5 ms·

People buying desktop computers care about performance and price, not battery life or the fruit logo on the case. You'll find it difficult to convince many peo

by tagrun 3y ago

People buying desktop computers care about performance and price, not battery life or the fruit logo on the case. You'll find it difficult to convince many people who are not already locked in Apple's walled garden and sense of consumerism around its branding to pay $4000 for such a performance, with limited RAM/disk, and no real path to upgrades or user repairs. > most of these machines can provide better price/performance than most anything else on the market, I agree, for better performance/price though, you wouldn't buy from Apple. (A meta comment: I find it difficult to comprehend how people can become so emotionally invested in a company. Finding an excuse to every single shortcoming of Apple, not leaving any criticism unanswered for them.)

bradknowles 3y ago
Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. You can't, because it doesn't exist. Here's a hint -- the price is much closer to $1000 than $4000. I've been a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the 128k Mac, a month before the Super Bowl commercial where Apple officially introduced the thing. Yeah, that famous one. It took only five minutes of playing around with the prototypes of what came to be called MacWrite and MacPaint (because those were the only two pieces of prototype software available yet) to convince me that this was the future of computing, and that all computers should work like this. But I'm also a Mac realist. I fully recognize that there are markets that Mac doesn't serve well, like Enterprise. Apple has always understood the workgroup level and served that market well, but as you scale up, they do worse and worse. The fact that the Mac works well in an Enterprise is in spite of Apple design philosophy, not because of it. And I also understand that there are markets where Apple makes no attempt to serve that market, because they don't consider it worthwhile -- whether I agree with them or not. I even did a short six month contract working for Apple Retail Software Engineering, where I worked with the team that developed all the proprietary software that the Apple Retail personnel use, whether that's everyone in the stores, or the people back at HQ that are coordinating with the people in the stores. I delivered a CI/CD system for them, so that they would no longer have to do all the building of all their software on the laptops of the individual developers. After six months, I had contributed code to each of their main code bases (iOS, macOS, and Linux for their back-end servers) to get the to compile on the CI/CD system, and the rest of my job was done. And in the process, I learned that Apple is a company I am happy to be a customer of, but I don't ever want to work there again.
- nateb2022 3y ago
  > Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. I will happily be the one to tell you. For between $600-700 you can get a gaming laptop from MSI, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and the like with a 12th or 13th gen Intel CPU (e.g. i5 13420H), 8-16 GB of RAM, and a RTX 3050 or better, along with a 512GB-1TB SSD. Single-core performance is just shy of the M2, multi-core performance beats the M2, GPU performance is significantly better, and the only major shortfall is battery life. As others have said, the M-series is great at power efficiency, but if performance is your only criteria there are significantly cheaper alternatives. Sure, you're going to have to keep your laptop plugged in most of the time and it will probably sound like a jet engine at times, however Apple is NOT the leader in value for performance as you believe. Regarding battery life, you could approach Apple levels of usage time by undervolting your CPU. Depending on your configuration and hardware, you could gain a couple more hours of usage time by undervolting as well as using integrated graphics and disabling the GPU in favor of integrated graphics.
  - bradknowles 3y ago
    So, what is the battery life on that device? One hour? Two hours? Could you get twelve hours out of it? Eighteen? And what is the resolution on that screen? Anywhere close to 2880 by 1864? You have failed to deliver a system that actually meets the specs of the MacBook Air 15" that you are comparing against, and then declaring yourself the victor because your machine is marginally faster. You fail to grasp that you have actually proven my point for me. Apple is designing their machines for real people in the real world who may not be anywhere close to a power outlet for a long time. Or, who may not want to tie themselves down to needing to be close to a power outlet all the time.
    - nateb2022 3y ago
      > So, what is the battery life on that device? One hour? Two hours? I'd put the average battery life of a $600-700 gaming laptop at ~4-6hr, although if you undervolt the CPU (getting maybe 80% of the performance) you could achieve 8+ hours on a charge. Screens vary, but they're typically 1280x1080 -- however at 120/144Hz. I'd say both are acceptable for most people. And I am not claiming to compete against the MacBook Air 15" for $600-700. I am just pointing out that performance-wise, a $600-700 gaming laptop can equal a $1200 Macbook, and hence is a much better value. If however you want me to find a challenger to your MacBook Air 15", I will. With a $1200 base 15" M2 Macbook Air budget, you can get a Dell XPS 15 for $1,149 (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/12th-gen-intel/spd/xps-15-9520-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/12th-gen-intel/spd/x...). The i7-12700H equals the M2 in single-core and beats the M2 in multi-core workloads. It comes with a RTX 3050, 16 GB of DDR5, and a 512GB SSD, and a 3456x2160 OLED touch display. You get 8GB more RAM, twice the storage, a better GPU and multi-core performance than the base model Mac Air for $50 less. Battery lasts up to 13 hours. I am admittedly also an Apple fan, but that doesn't mean I have my eyes on the competition. While Apple has had its share of advances, and while it is still my go-to for my laptops, I will be the first to admit that there are plenty of alternatives depending on what you're looking for. And some of those alternatives are hands-down a better value depending on your criteria.

