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It's difficult for them to catch up when the market for Windows laptops can't bear a 2k+ price tag. Expensive Windows laptops do exist and are pretty good, but
by emmet 3y ago
It's difficult for them to catch up when the market for Windows laptops can't bear a 2k+ price tag. Expensive Windows laptops do exist and are pretty good, but they're few and far between.
I know giant gaming laptops exist, but in order to keep that power and go smaller, the price is going to jump up in the moon.
- zozbot234 3y agoThere are plenty of expensive Windows laptops, they're just sold as "gaming" laptops with added blinkenlichten.
- emmet 3y agoI mean that was my second point there, but I did enjoy blinkenlichten.
- MBCook 3y agoApple’s best selling laptop, by far, is the Air. And most likely the cheapest model. So that’s $1100 or $1200. Yes other models go way up from there. And many PCs are sub $500. But $2k is not the normal Apple price.
- smoldesu 3y agoWith that being said, the base-model Macbook Air is absolutely designed to leave you unsatisfied. 256gb of storage is a decade-running joke, and 8gb base RAM in an age of unified memory might as well be planned obsolescence. The upgraded models feel like a different beast entirely. Apple wants you to feel like you're justified paying for 16gb of memory and 1tb of storage because... you are. Those upgraded machines run smooth and stay running nice after multiple years of software updates. MacOS is a storage-hungry OS, 3 years of daily-driving a base-model Macbook Air will make you wish you spent $2k on your laptop.
- kube-system 3y agoThe Air is designed to satisfy the target market for the Air, which it does, and is why they sell in large numbers. It runs Safari, MS Word, and TurboTax just fine. For comparison, a base Surface Pro has even lower specs than a basic MacBook Air. (8GB/128GB) But both of these devices are absolutely useable for general tasks.
- JohnBooty 3y agoWith that being said, the base-model Macbook Air is absolutely designed to leave you unsatisfied. 256gb of storage is a decade-running joke I spent a couple of years doing Rails and Python work on a 2018 MBP (local dev) with 256GB. It's doable, barely, if you are willing to leave a low-profile thumbdrive permanently inserted. Or if you are willing to velcro an external SSD to your laptop lid =) 8GB+256GB is fine for a lot of use cases though. If you have a remote development setup, or if you are just kind of using your laptop as kind of a glorified $1099 chromebook.
- MBCook 3y agoWhile I think it’s dumb to sell 8GB devices, I’m coming to the conclusion 256GB may not be a problem for normal people. If your pictures are in iCloud or Google photos, your music is streamed, and other stuff is in iCloud or Google drive or whatever so most people need a ton of space these days? I’m not arguing Apple’s RAM/storage prices are sane. They’re not. But with so much in the cloud or just being done in the browser instead of a large downloaded app i’m not sure normal users really benefit. Paying for cloud storage may be a better deal, especially since I suspect the cloud is less likely to randomly lose data than if you forget your laptop somewhere or break it without a backup. If you want to do video editing or a lot of programming that’s probably not gonna work. But if you’re mostly going to do “office task“ kind of things of typing and surfing and listening to music or watching YouTube maybe 256 GB isn’t so bad. Base configuration should still be 16/512 in my opinion. But I’m not sure it’s as bad as it would’ve been 10 years ago to go low on storage.