting workloads. That's especially useful in places like the financial industry. There, a single failure or error can cost much more than a mainframe. They're a niche, but a big enough one to support a multi-billion dollar business. It shrunk for many years, but it's currently even growing.
  - danaris 3y ago
    I was doing work on an IBM AS/400 mainframe in my previous job, just over a decade ago. It supported Java and Tomcat (which was fairly current at the time) out of the box. The only oddity I needed to deal with was making sure I had a proper JDBC driver for its DB/2 database. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad I don't have to deal with it anymore, but mainframes are definitely still around.

sokoloff 3y ago

You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m1-chip-8gb-memory-256gb-ssd-space-gray/5721600.p?skuId=5721600 https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m... I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easily achievable next entry-level step up. Looking at the best selling laptops at Microcenter, they're $600, $700, $700, $1100, $800, $800, $750, $900... Having an M1 Air slotted in at $800 seems right in-line with the market.

coffeebeqn 3y ago
8GB is pretty sad though and it’s soldered on with no ability to upgrade
- The_Colonel 3y ago
  Especially if you plan to use it for next 5 years. Perhaps if you're sure you don't want to do anything other than web browsing, but then maybe you don't actually need the M1. BTW, the cheapest M1 Air (8 GB RAM) in Austria is 1200 EUR.
- shinycode 3y ago
  But it’s more than RAM and it’s enough even for web dev so for most people it’s way enough
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    I tried to do web dev on an 8GB Mac and it wasn't fun. If you use an IDE, it will be constrained for memory if you have things like browser windows open, you will have a bad time if you try to open multiple projects and running Docker made it all worse. Virtual machines were out of the question which made mobile app development difficult. If you can stick with a terminal or some lightweight editors, 8GB might be okay for you, but I feel like 8GB has been pushing it for at least 5 or more years now.

mrtksn 3y ago

Macs are incredibly good value. The M1 Air actually starts at 800$ if you chase the deals and $900 if you buy from Apple with education discount. Nothing ever comes to the quality at that price, so even if you can buy much cheaper laptops those suffer in quality and performance. This means the value per dollar is not any better than MacBook Air, unless you are extremely short on dollars. Also the re-sell value of Apple products is good and combined with the durability of Apple laptops(this is where the repairability folks fail to convince most people because for most people Apple devices don't break down, they become obsolete after extensive use) the money spent on Macs turns to be an investment. The "Apple premium" you pay when you buy an iDevice is actually a recoverable when you sell it.

mschild 3y ago
I agree they are but what if you can't afford to spend 800 or 900 on a laptop? There's also plenty of people who use their laptop until it's dead. Infact, I'd argue it's probably more economical to purchase a repairable laptop and replace parts as needed.
- mrtksn 3y ago
  If you can't afford $900 you shouldn't be buying a laptop unless you absolutely need it in short term to get out of your current situation. You are probably in a precarious state, not really a chooser at this time and all you can do is to sort by price and buy the cheapest.
  - mschild 3y ago
    Thats an incredibly privileged view on this. The world doesn't run high paying western salaries. Most people earn significantly less. The average monthly indian salary, by now the largest country in the world population wise, is roundabout 450 USD. Your advice boils down to just get richer and don't be poor.
    - mrtksn 3y ago
      My advice is, don't spend your money on low quality stuff unless you absolutely have to(i.e. maybe you will do some data entry stuff to buy food, then maybe you can spent a few hundred dollars on a laptop but if you are not in that kind of a situation save up buy something of good value later).

SamuelAdams 3y ago

> What makes you think windows is in a death spiral? They still have a good 75% market share The biggest threat to Windows isn’t Apple and Linux, it’s mobile phones. People aren’t buying computers like they used to. Most day to day things can be done on a smartphone now. I see this first hand in my own family. My wife and mom both use their phones for pretty much everything. Email, web browsing, etc. If my wife needs a bigger screen for something like a yoga video, she usually uses a TV in the house which has a Roku, chrome cast, or similar attached.

bhouston 3y ago

> The M1 is a good chip, but Macs are expensive. Cheapest one you can currently buy is the Air. That starts at 1k USD pretax. Get the MacMini. The low end M2 Mac mini is $599.00 USD right now, although the one I run for my desktop is the more expensive one at $2,199 with 32GB, more cores, more gpu and more drive space.

mschild 3y ago
That's not a laptop so you still need to buy a screen, keyboard, and mouse.
- bhouston 3y ago
  Adding that will add another $150 if you buy it at Walmart. You are correct.