by tagrun 3y ago

bradknowles 3y ago

Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. You can't, because it doesn't exist. Here's a hint -- the price is much closer to $1000 than $4000. I've been a MacFanatic since December of 1983, when I saw a by-invitation-only demo of a prototype of the 128k Mac, a month before the Super Bowl commercial where Apple officially introduced the thing. Yeah, that famous one. It took only five minutes of playing around with the prototypes of what came to be called MacWrite and MacPaint (because those were the only two pieces of prototype software available yet) to convince me that this was the future of computing, and that all computers should work like this. But I'm also a Mac realist. I fully recognize that there are markets that Mac doesn't serve well, like Enterprise. Apple has always understood the workgroup level and served that market well, but as you scale up, they do worse and worse. The fact that the Mac works well in an Enterprise is in spite of Apple design philosophy, not because of it. And I also understand that there are markets where Apple makes no attempt to serve that market, because they don't consider it worthwhile -- whether I agree with them or not. I even did a short six month contract working for Apple Retail Software Engineering, where I worked with the team that developed all the proprietary software that the Apple Retail personnel use, whether that's everyone in the stores, or the people back at HQ that are coordinating with the people in the stores. I delivered a CI/CD system for them, so that they would no longer have to do all the building of all their software on the laptops of the individual developers. After six months, I had contributed code to each of their main code bases (iOS, macOS, and Linux for their back-end servers) to get the to compile on the CI/CD system, and the rest of my job was done. And in the process, I learned that Apple is a company I am happy to be a customer of, but I don't ever want to work there again.

nateb2022 3y ago
> Look at the price of the MacBook Air. Then tell me you can get anything that remotely approaches that level of performance from any other major vendor, at anything remotely close to the same price. Or the same battery life. I will happily be the one to tell you. For between $600-700 you can get a gaming laptop from MSI, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and the like with a 12th or 13th gen Intel CPU (e.g. i5 13420H), 8-16 GB of RAM, and a RTX 3050 or better, along with a 512GB-1TB SSD. Single-core performance is just shy of the M2, multi-core performance beats the M2, GPU performance is significantly better, and the only major shortfall is battery life. As others have said, the M-series is great at power efficiency, but if performance is your only criteria there are significantly cheaper alternatives. Sure, you're going to have to keep your laptop plugged in most of the time and it will probably sound like a jet engine at times, however Apple is NOT the leader in value for performance as you believe. Regarding battery life, you could approach Apple levels of usage time by undervolting your CPU. Depending on your configuration and hardware, you could gain a couple more hours of usage time by undervolting as well as using integrated graphics and disabling the GPU in favor of integrated graphics.
- bradknowles 3y ago
  So, what is the battery life on that device? One hour? Two hours? Could you get twelve hours out of it? Eighteen? And what is the resolution on that screen? Anywhere close to 2880 by 1864? You have failed to deliver a system that actually meets the specs of the MacBook Air 15" that you are comparing against, and then declaring yourself the victor because your machine is marginally faster. You fail to grasp that you have actually proven my point for me. Apple is designing their machines for real people in the real world who may not be anywhere close to a power outlet for a long time. Or, who may not want to tie themselves down to needing to be close to a power outlet all the time.
  - nateb2022 3y ago
    > So, what is the battery life on that device? One hour? Two hours? I'd put the average battery life of a $600-700 gaming laptop at ~4-6hr, although if you undervolt the CPU (getting maybe 80% of the performance) you could achieve 8+ hours on a charge. Screens vary, but they're typically 1280x1080 -- however at 120/144Hz. I'd say both are acceptable for most people. And I am not claiming to compete against the MacBook Air 15" for $600-700. I am just pointing out that performance-wise, a $600-700 gaming laptop can equal a $1200 Macbook, and hence is a much better value. If however you want me to find a challenger to your MacBook Air 15", I will. With a $1200 base 15" M2 Macbook Air budget, you can get a Dell XPS 15 for $1,149 (https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/12th-gen-intel/spd/xps-15-9520-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptops/12th-gen-intel/spd/x...). The i7-12700H equals the M2 in single-core and beats the M2 in multi-core workloads. It comes with a RTX 3050, 16 GB of DDR5, and a 512GB SSD, and a 3456x2160 OLED touch display. You get 8GB more RAM, twice the storage, a better GPU and multi-core performance than the base model Mac Air for $50 less. Battery lasts up to 13 hours. I am admittedly also an Apple fan, but that doesn't mean I have my eyes on the competition. While Apple has had its share of advances, and while it is still my go-to for my laptops, I will be the first to admit that there are plenty of alternatives depending on what you're looking for. And some of those alternatives are hands-down a better value depending on your criteria.